Raymond Kévorkian - The Armenian Genocide - A Complete History-I.B.Tauris (2011)

Raymond Kévorkian is an historian who teaches at the Institut Français de Géopolitique,
University of Paris-VIII-Saint-Denis. He is Director of the Bibliothèque Nubar – the

Armenian Library in Paris – and the author of numerous works on the history of modern
and contemporary Armenia and Armenians.
“This is a major, magnificent achievement of scholarship. It is hard to imagine this book

being surpassed for decades in terms of the breadth and depth of its research and the
scale of its undertaking.”
Donald Bloxham, Professor of Modern History,
University of Edinburgh
“Raymond Kévorkian has made a major contribution to the developing historiogra-

phy of the Armenian Genocide of 1915–1916. Using previously little-employed sources
found in distant archives, he weaves a detailed and compelling account of the ideologi-
cal background, the planning and execution of the first major mass killing by a mod-
ernizing, nationalizing state. An event of this magnitude, one would believe, could be
neither denied nor forgotten, and yet through the systematic efforts of governments of
the Republic of Turkey this “crime of crimes” has been obscured and rendered controver-
sial. Reading this rich, convincing account makes this holocaust before the Holocaust
undeniable.”
Ronald Grigor Suny, Charles Tilly Collegiate Professor of Social
and Political History, University of Michigan, and author
of Looking Toward Ararat: Armenia in Modern History
“This is the most comprehensive book to date on the Armenian Genocide of 1915. In
this detailed account, Raymond Kévorkian describes the process which drove 1.5 mil-
lion Armenians in the Ottoman Empire to their deaths.”
Le Monde
“This mighty volume constitutes the most complete summary to date.”

Histoforum, Paris
Kevorkian_i-viii.indd i 2/25/2011 6:07:16 PM

Kevorkian_i-viii.indd ii 2/25/2011 6:07:16 PM
THE ARMENIAN
GENOCIDE
A Complete History
Raymond Kévorkian
Kevorkian_i-viii.indd iii 2/25/2011 6:07:16 PM

Published in 2011 by I.B.Tauris & Co Ltd
6 Salem Road, London W2 4BU
175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010
www.ibtauris.com
Distributed in the United States and Canada

exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan
175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010
French edition published in September 2006 by Odile Jacob as Le Génocide des Arméniens
Copyright © ODILE JACOB, 2006, 2011
The right of Raymond Kévorkian to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him
in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not
be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any
means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written per-
mission of the publisher.
ISBN: 978 1 84885 561 8
A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
A full CIP record is available from the Library of Congress
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: available
Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham
Kevorkian_i-viii.indd iv 2/25/2011 6:07:17 PM

Contents
Introduction 1
Part I Young Turks and Armenians Intertwined

in the Opposition (1895–1908)
1 Abdülhamid and the Ottoman Opposition 9
2 The December 1907 Second Congress of the Anti-Hamidian
Opposition: Final “Preparations for a Revolution” 43
Part II Young Turks and Armenians Facing

the Test of Power (1908–12)
1 Istanbul in the First Days of the Revolution:
“Our Common Religion is Freedom” 51
2 Young Turks and Armenians Facing the Test of
“The 31 March Incident” and the Massacres in Cilicia 71
3 The Ottoman Government’s and the Armenian Authorities’
Political Responses to the Massacres in Cilicia 97
4 The CUP’s First Deviations: The 1909, 1910, and 1911 Congresses 119
5 Armenian Revolutionaries and Young Turks:
The Anatolian Provinces and Istanbul, 1910–12 125
Part III Young Turks and Armenians Face to Face

(December 1912–March 1915)
1 Transformations in the Committee of Union and Progress after
the First Balkan War, 1913 141
2 The Armenian Organizations’ Handling of the Reform Question 153
3 The Establishment of the Ittihadist Dictatorship and
the Plan to “Homogenize” Anatolia 167
4 Destruction as Self-Construction: Ideology in Command 189
5 Turkey’s Entry into the War 207
6 The Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa on the Caucasian Front and
the First Military Operations 217
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vi THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE
7 The First Acts of Violence 225

8 Putting the Plan into Practice, and the “Temporary Deportation Law” 243
Part IV In the Vortex of the War: The First

Phase of the Genocide
1 The Armenian Population of the Empire on the Eve of the War:
The Demographic Issue 265
2 The Ottoman Armenians’ Socio-Economic Situation on
the Eve of the War 279
2.1 The Eradication of the Armenian Population in
the Provinces of the Ottoman Empire: Reasons for a
Regional Approach 285
3 Deportations and Massacres in the Vilayet of Erzerum 289
4 Resistance and Massacres in the Vilayet of Van 319
5 Deportations and Massacres in the Vilayet of Bitlis 337
6 Deportations and Massacres in the Vilayet of Dyarbekir 355
7 Deportations and Massacres in the Vilayet of Harput/Mamuret ul-Aziz 381
8 Deportations and Massacres in the Vilayet of Sıvas 429
9 Deportations and Massacres in the Vilayet of Trebizond 467
10 Deportations and Massacres in the Vilayet of Angora 495
11 Deportations and Massacres in the Vilayet of Kastamonu 527
12 Constantinople in the Period of the Deportations and Massacres 533
13 Deportations in the Vilayet of Edirne and the Mutesarifat of
Biğa/Dardanelles 545
14 Deportations in the Mutesarifat of Ismit 551
15 Deportations and Massacres in the Vilayet of Bursa and
the Mutesarifat of Kütahya 557
16 Deportations and Massacres in the Vilayet of Aydın 567
17 Deportations and Massacres in the Vilayet of Konya 571
18 The Deportees on the Istanbul-Ismit-Eskişehir-
Konya-Bozanti Route and Along the Trajectory of the Bagdadbahn 577
19 Deportations from Zeitun and Dörtyol: Repression or
Genocidal Program? 585
20 Deportations in the Mutesarifat of Marash 591
21 Deportations in the Vilayet of Adana 593
22 Deportations in the Sancaks of Ayntab and Antakya 605
23 Deportations in the Mutesarifat of Urfa 613
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Contents vii
Part V The Second Phase of the Genocide

Fall 1915–December 1916
1 The Aleppo Sub-Directorate for Deportees: An Agency in
the Service of the Party-State’s Liquidation Policy 625
2 Displaced Populations and the Main Deportation Routes 629
3 Aleppo, the Center of the Genocidal System and of Relief Operations
for the Deportees 639
4 The Camps in Suruc, Arabpunar, and Ras ul-Ayn and
the Zones of Relegation in the Vilayet of Mosul 647
5 The Concentration Camps along “The Euphrates Line” 655
6 The Deportees on the Hama-Homs-Damascus-Dera’a-
Jerusalem-Amman-Maan Line 673
7 The Peculiar Case of Ahmed Cemal: The Ittihad’s Independent
Spirit or an Agent of the Genocide? 681
8 The Armenian Deportees on the Bagdadbahn Construction
Sites in the Taurus and Amanus Mountains 687
9 The Second Phase of the Genocide: The Dissolution of
the Armenian Patriarchate and the Decision to Liquidate
the Last Deportees 691
Part VI The Last Days of the Ottoman Empire:

The Executioners and Their Judges
Face-to-Face
1 Grand Vizier Talât Pasha’s New Turkey; or, Reanimating Pan-Turkism 699
2 The Refounding of the Young Turk Party Shortly Before and
Shortly After the Armistice 715
3 The Debates in the Ottoman Parliament in the Wake of
the Mudros Armistice 721
4 The Mazhar Governmental Commission of Inquiry and
the Creation of Courts Martial 735
5 The Armenian Survivors in their Places of “Relegation” in
the Last Days of the War 743
6 The Great Powers and the Question of “Crimes Against Humanity” 763
7 The First Trial of the Young Turk Criminals Before
the Istanbul Court-Martial 775
8 The Truncated Trial of the Main Young Turk Leaders 783
9 The Trial of the Responsible Secretaries and the Vicissitudes of
the Subsidiary Trials in the Provinces 791
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viii THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE
10 Mustafa Kemal: From the Young Turk Connection to

the Construction of the Nation-State 799
Conclusion 807
Notes 813
Index 1003
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Introduction
T
he destruction of historical groups by states is always the culmination of complex
processes that unfold in particular political and social environments – most nota-
bly, in multiethnic contexts. The translation of genocidal intentions into action is
systematically preceded by periods of maturation rooted in diverse experiences, collective
failures, frustrations, and virulent antagonisms. It is justified by an ideological construction
that envisages the elimination of “internal enemies” from the social body. Each instance of
genocidal violence, however, obeys an internal logic that lends it its singularity. The physical
destruction of the Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire has, in its turn, a singular
feature: it was conceived as a necessary condition for the construction of a Turkish nation-
state – the supreme objective of the Young Turks. The two phenomena, in other words, are
indissolubly linked: we cannot understand the one if we ignore the other.
The present book is informed by this assumption and its structure depends on it.
“Destruction as self-construction” might have been the slogan adopted by the Committee
of Union and Progress (CUP) and that is the guiding thread of this study. In adopting it, I
have decided to situate myself at a level of observation that privileges the Young Turk and
Armenian elites; I have chosen methodically to examine the internal evolution of these
limited circles; I have attempted to assess the reactions of the two groups in crisis situations;
and finally, I have studied the nature of the interrelations between the two groups, their
points of convergence and divergence, and even their ideological similarities. Thus, it is
domestic Ottoman politics, examined from the level of the Empire’s elites, which serves as
the frame of reference for this book and sets its problematic. This point of view distinguishes
the present book from previous studies, which are generally organized around the “Eastern
Question” and European interventionism in the Ottoman Empire. I have not felt the need
here to evoke the historiographical traditions on the subject, so as perhaps to better distance
myself from them. The historiography is, in any case, a complex matter calling for a study of
its own, one that would divert us from our main subject.
That said, I have primarily interrogated the institutional, political, social, and even psy-
chological mechanisms that culminated in the destruction of the Ottoman Armenians. In
particular, I have sought to mark off the successive phases of the radicalization of Young
Turk circles. I have paid special attention to decision-making processes, which are a complex
phenomenon if ever there was one.
The debates over ideas within the Young Turk elite and the formation and subsequent
radicalization of the Young Turks’ ideology are here set against the parallel development
of the nationalism fostered by the Armenian revolutionary movements. These elites, both
when they were in opposition to Sultan Abdülhamid’s regime and, later, when they were at
the head of the state, endlessly discussed the destiny of their common society. I have tried
to account for this. Particular attention has been paid to the troubling resemblance between
the Armenian and Young Turk elites, both of whom saw themselves as the bearers of a
“sacred” mission – saving the “nation.” The present study accordingly moves back and forth
between examinations of the practices of each.
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2 THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE
As a lens for the examination of the Young Turk regime’s political practices, the April
1909 Cilician massacres have been privileged over every other pre-war event. My choice was
dictated by the fact that this violence was a major issue in the dialogue between Turks and
Armenians, one that provoked a crisis of confidence. The abundant documentation avail-
able on this intermediate period, which affords us insight into phenomena that are harder to
discern in later periods, was another reason for my choice.
The geographical problematic is the second frame of reference for the present work. The
regional approach, which requires that one descends to the micro-historical level, has never
been seriously integrated into a global study. The immensity of the geographical area to
be considered, together with its local specificities, makes the task a formidable one that
has no doubt intimidated more than one historian. The historical vacuum that prevails
in this domain is perhaps also not unrelated to the enormous mass of material that has
to be patiently sorted out and worked through in order to establish the facts in the differ-
ent regions. The bloody nature of the events to be examined may, in turn, have dissuaded
some. It is not without apprehension that I have set out on this long adventure myself. But
a plunge into the Ottoman provinces is also necessary, in that it alone allows us to draw
macro-historical lessons from the strategy pursued by the central authorities and to single
out the modifications of it that came about one at a time. A regional approach also author-
izes conclusions about the fates of the Armenian conscripts which varied with their native
region; it helps us identify the categories of Armenians likely to survive (that is, to be drawn
into the “Turkish world” in formation); it throws a harsh but revealing light on the relation-
ship between executioners and victims and on the reactions that the party-state’s genocidal
policies elicited from both society and especially certain officials; and it brings out the roles
played by the administrative, army, political, and paramilitary groups linked to the CUP in
the context of the extermination plan. What thus comes into view is a repetitive mechanism
that consisted in entrusting the “legal” side of the process to the agencies of the state (iden-
tification of people to arrest, formation of convoys, seizure of property) and the “shadowy”
side to the Special Organization, to whose activities we have paid very close attention. In this
vast inventory of the realities that emerged in the Armenian provinces of eastern Anatolia
and the Armenian communities of western Anatolia, each regional study contributes some-
thing to our understanding of the global process.
To round out this approach, I have made an inventory of the civilians, military officials,
and local notables implicated, in one capacity or another, in this mass violence, in order to
better discern the sociological profile of the men who took part in the Young Turk experi-
ment. In response to the legitimate curiosity of the victims’ descendants, I have also tried to
determine as precisely as possible the dates on which the convoys of deportees set out, region
by region and locality by locality. I have endeavored to retrace their trajectories, establish the
location of the killing fields to which they were sent, and identify both the officers command-
ing their “escorts” and the heads of the Special Organization’s squadrons of irregulars perma-
nently assigned to “managing” the gorges that were most commonly used as slaughterhouses.
I have also taken an interest both in the activities of the commissions created by the
Ottoman administration to deal with what was termed “abandoned property” and in the
broader economic effects of the spoliation of the Armenians’ property, which was carried
out within the framework of the Millî Iktisat (“national economy”). The importance of these
expropriations can hardly be exaggerated: they constituted one of the major objectives of the
Young Turk policy of ethnically homogenizing Asia Minor.1
Among the individuals and institutions representing the CUP at the local level, the Young
Turk clubs and “responsible secretaries” delegated by the Ittihad’s (Committee of Union and
Progress abrege Turkish form) Central Committee have held my attention because their
activity exposes the hidden underside of the genocidal program.

Introduction 3
Among the most innovative aspects of this present work are the lessons it draws from
an examination of the legal actions brought by the state against both civilians and military
personnel in the course of the war. This examination allows us to pinpoint the reasons
why miscreants were indicted and the nature of the penalties imposed for economic “infrac-
tions” – misappropriation of real estate or moveable assets. It shows, as well, that no one was
ever indicted for mass murder.
In studying the procedures the CUP used to liquidate the Armenian population, it seemed
worthwhile to take a long look at the fate of the deportees who, in the “second phase of the
genocide,”2 were interned in Syrian and Mesopotamian concentration camps controlled by
the Aleppo Sub-Directorate. Here, I zero in on the final decision of the Young Turk leader-
ship, made in the first half of March 1916, which sealed the doom of several hundred thou-
sand deportees. This decision illustrates the flight to the front by the Young Turk leaders with
decision-making power.
In accordance with the methodologies of this book, I have also systematically examined
the activities of the clandestine humanitarian networks, both Armenian and foreign, which
strove to save orphans and intellectuals in particular.
I could hardly have brought this study to a close without considering the legal dimension
and political effects of the destruction of the Ottoman Armenians. Therefore, the last part of
the book discusses attempts by both the Ottoman authorities and international institutions
to bring the authors of the genocide to justice, as well as the judgment passed on them. Such
a discussion is essential. It allows us to measure the will of the state and society to face up to
their responsibility in the eradication of the Armenians. It offers an occasion to analyze not
only the way all the trials organized in Constantinople from February 1919 to spring 1921
were conducted but also the procedures applied in carrying out preliminary court investiga-
tions and validating the evidence accumulated by the commissions of inquiry, as well as the
methods used to interrogate defendants or witnesses. It affords us a glimpse of the mental
universe of the defendants, by way of their explanations, self-justifications, and perceptions
of the criminal acts for which they stood accused. Finally, it allows us to bring out the basic
element of the founding discourse that inspires the Turkish authorities even today. We are
thus led to reflect on the ideological and cultural foundations of a society that rejects its past
and is unable to come to terms with its history.
This examination of the legal proceedings also allows us to assess outside interference in
the postwar trials, notably in the trial of the Young Turks who had withdrawn to Anatolia
or were still in the Ottoman capital. We further discuss their Anatolian and, soon, Kemalist
sanctuary in connection with the sabotage of the judicial procedure, the theft of incrimi-
nating evidence, the rejection of the very idea that the suspects should be judged, and the
organization of their flight to Anatolia by CUP militants active in the eastern provinces.
Several points must be made about the materials to which we had access in carrying out
the present study. Many may find the slow progress of research on the Armenian genocide
puzzling. It is perhaps unnecessary to point out that since Turkish sources are scarce – in
particular, the archives of the Young Turk Central Committee and its paramilitary exten-
sion, the Special Organization, are unavailable; one has to go to great lengths to make up
even partially for such a handicap. Fortunately, well-documented works, such as those by
M. Şükrü Hanioğlu,3 make it possible to understand the ideology that animated the Young
Turk regime, its internal practices and gradual radicalization. For his part, Krieger (the pen-
name of Father Krikor Gergerian), carried out the pioneering task of systematically collecting
the available sources on the genocide of the Ottoman Armenians, even though he published
only one work (in Armenian).4 Vahakn Dadrian has taught the discipline to take its first
steps, with his many scholarly articles and an essential book on the genocide.5 The work
of Erik J. Zürcher is no less important.6 By carefully sifting through Turkish historiography,

notably on Mustafa Kemal, he has succeeded in casting new light on many facts that histo-
rians considered incontestable and in clarifying historical questions that had long remained
obscure. The principal merit of his work is that it brought out the ideological and personal
links between the Young Turks and Mustafa Kemal. There can be no doubt about their
importance, even if Kemal worked hard to establish legitimacy in his own right in order to
construct the Turkish nation-state whose foundations were laid by his predecessors.
Taking Turkish-Armenian relations as our guiding thread, I try to go one step further
here. My work is largely based on material that for all intents and purposes had not been
exploited previously – the archives of the Information Bureau created by the Armenian
Patriarchate immediately after the Mudros Armistice. The main mission of this bureau was
to gather information on the deportation and massacre of the Armenians for the indict-
ments of the Young Turk leaders. We must first say a word about the importance of these
materials and their origins.
Let us begin by recalling that the Armenian Patriarchate in Constantinople was dissolved
in 28 July 1916 by decision of the Ottoman Council of Ministers7 and that the Patriarch,
Zaven, was exiled to Baghdad on 22 August. The Patriarchate was restored only after the
Mudros Armistice brought an end to hostilities. The British High Commissariat then set
up an Armenian-Greek committee8 charged with rehabilitating the survivors of the geno-
cide. When, on 19 February/4 March 1919, Patriarch Zaven returned to Istanbul,9 one of
his priorities was to create an Information Bureau (deghegadu tivan). He appointed Arshag
Alboyajian (1879–1962), a young historian, to head it. Alboyajian was assisted by Zora
Zorayan and, later, by Asadur Navarian (1875–1955) and the jurist Garabed Nurian, who
became a member of the Armenian Political Council in 1920.10 The Information Bureau
set about gathering old and new documents on demographic issues, the anti-Armenian
persecutions, massacres, deportations, and stolen property. It also compiled facts about the
principal authors of the massacres and eyewitness accounts, corroborating evidence and
statistics on people who had been abducted and held against their will.11 According to
a report of Nurian’s, the Bureau also prepared files on the Turkish authorities’ treatment
of the Armenians after the Armistice, submitting three hundred reports on attacks on
Armenian survivors to the British High Commission. Furthermore, it accumulated docu-
mented files on the authors of the deportations “whom the Turks were trying to exonerate”
and published two books on “the massacres in Caesarea and Dyarbekir.”12 Thus, it can be
seen that, as soon as circumstances allowed, Armenian institutions began to collect materi-
als with the expectation that the Young Turk leaders would be brought to justice before an
international “High Court.”
On 21 November 1918, a commission of inquiry into the government’s conduct, the
“Mazhar Commission,” was created within the Department of State Security by imperial
irade (official decree).13 The following month saw the creation of courts martial charged with
trying the Young Turk criminals. Pretrial investigations of a large number of suspects were
now opened. The Mazhar Commission, as soon as it came into existence, set about collecting
eyewitness accounts and other evidence. It focused its inquiries on state officials complicit
in crimes against the Armenian population. It had rather broad prerogatives, inasmuch as it
could serve writs, search and seize documents, and also order the arrest and imprisonment of
suspects by the Criminal Investigations Department or other state agencies. At the outset,
Hasan Mazhar sent an official circular to the provincial prefects and sub-prefects, demand-
ing the originals or certified copies of all orders received by the local authorities in connec-
tion with the deportation and massacre of the Armenians. The commission also proceeded
to question witnesses under oath. In a little less than three months, it compiled 130 files,
regularly transmitting them to the court-martial. These files contained numerous official or
semi-official documents, only some of which were published in the legal supplement to the

Introduction 5
Official Gazette (Takvim-ı Vakayi). Many others appeared in the Istanbul press of the day, in
Ottoman Turkish, Armenian or French.
In their capacity as plaintiffs, the Armenians represented by the Constantinople
Patriarchate had access to the prosecution’s files on the accused. They also had the right to
make copies or take photographs of the original documents or of certified copies of them.
Although the court was an “extraordinary court-martial,” it was originally “mixed” – that is,
both civilian and military judges sat on it. Such, at least, was the case until 24 March 1919.14
Although the Patriarchate and its lawyers enjoyed access to the files compiled by the pros-
ecution for only a brief period – 5 February to 23 March – the Information Bureau was able to
assemble a rather substantial mass of official documents; they were supplemented by mater-
ial from other sources and the eyewitness reports that came flooding into the Patriarchate’s
offices.
In November 1922, faced with the Kemalist forces’ imminent entry into the capital,
Patriarch Zaven sent the 22 trunks containing these documents to the Armenian primate
in Europe, His Grace Krikoris Balakian, who was then in Manchester. When Balakian was
elected bishop of Marseille in 1927, he took the documents with him. On the express request
of the retired Patriarch, who wished to consult this material in writing his memoirs, it was
sent, early in 1938, to the Patriarch of Jerusalem, Torkom Kushagian. By then, Zaven Der
Yeghiayan was living in retirement in Baghdad.15
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Vahé Tachjian and Michel Paboudjian, who shared their expert knowledge of
archives with me, provided me with innumerable documents, and kindly shared my inter-
rogation of this history; Boris Adjémian, for patiently reading through the manuscript and
making valuable suggestions; Stephan Astourian, Hamit Bozarslan, George Hintlian, Hrayr
Karagueuzian, Hans-Lukas Kieser, Marc Nichanian, Ara Sarafian, Eric Van Lauwe and
Vartkes Yeghiayan, for their generosity, advice and help of various sorts; Alice Aslanian and
Serge Samuelian for their kindness and discrete, effective aid; and, last but not least, Gérard
Chalian, for suggesting to Odile Jacob’s publishing firm that it publish the present work and
kindly agreeing to write the preface to the French edition.

PART I
Young Turks and Armenians

Intertwined in the Opposition
(1895–1908)

Chapter 1
Abdülhamid and the Ottoman

Opposition
A
great deal of ink has been spilled on the virulence and diversity of the opposition
to the regime of Sultan Abdülhamid II. His accession to the throne was tainted
by illegitimacy and probably a regicide, but illegitimacy and murder were, after all,
common in Ottoman court circles. A good many historians have also stressed the fierce hos-
tility of conservatives, the clergy, and, more generally, Muslim Ottomans to the “Tanzimat,”
a policy of reform and centralization designed to reorganize the state in central form and
make all Ottoman subjects equal before the law. It can hardly be doubted that the centrali-
zation of power bred discontent among the begs, or tribal chieftains, accustomed to broad
autonomy for centuries. It is still more certain that the foreseeable, if not indeed already
accomplished, end of the traditional Ottoman system, based on a social hierarchy that put
Muslim Ottomans at the top of the scale and “infidels” at the bottom, alarmed, the dominant
group and its clerics.
While Abdülhamid II had not initiated the modernization process, he had nevertheless
inherited its consequences, particularly the “Midhat Constitution,” the restoration of which
would later figure as one of the Young Turks’ political demands. The fact that the sultan sus-
pended this constitution in rather short order, dissolving parliament and relieving its author
of his functions, did not prevent him from pursuing his predecessors’ policies of reforming
the administration, reorganizing the army, creating a modern educational system, and, more
generally, adopting Western models. Yet this was evidently not enough to satisfy the Young
Ottoman “modernists.”
The Russo-Ottoman War of 1877–8, with which the sultan was confronted almost as soon
as he acceded to the throne, reminded the dominant group that the Ottoman Empire had
begun an irreversible decline and was losing its possessions one after another. The moderni-
zation of the Ottoman state and Ottoman society was, of course, a response to this decline.
The new setback that the empire suffered in the Russo-Ottoman War indicated, however,
that all the efforts it had made had not yielded the expected results, that the empire would
continue to decline and was incapable of putting up effective resistance to the ambitions of
the great powers. Such, at any rate, was the conclusion to which many figures associated with
the government came, along with conservative and religious social strata.
How was the empire to be saved? Beyond a doubt, all the various Ottoman oppositions
crystallized around this question, even if they answered it in diametrically opposed ways. As
is often the case when a multicultural, multiethnic empire begins to fall apart, each of its
component groups focused on its own future. This was most true, first and foremost, for the
group that had held power for centuries.
The very nature of the system was such that the opposition to the sultan was, initially,
internal and institutional. Thus, the most active opposition emerged from the ranks of state

officials, civilian or military, belonging to the dominant group. Historians have noted that
the very idea of opposition to the sovereign and caliph was altogether foreign to the Muslim
masses. Under Abdülhamid, one could be exiled to the empire’s remote provinces, such as
Yemen or the eastern provinces of Asia Minor, on mere suspicion. Indeed, the sultan’s patho-
logical suspiciousness, to which his contemporaries often pointed, helped the oppositional
groups recruit new members throughout the 30 years of his reign. Members of the Ottoman
elite, all educated in accordance with the same modernist model, sometimes found them-
selves in the opposition quite simply because they had fallen into disgrace, even though they
had no fundamental disagreements with the regime. Their political discourse came down to
a demand for restoration of the constitution.
This did not hold for the clergy, beginning with those clerics who had roots in the reli-
gious orders. They could not accept, as we have said, egalitarian ideology and the attendant
risk of losing the superior status that Islam conferred on them. Since the clergy enjoyed, to
some extent, ascendancy over the Muslim masses, they played an important part in shaping
the public opinion that rejected Western innovations and looked askance at the increasingly
influential role played by non-Muslims.
In contrast, the Young Ottomans, who in 1889 founded the Ittihad-ı Osmani1 at the
Tıbbyeyi Askeriye (Military Medical School) – Mehmed Reşid,2 the future vali of Dyarbekir,
İbrahim Temo (1865–1939), Abdüllah Cevdet (1869–1932) and İshak Sükûti (1868–1903) –
embodied the beginnings of a true political opposition. For they had assimilated a key source
of the cohesion and, therefore, power of the Western societies of their day – namely nation-
alism. They had very little power in this period and were a school of thought rather than
an organized movement, but their guiding idea was already making its way in the Ottoman
world.
With regard to the burning question of the empire’s future, however, the elements that
were not associated with the dominant group were already wondering what was to become of
them. Their status as gâvurs (“infidels”) had improved somewhat since implementation of the
Tanzimat, yet they continued to be perceived by the Turkish population as ungrateful, deceit-
ful, and disloyal groups with a penchant for profiting from all the others.3 While some of the
members of these millets served in government, they had only subaltern functions and had no
political responsibilities; in the everyday world, the courts and the administration in general
maintained inegalitarian practices and taxed non-Muslims more heavily than others. The
Muslim masses continued to regard the millets as foreign elements, almost as domestic foes.
For the non-Turkish groups living in the European part of the empire, the 1878 Treaty of
Berlin had plainly put a dent in the dogma of the empire’s territorial integrity; it remained
only to work out the final details of their divorce with Istanbul. This was not the case with
the Arab, Armenian, or Kurdish elements of the empire, whose destiny was much more
closely bound up with that of the Ottoman state, thanks to their implantation in the Asiatic
part of the empire. The organic religious bond that tied the Arab world, practically severed
from its Egyptian component, to the Ottoman capital and its Sultan-Caliph was by no means
superficial, but it appeared too loose to hold forever. Egypt’s impressive economic develop-
ment did not go unnoticed and was the envy of many people from the clan-based or tribal
world of Syria and Mesopotamia, or even Arabia and Yemen. This was the more so in that
it brought out the contrast between modernization at a forced pace and an Ottoman society
stagnating under an administration that many deemed inefficient and corrupt.
The Armenian-Kurdish Ottoman world was, in its turn, awakening from a slumber of
several centuries. The Armenians saw the progress that had been made in the eastern part of
their historical territory ruled by Russia, even if this progress went hand-in-hand with assimi-
lationist, repressive policies. Officially, the Tanzimat had freed them of their dependency
on Kurdish begs, but the result was to revive an ancient rivalry that had over the centuries

Abdülhamid and the Ottoman Opposition 11
yielded to a sort of arrangement, or “symbiosis,” from which both parties benefited. The
Kurdish chieftains, who had been replaced by officials appointed by the central government,
found it hard to accept the loss of their long-standing privileges for the sake of modernizing
the state and centralizing it in line with a European model about which they knew noth-
ing. Yet, neither Kurds nor Armenians had as yet begun to envisage their future outside the
Ottoman framework.
The “Armenian Committees,” which doubtless represented the most virulent wing of
the opposition, were considered, both by the Hamidian government and many Young Turk
opponents of the regime, to be terrorist organizations threatening the country’s domestic
security and territorial integrity, helping to create through their propaganda a deplorable
image of the empire in the West. For their part, the committees deemed themselves part of
the enlightened element of Ottoman society, a kind of avant-garde imbued with socialist
values that was endeavoring to free the masses from the reigning obscurantism and build a
federal state.
It can readily be seen, then, that an immense gulf separated the ruling group, which was
desperately seeking to preserve the empire and defend its privileges, from the Armenian
activists who reasoned in terms of intellectual categories altogether foreign to the world in
which they operated. Sultan Abdülhamid’s response to these movements was to massacre
nearly 200,000 Armenians in the years 1894–6. These crimes, of which we still have no
comprehensive study, had an organized character; it is beyond doubt that the Sublime Porte
was directly implicated in them. Although they cannot be called genocidal, they seem to
have been intended to reduce the Armenian population at large and weaken it at the socio-
economic level. They also unleashed a debate within the Committees and the Armenian
population about the revolutionary acts of self-defense supposed to have brought on this
bloody repression. This debate lastingly poisoned relations within the Ottoman Armenian
community: it of course raises questions about the psychological effects of mass murder, but
also about the practices of the Hamidian regime, the role of violence in Turkish society, and
that society’s way of dealing with political questions.
That said, the mobilization of Western public opinion that resulted from these events
transformed the massacres into a sort of moral touchstone or yardstick that was later used in
judging Ottoman oppositional currents. The massacres were thus a central topic of debate
when the Young Turks and Armenian activists in exile began to discuss the future of the
Ottoman Empire.
Young Turks and Armenian Militants

in Europe, 1895–1901
Until 1895, Paris remained a place of exile for the Young Turks, including the most famous of
them, Ahmed Rıza, who founded the Ottoman Committee of Union and Progress (OCUP)
in this period. Rıza had gathered only a small group of Young Turks around him, but it was
a very select one: it included Dr. Nâzım, a native of Salonika, who joined him in 1894 in
Paris, where he also hoped to complete his medical studies,4 and Ahmed Ağaoğlu (Agayev),
a native of Shushi (the capital of Karabagh) who took courses in history and philosophy at
the Sorbonne and the National Institute of Eastern Languages and Civilizations.5
Among the Armenians in Paris in the same period, Stepanos Sapah-Giulian was undoubt-
edly the most interesting figure.6 A leader of the Hnchak Social-Democratic Party (SDHP),
Sapah-Giulian was the moving spirit behind the Hnchak club in Paris. Here he rubbed
shoulders with the Young Turk exiles, whom he claimed to know better than anyone else
because he had had dealings with them for so many years.

In early 1895, in Parisian political and intellectual circles, conversation turned on the
appropriate reaction to the anti-Armenian massacres perpetrated in Sasun in summer 1894
and the publication, in a British parliamentary Blue Book, of the damning conclusions of the
European consuls who had served on a commission of inquiry into these events. The Sultan,
many said, had to be confronted with a demand for “reforms” in the eastern provinces of Asia
Minor that would put an end to the “insecurity” reigning there.
For the first time, the Parisian Young Turks were forced to consider the vexing question
of the “reforms” that the European powers were seeking to impose on the Ottoman Empire.
With this question, it was their conception of the Ottoman state, and the place and status
of non-Muslim elements in it, that was put to the test. The publication of an article on the
reform plan of “11 May 1895,” in the Parisian daily Le Figaro,7 led to a meeting between the
Parisian SDHP activists and the Young Turks, headed by Rıza and Nâzım, who had just been
elected treasurer of the CUP. Sapah-Giulian’s account of their meeting shows that the two
Turkish leaders were staunchly opposed to this reform plan8 – that is to say, hostile both to
European interference in what they considered an internal Ottoman affair, as well as the
creation of a special status for certain provinces of the empire. They continued to argue for
a policy of centralization, contrary to the Hnchaks, who simply denounced the tribal system
and the violence prevailing in the eastern provinces and condemned the Sasun massacres.
What is more, the official leader of the Young Turk movement, Ahmed Rıza, rejected
the revolutionary methods espoused by part of the anti-Hamidian opposition. He advocated,
rather, a conservative policy9 that was ultimately not very different from the sultan’s. However,
Rıza needed support from the Armenians, among others, in order to make his political project
credible in Parisian circles. He therefore asked to meet with Nubar Pasha,10 an Armenian
from Smyrna who had served as Prime Minister of Egypt and was the father of the Egyptian
reforms, notably the creation of mixed courts. Rıza doubtless hoped to profit from the Egyptian
pasha’s many connections to French politicians, and from his generosity as well.
In fall 1895, the “Armenian Students of Paris” organized a lecture in a hall in the city’s
Grand Orient lodge. The invited speaker was Avetis Nazarbekian of London, one of the
SDHP’s founders. The lecture and the response to it offer us an opportunity to evaluate the
positions taken by the Parisian Young Turks on the most recent persecutions of the Ottoman
Armenian population. Nazarbekian denounced Hamid’s policies, especially the generalized
massacres of October and November and Europe’s indifference to them. “If the Armenians
must die,” Nazarbekian concluded, “they will die, not as slaves, but as free men.” Yet, it was
the part of his talk in which he questioned the Sublime Porte’s ability to govern its possessions
that disturbed his Young Turk listeners, more than the crimes themselves. Sapah-Giulian
later noted that the many Armenian students in the Young Turks’ ranks were surprised by
their Muslim comrades’ negative reaction.11
The massacres contributed heavily to turning Western public opinion against the Ottoman
Empire. This pained the Young Turk exiles in Paris. The violence also helped bring about a
radicalization of the Armenian Committees, whose leadership bodies had established them-
selves in London, Geneva, and Paris. The Young Turk movement nevertheless profited from
the diplomatic crisis that followed the Armenian massacres.12 The French supplement to
Meşveret (Mechveret supplément français), which Rıza had begun publishing in Paris in 1895,
reveals the uncomfortable situation in which the Parisian exiles found themselves, torn as
they were between patriotic feelings informed by official Ottoman discourse and their shame
at the European reaction to the events. A May 1896 article by the movement’s master thinker
includes a long demonstration in which Rıza endeavors to show that the anti-Armenian
massacres organized by Abdülhamid “flew in the face of the traditions of Islamicism and the
precepts of the Koran ... We wish to see the sultan surrounded by counselors who are steeped
in both Muslim precepts and the ideas of order and progress.”13 Rıza thus put forward the

thesis that responsibility for the massacres lay with the sultan’s entourage, which had suppos-
edly failed on this occasion to respect national traditions. He thereby exonerated the sultan
himself of all blame, illustrating in the process his conception of the government and his
attachment to the function of the Sultan-Caliph.
A few weeks later, Rıza expatiated on his approach to the notion of responsibility, thereby
revealing his perception of the empire’s Christian subjects. He confessed that he “defended
the Muslims more often than the Christians.” “This may seem exaggerated,” he went on,
“but the fact is that, in our country, there is no comparison between the fate of the Ottoman
Christians and that of the Muslims. The Christians are by far happier, or, if one prefers, less
wretched ... If Christians are the preferred targets of looting, the reason is that they enjoy
greater wealth and material comfort than the Muslims and that, either out of fear or suspi-
cion of the victor, they generally keep their doors shut.”14 What the Young Turk leader says
here is obviously rooted in a centuries-old Ottoman tradition, marked by the concept of the
Christian “guest” who “takes advantage” of his happy lot and displays his lack of gratitude
toward his masters by refusing to share what he possesses with them. Thus, the violence
exercised by the dominant group is legitimized.
Jules Roches delivered a lecture in December 1895 at the Hôtel des Sociétés Savantes in
which he denounced the horrors perpetrated by the Hamidian regime. The reactions that
his lecture elicited are as revealing as Rıza’s essay. One of the Young Turks present, who had
taken a seat beside Rıza, was unable to contain himself and shouted out: “All this informa-
tion is false; it has been made up by the Hnchaks.” He then blamed the Armenians for the
events that were sullying Turkey’s reputation.15 This shows how deeply young “liberal” activ-
ists, albeit united in their combat against Abdülhamid’s regime, were opposed on a great
number of issues, prisoners of their respective cultural backgrounds and traditions.
For their part, the Armenian activists who sought to appeal to Western public opinion
complained that the Parisian press depicted them as terrorists and willfully ignored the
reality of the massacres.16 According to Sapah-Giulian, this general trend was reversed by
a conversation he had with Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu, his professor at the École des Sciences
Politiques. Leroy-Beaulieu, known as an expert on the East, agreed to intervene in the
debate.17 His contribution also took the form of a lecture, “Armenia and the Armenian
Question,” delivered at the Hôtel des Sociétés Savantes. This event, which saw a dis-
tinguished French personality participating in the discussion, provided Young Turk and
Armenian activists with a new opportunity to air their opposing views. It showed, as well,
that Istanbul kept close tabs on its opposition in exile. Münir Bey, the sultan’s ambassador,
who had been given the task of monitoring the opposition’s activities in Paris, recruited
young Ottoman students, Sapah-Giulian reports, and had them introduced into the lecture
hall, where Ahmed Rıza and his partisans were also present. One of Rıza’s supporters, no
doubt reflecting his comrades’ mood as well, interrupted the lecturer to ask him whether
a scholar like himself could seriously speak in such terms about a “religious group.”18 In
thus seeking to downplay Armenian identity, the Young Turks were in fact voicing the
apprehensions they felt at the campaign mounted by the Hnchaks, who, adding insult to
injury, had invited a “foreigner” to join a debate on an “internal matter” and so incited the
European chancelleries to intervene in Turkey.
Other examples, however, illustrate the solidarity prevailing between the oppositional
groups in Paris and the fact that their relations, while sometimes stormy, were quite close.
A meeting that took place between the Young Turk leaders and the Hnchak revolutionaries
shortly after the events just discussed was one of the most revealing in this respect. Rıza and
Nâzım proposed to the SDHP representatives that they collaborate and “make a joint con-
tribution to the movement of national renewal.” He suggested that, to this end, they “put old
quarrels behind them.”19 In view of Rıza’s frank aversion to his Armenian interlocutors’

revolutionary methods, it is not easy to say what impelled the Ottoman Committee of Union
and Progress to seek a rapprochement with the Hnchaks. Possibly Rıza and Nâzım were hop-
ing to profit from the popularity that the Hnchaks enjoyed at the time or even from their
relations with certain Parisian intellectual circles. They may also have been seeking to curb
the Hnchaks’ anti-Hamidian campaign, which they deemed anti-Ottoman.
The seizure of the Banque Ottomane by militants of the Armenian Revolutionary
Federation (ARF) on 26 August 1896 is another event that serves as a yardstick with which
to measure the Young Turk and Armenian positions. The operation, the kind that the
press delighted in covering, found a much broader international echo than the massacres of
autumn and winter 1895–6, doubtless because it struck directly at European financial inter-
ests.20 This was, however, not a peaceful demonstration like the one that had taken place
in October 1895; most of the French press reacted very harshly, painting the Armenians as
terrorists. The Paris Hnchaks suddenly felt that they had lost the fruits of the public aware-
ness campaign that they had been waging for the past year. The SDHP therefore requested
a meeting with the leaders of the ARF, who agreed to make the trip from Geneva – their
European headquarters and the city in which they published their official organ, Droschak.
Sapah-Giulian asked them why they had mounted this operation. He seems to have received
an embarrassed response; it came down to the idea that the ARF wanted to make an atten-
tion-grabbing appeal to Europe in order to bring an end to the Armenian massacres. In
private, the Hnchak leaders did not hesitate to speak of “political immaturity.”21 It seems
reasonable to suppose that the competition between the two organizations for leadership of
the Armenians had helped motivate the ARF’s spectacular strategy.
Leaving a meeting with the historian Ernest Lavisse and the academician Albert Vandale,
Sapah-Giulian, who had asked the two Frenchmen to intercede on the Armenians’ behalf,
ran straight into Rıza and Nâzım, “arm-in-arm” in front of the main entrance to the French
Senate building. Rıza exclaimed, “Mr. Sapah-Giulian, this time they are massacring people
by the tens of thousands ... What remains of the Armenian Question, the 11 May plan and
European intervention?” Nâzım added, “The [death toll] of the massacres of the past few days
is over one hundred thousand; it seems that they are not going to leave a single Armenian
[alive].”22 The Hnchak leader did not fail to note the ironic tone adopted by his interlocu-
tors, who did not for a moment consider condemning these crimes, but had already begun
calculating their demographic and political impact.
The Hnchak Committee finally decided to turn to a “heavyweight” in an effort to reverse
the anti-Armenian trend. It sent a memorandum to Jean Jaurès defending the Armenians’
struggle against Abdülhamid’s regime and asking Jaurès to take a public stand in order to
stem the flood of anti-Armenian propaganda in the French press. Sapah-Giulian points out
that the socialist leader had previously rejected this suggestion because of his apprehen-
sions about “Armenian nationalism.” After a conversation with Sapah-Giulian, however, he
decided to throw himself into the fray. At the same time, he confessed that he had misgiv-
ings about the fact that he would be defending the same position as certain conservative
pro-Armenian circles in France.23
Jaurès’s first intervention came on 3 November 1896, at the podium of the French
Parliament, which was full to the point of bursting. The session was opened by Denis
Cochin, but Jaurès did not take the floor until the conservatives had finished speaking. His
entry into the lists came as a surprise, for no one had been expecting him to address a foreign
policy issue. He made a strong impression on those present and on public opinion generally,
in particular by indicting the French government for its policy on Turkey of the past four
years.24 Jaurès’s one-and-a-half hour speech marked the real beginning of the pro-Armenian
movement in France. The Parisian newspapers, which, as everyone knew, pocketed generous
subsidies from agents of the Ottoman sultan, now struck a new tone.

There was a perceptible détente in relations between Young Turks and Armenian activists
in late 1895. Changes within the Young Turk movement undoubtedly helped create the con-
ditions for real cooperation among the various opponents of the Hamidian regime. Murad
Bey Mizanci’s arrival in Europe earlier in the year had already established a connection
between OCUP circles in Istanbul and Europe, long isolated from each other. Unlike Rıza
and Nâzım, Murad Bey, who had worked for a long time in the Hamidian administration,
favored European intervention as well as rapprochement with the Armenian revolutionary
committees and the formation of a united front. In December 1895, he began publishing the
review Mizan (Balance) in Cairo, which had considerable impact in circles sympathetic to
the Young Turks.25 In this review, Murad Bey challenged Rıza’s anti-revolutionary positions.
He dealt Rıza the deathblow upon his return to Paris in July 1896, in the course of a meeting
at which a new central committee was elected after Rıza had lost the support of the major-
ity. Murad assumed leadership of this committee, with Nâzım as his second-in-command.26
On his initiative, the Young Turks apparently established warmer relations with the ARF in
particular.27 In April 1897, the Turkish intelligence service intercepted a message from the
ARF’s Paris branch to the committee in Erzerum; it indicated that the Armenian organiza-
tions and the CUP had now come together around a common goal, dethroning the sultan.28
No trace of such an agreement is to be found in Armenian sources, but it is the more plausible
in that all branches of the CUP had been directly linked to Paris after the Constantinople
branch was dissolved under pressure from the Hamidian political police.29 For a long time
to come, the ARF was the Young Turks’ main Armenian interlocutor, even if we should not
attach undue importance to this initial rapprochement.
That the ARF and CUP united around common goals is more likely; the social complex-
ion of the Turkish organization had changed with the 1896–7 arrival in Paris of officers and
army doctors.30 However, thanks to the defection of Mizanci Murad, who in July 1897 agreed
to return to Istanbul after negotiations with representatives of the sultan, Rıza had again
assumed the dominant role in the CUP,31 putting a damper on the plans for a rapproche-
ment between Young Turks and Armenians. The salient feature of this period, however,
was the growing influence of the CUP’s Cairo branch, which helped change the Union’s
orientation.32 As Hanioğlu points out, after first promoting a union of all Ottoman groups
behind Rıza’s idea of Ottomanizing society and secularizing the state, and then defending
Murad Bey’s conservative political line, which was favorable to outside intervention, the
CUP adopted a new program that called for reconciling Islam with modernity on the basis
of a constitutional system.33
The Armenian Committees probably took note of these transformations. At all events,
a Turkish-Armenian oppositional delegation, headed by Rıza, participated in the 1899
Hague Peace Conference, where it distributed a joint memorandum. The Turkish leader
was accompanied by an Armenian, Minas Tchéraz, a well-known yet independent figure
to be sure, and Pierre Anmeghian, one of Tchéraz’s most faithful followers. In other words,
he was not accompanied by representatives of the Armenian revolutionary parties. Yet, the
idea of sending a joint delegation to the conference was a success, for it attracted favorable
attention from the European delegates.34 The fact that the Armenian delegates were not
altogether representative of their people should not obscure the novelty of this public ini-
tiative, from which the Young Turks, who were seeking to enlist European public opinion
in their cause and profile themselves as liberals, derived the greater benefit. Abdülhamid
seems to have understood this quite well, for he included Diran Kelekian,35 a journal-
ist well known for his perceptive analyses of Ottoman society, in the official Ottoman
delegation.36
The positions that the Armenian Revolutionary Federation put forward, after the OCUP
issued its call for a union of all oppositional forces in spring 1898,37 provide a good index

of the positive but skeptical attitude reigning in Armenian circles. The Armenian leader-
ship thought that it had detected a change in the OCUP, which, it felt, “had resolved to
abandon its passive position once and for all and enter an active phase.” “To date,” Droschak
went on,
we have tended to take a skeptical view of Young Turkey’s capacities, course of action
and principles, as well as the seriousness of its desire for reform. Long experience
has convinced us of the need for this. In the last twenty years, we have never once
seen this party attempt to protest the crowned murderer’s unexampled injustices and
outrageous crimes in active form. We have never laid eyes on Turkish revolutionaries;
we have seen only Turkish “liberals” or “pacifists,” who are present in large numbers
among us [the Armenians] as well. We have had our fill of vain memoranda; we have
had our fill of begging and imploring Europe, of sighs and lamentations ... The ideas
that Young Turkey preaches have unfortunately not found fertile ground in the Turkish
people or created a public movement among the Turks. The Young Turks’ program
was utopian. They made an enormous mistake in proclaiming “that the revolution
would come from above” ... Today, however, we are happy to be able to point out that
groups which ... have split off from this movement are professing more radical ideas
[and] have invited us to show our solidarity with them ... If, today, there exists a degree
of national antagonism between Ottoman Turks and Ottoman Armenians, the blame
for it lies primarily with the government. We are convinced that, in future, once
acceptable political conditions have been brought about in Turkey, our two nations
will continue to live in peace and harmony and will, united in a common effort,
make their way toward the highest form of civilization ... . It matters little that cer-
tain decrepit representatives of Young Turkey, who are utterly ignorant of our activi-
ties, spread insinuations against us, holding up the Armenian Committees before all
Europe as “destroyers of Turkish villages” and casting the word “separatist” in the
Armenian revolutionaries’ teeth ... Gentlemen, you have doubtless firmly resolved to
have done with your old delusions, with moderation, slow progress, evolution and
other such vague notions, in which your senile brothers are steeped. There are, among
us Armenians as well, empty-headed philosophers who call themselves “evolution-
ists” and shun revolution. Evolution, however, is an undefined concept that everyone,
the unbridled Tyrant included, can exploit to his own ends in elaborating programs,
whether political or of some other kind ... You, too, should galvanize your own people,
whose bitter sufferings you know very well. That unfortunate people is also being
tortured ... Enslaved, it has, like the slaves of other faiths, crawled before tyrants and
exploiters belonging to its own race ... Your clergymen, invoking the Koran, are unfor-
tunately reinforcing and sacralizing hatred of all that is new. Rescue the people from
this deadly immobility.38
This long response from the ARF, cast in the form of a lecture delivered in an occasion-
ally peremptory tone, sums up the party’s perception of the Young Turk movement. This
perception, based on “long experience,” confirmed, in the Armenian party’s view, that
“Young Turkey” had not adopted the “radical” methods of which the ARF considered itself
the champion. It must be said that, in this period, violent clashes between the army and
groups of Armenian fedayis in the eastern provinces were occurring almost daily; every issue
of Droschak between 1890 and 1900 describes such clashes and gives the biographies of the
fighters who fell in battle. The “martyrs” that the ARF’s resistance to Abdülhamid’s regime
cost it no doubt explain the party’s feeling that it was the sole opposition movement to com-
bat the sultan’s “tyranny” at the practical level.

The ARF’s reaction to the 1899 Hague Peace Conference is also rather revealing of its
irritation with the European powers. The tone of the “Declaration Addressed to the Public
Opinion of the Civilized World” on the occasion of the conference is sarcastic, almost cyni-
cal, and in any case disillusioned in the passages that evoke the Europeans’ foreign policy or
their indifference to the 1894–6 massacres.39 The “Declaration,” however, says not a word
about Rıza’s decision to attend the conference as part of a delegation made up of Turks and
Armenians.
Also worth pausing over, because they illustrate both the political game as it was played
in the Ottoman family and the ARF’s openness to dialogue, are the maneuvers that Sultan
Abdülhamid undertook to silence the Armenian opposition in exile, as he had partially
succeeded in doing with the Young Turks. He proceeded by engaging in political negotia-
tions with the party even while pursuing repressive domestic policies. To open discussions
between the Sublime Porte and the ARF, which did not become public knowledge until
after they were broken off on 11 March 1899, Abdülhamid delegated his undersecretary of
state for foreign affairs, Artin Pasha Dadian, a scion of one of the grand Armenian families
that had served the Ottoman state for generations. On 28 October 1896, Dadian’s son,
Diran Bey Dadian, arrived in Geneva and met with the ARF’s Western Bureau, which was
grouped around the monthly Droschak. The message he bore was clear: the ARF had to
abandon its violent activities. In exchange, the sultan pledged to carry out fundamental
reforms in the country over the coming nine months.40 According to Droschak’s editors,
the “Khanasor” operation – a commando raid on 25 August 1897 (6 September, new style),
that had taken retaliatory measures against a Kurdish tribe that had participated in anti-
Armenian massacres in the Van region the year before – and the abortive attempt to
blow up Yıldız Palace on 6/18 August had forced Abdülhamid to take the ARF’s demands
seriously.
An accomplished politician, the sultan resorted to his usual methods, seeking to pull the
wool over the eyes of the Armenian revolutionaries as he was also attempting to do with the
Young Turks. On the sovereign’s orders, Drtad Bey Dadian, a nephew of Artin Pasha’s, spent
almost eight months in Geneva, leaving only in March 1899. The length of his stay indicates
the seriousness and determination of this initiative. While it proved unsuccessful, it never-
theless enabled the Sublime Porte to take the measure of the Armenians’ demands: at Artin
Pasha’s request, the ARF drew up a list of the reforms that it was seeking.41
Manifestly, since Mizanci Murad’s “surrender,” the Young Turk movement in exile had
once again adopted the positivist leader’s moderate line, even if it did not command unani-
mous assent. In other words, the movement was paralyzed and found it difficult to recruit
new members from the circles opposed to the sultan. It was repeatedly criticized for failing to
commit itself to action.
In 1899 and 1900, the discussion between Young Turks and Armenians was carried on in
their respective newspapers, which indicates that the parties were, despite everything, inter-
ested in each other. The old debate about whether or not it was necessary to build a com-
mon front of all those opposed to the Hamidian regime flared up frequently in these papers.
Thus, an anonymous letter, published by Droschak, revealed that toward the middle of 1899,
Tunalı Hilmi42 had circulated in Cairo a declaration calling for a congress of “Muslims and
non-Muslims” aimed at creating an “Ottoman Committee,” and that Damad Mahmud Pasha
and his two sons, members of the imperial family, had fled Istanbul to join the Young Turk
opposition in exile. The anonymous author of the letter notes, finally, as if in response to his
Armenian interlocutors’ criticisms, that Osmanlı did not share Meshveret’s anti-revolutionary
positions and that “a good many Young Turks advocate revolutionary methods.”43 This is
one index of the fact that the ARF embodied the idea of revolution for certain Young Turk
circles, especially officers who had graduated from the Military Academy.

Damad Mahmud Pasha’s “Open Letter to the Armenians,” sent out from his Parisian exile
in summer 1900, was the first credible sign that the Young Turk opposition wanted to pool
the energies of all those opposed to the sultan, even if the letter blamed Abdülhamid alone
for all the empire’s ills. Mahmud expressed his regrets over the “appalling massacres” organ-
ized by the sultan, while also criticizing the Armenians for maintaining too great a distance
from the Turks. He ended his letter with a call for unity, restoration of the constitution, and
“federation with the Turks.”44 The last formula was unprecedented: coming from someone of
Damad’s stature, it was no mere rhetorical flourish, but a promising invitation to construct
“the new Turkey.”
The response of Droschak’s editors shows that they took Prince Damad’s offer seriously:
There was a time when we were constantly inviting the Turks, perplexed as we were
by their indifference to Turkey’s dire plight, to unite with us in struggle ... Now the
roles have been reversed: Turkish calls for “union” are raining down on us, while we
are unfortunately obliged, despite our deep-felt sympathy for the principle, to main-
tain an uncertain position ... “Let us unite”: that is a superb idea. But with whom, and
how? The Armenian revolutionaries have been on the scene for a long time and are
already waging the struggle in whose name we are invited to unite. But where are
the Turkish fighters? To date, we have encountered only individuals, groups, people
busy making propaganda on paper; we have yet to see active fighters and agitators.
Cut off from the real Turkish populace and depending for support on a negligible
fraction of the Turkish intelligentsia, the Young Turks are still politicians who look
to “the revolution from above”; they are weak, disorganized and, consequently, still
inactive; they are men who prefer talk to action ... Would that they had, at the very
least, waged a verbal propaganda campaign tending in the right direction and geared
to the present cultural needs of the Turkish people. But read through the Young
Turks’ publications: you will not find a single challenge to the internal forces smoth-
ering Turkish society ... “Our history is superior to the Europeans’, and we have more
patience,” someone writes. Someone else scurrilously repeats that “there exists no
evil in Turkey that does not exist in still greater measure in so-called enlightened
Europe.” The only evil, we are told, is Sultan Hamid’s person; the crisis that Turkey
has been enduring for a quarter of a century is wholly due to his caprices. If Hamid
disappears, Turkey will become a model country: this is what all the Young Turks
repeat in chorus.45
The ARF was not the only organization to respond to Prince Damad’s overtures. The
SDHP also made itself heard in the person of Sapah-Giulian. He pointed out that the state
was organized in such a way that there were no real bonds between its various constitutive
elements, that no institution had sought to unite them in a bond of solidarity with the
throne, and that, if the country were not reorganized on new foundations, it was condemned
to disappear.46 Finally, Sapah-Giulian reminded his readers that
the very moderate desires and the short-term goals put forward by the Armenian
nation and the Armenians’ fighting forces have never stood in opposition to the real,
permanent interests of Turkey considered as a state. What the Armenians are demand-
ing today is not in any way intended to weaken or paralyze Turkey, to dismember and,
ultimately, destroy it, to pulverize the Turkish people and, on its ruins, re-establish the
Home of the Armenians. The Armenian people’s modest desires for reform and all the
political, economic and social institutions to which it aspires contain, not the seeds of
Turkey’s destruction, but, abundantly, the seeds of its renewal.47

These reactions to Damad Mahmud Pasha’s invitation sum up the Armenian Committees’
political vision and reflect their determination to help rebuild a common state. The Ottoman
dignitary’s proposal to forge an “Armenian-Turkish federation” 48 doubtless reflected an option
for founding the state anew shared by certain liberal circles that had emerged from the
Ottoman elite. However, the Armenian Committees, still shaken by the violence inflicted
on their compatriots in the eastern provinces, remained skeptical about the possibility of
yoking their fate to that of this opposition, whose weakness and unrealistic objectives they
had pointed out.
The end of the first stage of the rapprochement between Young Turks and Armenian revo-
lutionaries throws up a crucial question: why did the largely legitimist Young Turk opposition
seek to cooperate with the revolutionaries? On the face of it, everything separated a prince
of the house of Osman from an Armenian intellectual who pleaded for socialism and even
espoused revolutionary violence. Part of the answer no doubt lies in the common education
and shared cultural references of the members of these two elites, who both spoke French and
were steeped in European sociopolitical concepts. Another reason is to be sought in the exist-
ence of a vast network of Armenian militants, capable of operating in many different regions
of the empire and characterized by their iron discipline, spirit of self-sacrifice and unwavering
dedication: the Young Turk movement lacked any such base. We should also not overlook the
fact that the Young Turk elite, especially the elite with roots in the Ottoman court or the upper
echelons of the state administration, had necessarily come into contact with the high-ranking
Armenian officials who had chosen to serve the state and did so with an effectiveness that no
one dreamed of contesting. In addition, the same Young Turk elite was aware of the importance
of the Armenian and Greek businessmen who were the moving spirits behind the industrializa-
tion of the country. Finally, we must not underestimate the pro-Armenian network that the
Armenian Committees had succeeded in building up in Europe. Its by no means negligible
ability to mobilize Western public opinion constituted the essential antidote to the propaganda
campaigns of Abdülhamid and his agents, waged with the help of large “subsidies.”49
The first phase of the Armenian-Turkish negotiations also revealed, however, the antago-
nistic positions of the two main Young Turk groups on basic issues such as foreign interven-
tion or local autonomy. The organizing committee, indeed, had not so much as asked Rıza
for his opinion before compiling the lists of invitees. It would seem that the members of
the old OCUP were hostile to the Armenian Committees and, especially, the ARF.50 But
Damad Mahmud’s whole strategy turned on the idea of a rapprochement between Young
Turks and Armenians.51 He therefore sought to neutralize Rıza while arranging to invite the
three Armenian parties – the ARF; the Verakazmial Hnchaks, who accepted the offer; and
the Hnchaks, who turned it down.52 Each committee was represented by three delegates and
agreed to work in coordination with the others. In January, they held preparatory meetings
with the two princes and İsmail Kemal Bey to make certain that the negotiations would
take Article 61 of the Treaty of Berlin and the Memorandum of 11 May 1895 as points of
departure. Avetis Aharonian headed the Dashnak delegation.53 The Armenian side was
further represented by three Paris-based veterans of the anti-Hamidian opposition – Minas
Tchéraz,54 Garabed Basmajian55 and Archag Tchobanian.56 The Young Turk delegation
included, among others,57 Hüseyin Tosun,58 İsmail Hakkı,59 Hoca Kadri, Çerkez Kemal, Dr.
Lütfi, Mustafa Hamdi, Ali Fehmi,60 Dr. Nâzım, and Yusuf Akçura.
The congress was opened by Prince Sabaheddin (whose father had just died) on 4 February
1902. There were six sessions conducted, at the Armenians’ request, in French as well as
Turkish. Only a few Greek, Albanian, and Kurdish delegates took part. As for the Macedonians,
they had not even been invited. Thus, the congress rapidly evolved into a tête-à-tête between
the Young Turk groups and the Armenian delegation. One of the pivotal questions posed
from the outset bore on the principle of foreign intervention. Sabaheddin and some of those

participating in the congress were in favor of it. Those who voted against it, according to
Bahaeddin Şakir’s archives, were Abdülhalim Memduh, Abdurrahman Bedirhan (represent-
ing the newspaper Kurdistan), Ahmed Ferid, Ahmed Rıza, Ali Fahri (on the editorial board
of Osmanlı), Albert Fua, Mustafa Hamdi, Dr. Nâzım, and Yusuf Akçura.61 A majority of the
25 delegates voted down a motion, put forward at the third session of the congress by the 18
representatives of the minorities, to discuss the question of foreign intervention again.
A joint declaration was nevertheless hammered out, to “remind the European powers that
it was their duty, and also in the general interests of humanity, to see to it that the clauses of
the treaties and international agreements between them and the Sublime Porte be carried
out in such a way as to benefit all parts of the Ottoman Empire.”62 The declaration had the
merit of summing up both the question of outside intervention and the no less controversial
question of how to implement the promised reforms – subjects that obviously concerned
the Armenians and Macedonians above all others. Yet, it had undoubtedly been too heav-
ily diluted from the standpoint of the Armenian delegation, which solemnly declared that
the Armenians were “ready to collaborate with the Ottoman liberals in every joint activity
aimed at changing the present regime”; that “beyond such joint actions, the Armenian com-
mittees [would] pursue their particular activities, it being well understood that these activi-
ties are directed against the existing regime, not the unity and organic existence of Turkey”;
and that “their particular activity has no other goal than to bring about the immediate
enactment of Article 61 of the Treaty of Berlin as well as the Memorandum of 11 May 1895
and the appendix to it.”63 This came down to agreeing to cooperate to preserve Turkey’s
territorial integrity while maintaining complete autonomy when it came to bringing about
reforms in the eastern provinces.
Ahmed Rıza and his partisans were, obviously, opposed to this declaration,64 so Sabaheddin
had to propose a variant. It called for “realizing the Armenians’ legitimate desires in connec-
tion with the organization and local administration of the provinces that they inhabit and
of all other provinces; establishing a central government based on liberal ideas, the best way
of guaranteeing the maintenance of national rights as well as the regular functioning of the
provincial governments, from which the Armenians would benefit on the same footing and
in the same measure as all the other peoples of the empire.”65 In this way, the prince tried to
satisfy the Armenians’ desire to have a hand in governing the provinces in which they lived
while simultaneously envisaging an extension of the principle of “administrative” decentrali-
zation to the other provinces of the empire. But, in fact, he succeeded only in displeasing
both sides: the Armenians left the congress before the last session, held on 10 February 1902.
Nevertheless, the new organization’s central committee was elected – by secret ballot.66 The
vote confirmed that Sabaheddin and a majority favorable to British intervention had taken
control of the movement, which now included, among the accusations it leveled against the
Hamidian regime, the sultan’s policy of “suppressing the Armenians.”
However, the majority also provoked the formation of a minority “coalition” within the move-
ment.67 This coalition brought together Ahmed Rıza and the activist young guard, which included
many officers. It accused the majority of collaborating with the Armenians and Macedonians
and consequently working against the interests of the empire. It accused it particularly of basing
its strategy toward Europe on a defense of the Armenians, so as to legitimize the movement, as
it were, in the eyes of the European chancelleries.68 Thus, we see here the emergence of a group
of Young Turks whose convictions were in every respect at variance with the activity of the
Armenian committees – even if, like the ARF after the 1902 congress, this minority took posi-
tions shaped to some extent by the desire to remain open or even conciliatory.
In the wake of the congress, negotiations were opened between the majority and the ARF
on the one side, and the Macedonian Committee on the other – represented by Aknuni
(Khachadur Malumian) and Boris Sarafov, respectively.69

To arrive at a comprehensive view of the positions of the other Armenian Committees

and understand their perceptions of the Young Turk movement, let us examine the way the
SDHP reacted after the 1902 congress. A long article by the editorial board of the SDHP’s
official organ, published in London, begins by recalling that the SDHP had been the only
party not to participate in the February 1902 congress and that it had made the decision not
to attend “based on a thorough-going analysis of the situation.” At the general congress that
the SDHP held in the same period, the article declares, the party came to the conclusion
that it was not possible to work with the Young Turks, for “dissatisfaction [with the current
regime] is not sufficient grounds for collaboration,” which could only be based on common
leadership and common political goals. However, the editorial board contends there is “a
towering barrier between the two groups,” even if this is not obvious, for the Young Turks’
“sole objective is to put the ‘pitiful’ Midhat Constitution into effect, without in any way alter-
ing the absolute tyrant’s irresponsible status.”70
The author then turns to the heart of the matter. He explains his party’s position:
The Young Turks like to say that they want to propel the country by peaceful means
down an evolutionary path toward a purely internal revolution of all state func-
tions and all laws. But they do not for a moment consider giving up an inch of the
state ... The preservation of the state’s territorial integrity is as much an article of
faith for them as it is for the sultan and all the Old Turks. In that respect, they are as
stubbornly patriotic as the sultan and the Old Turks, if not, indeed, more so. Their
revolutionary aspirations and spirit are, consequently, strictly internal. They want
to reform Turkey, revive it, and rejuvenate it, without, as we have said, calling state
boundaries into question. It follows that, when the moment comes to defend the
state against foreign encroachment or the kind of domestic discontent and revolt that
threatens to violate its territorial integrity (elevated to the level of a sacred dogma)
and undermine its organic unity – in a word, to divide or dismember that organic
unity – then, we say, the Young Turks will readily forget, at once, all the divergences
that distinguish them from their compatriots, the Old Turks and the sultan, and will
join with them to defend, like a single man, their common vatan [fatherland] against
foreign and domestic foes. The Young Turks say, “let us revolutionize the country, but
first let us preserve its territorial integrity.” We have nothing to object to this; how
could we? One cannot ask them to unite with the enemies of the state in order to help
dismember their fatherland.
There, however, at the root, at the foundation, lie the beginnings of the gaping
abyss, the unbridgeable gulf that makes it impossible to envisage any sort of coopera-
tive solidarity between the Young Turks and any revolutionary Armenian movement
or political party. Given the Armenians’ diametrically opposed aspirations, which are
fundamentally national and fundamentally separatist, the two parties’ basic, profound
conflict of interest (economic, political and social) shows, as soon as they confront one
another in any concrete domain, that they are nothing more nor less than enemies,
deceptive outward appearances notwithstanding.
Certain revolutionaries, the author goes on to say, “are making a very big mistake.” They
wish “to overturn the regime currently dominating the Turkish state in order to replace it
with a new regime of a high cultural level, like the regimes of the civilized nations of Europe.”
However,
the Armenian revolutionary does not have a mission of this kind. The Armenian
revolutionary has no mission other than to shake off the servile yoke under which

the Armenian people has been ... groaning for centuries ... It follows from all that has
already been said that there can be no cooperative solidarity and no federation of
any sort between us Armenian revolutionaries and the Young Turks ... The Young
Turks themselves have understood very well where our aspirations lead; they have
very clearly sensed the irreconcilable antagonism between us. The organizers of their
Congress, their big wheels, those wily future candidates for posts as wily Turkish diplo-
mats, capitalized on the naïve flirtation with Ottoman liberals in which the Armenian
revolutionaries have engaged and are still engaging and invited the Armenian revolu-
tionaries [to participate in their congress]. They invoked a general union of the peo-
ples of the Ottoman Empire and general reforms in order to stifle or annihilate the
Armenian cause, to evict it without a trace from the political arena.
Finally, the author affirms that,
to date, in speaking of the Young Turks, we have assumed that they were an organized
group. But that is not the reality of the matter. There is in fact no Young Turk organi-
zation and no organized Young Turk party. There are isolated individuals and small
groups scattered here and there, without firm internal unity or an organizational struc-
ture based on rules and regulations. They are held together less by political or social
ties than by a kind of familiarity typical of the East. There is no Young Turk party with
branches reaching into the various strata of the Turkish population. The two entities
known as Young Turkey and the Turkish people comprise two distinct worlds utterly
foreign to each other.71
Compared to the moderate position laid out by Sapah-Giulian in February 1901, this
declaration is surprisingly radical. How are we to explain this change in tone, this definite
rejection of the Young Turk experiment? The line of argument developed in the text gives
us an idea of the party’s opinion of the Young Turks: they are accused of nationalism and of
pursuing shadowy objectives designed to bury or instrumentalize the Armenian cause. By
itself, however, this does not suffice to explain the disconcerting bluntness of the article,
this “declaration of war.” The internal debates and the reunification of the Hnchaks and the
Verakazmial Hnchaks that took place at this time,72 or even the information that reached
the party’s central committee at this time, may have induced the Hnchak leaders to radical-
ize their discourse and attack not only the Young Turks but also the ARF’s policy of collabo-
rating with them. As if to take their distance from ARF positions, the Hnchaks rejected,
above all, the principle of Turkey’s territorial integrity, which constituted the obligatory basis
for dialogue between the Young Turk opposition and the Armenian activists.
The Young Turk Coalition: An Ideology in Gestation

The bitter debate that took place at the February 1902 congress of the Ottoman opposition,
between the majority that had coalesced around Prince Sabaheddin and the minority led by
Ahmed Rıza, finalized the break between the proponents of decentralization and dialogue
with the other nationalities and the partisans of a centralized state hostile to non-Turks. This
debate was all the more important in that it helped weld together the little group of activists
who would produce the Young Turk ideology that dominated the movement between 1908
and 1918.
The August 1902 creation, in Paris, of a distinct central committee of the Terakki
Cemiyeti (Committee of Progress), which comprised Rıza, Nâzım, Ahmed Ferid, Abdülhalim

Memduh, Mahir Sa’id, and Hikmet Süleyman, confirmed this divorce and illustrated the
exclusively Turkish make-up of the minority.73 The new central committee’s official organ,
Şûra-yı Ümmet, declared in its very first issue: “If Europe came to rescue us by accepting our
invitation she would at first try to separate the Armenians and Macedonians from us.”74 This
is a valuable index of the ideological evolution of the Committee of Progress. There was, to
be sure, an antagonism of sorts between Rıza and the activists: Rıza remained opposed to
revolution and violent action and “dreamed of creating a liberal ‘public opinion’ and thereby
changing the regime,” while the activists held that the time had not yet come to educate the
population and bring a public opinion into being, since “a revolution to dethrone the sultan
can be achieved only by high-ranking statesmen and the military.” The two groups had,
however, a point of convergence – Turkism. It was championed particularly by Yusuf Akçura,
an eminent member of the new coalition.75
Nationalism and Turkism, the ideological expressions of centralization and the exclusion
of non-Turks, constituted a kind of response to not only Sabaheddin but also the Dashnaks,
who were struggling to win administrative autonomy for the eastern provinces. In fall 1908,
the coalition’s organ denounced the prince’s political line, since,
union with the non-Turkish opponents of the sultan was chimerical: “If a Christian ... is
an Armenian, he dreams about the establishment of an independent Armenia ... Now
the Bulgarians and the Armenians are engaged in armed rebellion. Turks are wit-
nesses to all this, and naturally are saddened and feel that the Christians have hurt
them.”76
Unremarkable and widespread among the members of the coalition, these views show the
similarity between their discourse and the Sublime Porte’s when it came to the question of
the nationalities – that is, the territorial integrity of the empire.
“Turkish” nationalism thus would appear to have coalesced in reaction to the emergence of
national sentiment among the other groups in the empire. Doubtless because they were still
marked by the Ottoman heritage, the Young Turk activists initially seem to have perceived
only the movements formed by groups with roots in the Ottoman Christian world, which
they clearly distinguished from Europe – itself perceived, first and foremost, as Christian.
Both Şûra-yı Ümmet and the October 1903 issue of Mechveret introduced a nuance when they
affirmed that to be anti-Islamic came down to being anti-Turkish. They also bitterly criticized
Europe for discerning fanaticism in Islam alone: “if the Turks eradicated the Bulgarian race
or massacre the Armenians, they are driven to do so by Muslim fanaticism.”77 In essence,
they accused Europe of Turkophobia and attributed this attitude to the anti-Turkish propa-
ganda of the Armenian Committees.
These committees had indeed been striving for more than a decade to capture the atten-
tion of the European intelligentsia. Especially in France and Great Britain, especially in the
wake of the 1894–6 massacres, they had succeeded in creating a pro-Armenian network that
directed its blows, first and foremost, against the Hamidian regime.78
Incidents that occurred during a summer 1904 Anglo-Armenian congress in London
nicely illustrate the struggle between the Armenian Committees and the Young Turks of the
coalition. Rıza, who had, after some hesitation, been invited to the London congress in his
capacity as “leader of the party of Young Turkey,” asked for the floor. The organizers suggested
that he speak at the congress’s closing banquet. During his address, delivered to an audi-
ence of Armenian activists, British intellectuals, and members of parliament, he faithfully
repeated his faction’s line. He was attacked by delegates from France and Italy, who criticized
him for defending the sultan’s policy and using the language of the Sublime Porte, and asked
that he end his address.79

These circumstances reveal how difficult it was for the coalition to understand, even
if it was somewhat familiar with the major intellectual debates agitating the West at the
time, the objective reasons why much of Europe had rejected the sultan’s policy toward the
nationalities of the empire. In other words, they were hard put to see why what appeared to
be “natural” to them as members of the “dominant group” was unacceptable to Western soci-
ety. Doubtless, these Young Turks perceived anti-Hamidian discourse as anti-Turkish – and
by extension, anti-Muslim – leading them to reject the West in turn. It is also probable that
experiences of this kind eventually left them with a perception of Armenians as associated
with Europeans and, concomitantly, with European colonial plans.
In any event, the coalition, which its opponents accused of continuing to be “nationalist,
royalist, and Muslim,” considered the problem a matter of pulling the wool over the eyes of
a liberal Europe.80
The Cairo newspaper Türk, the organ of the Egyptian branch of the Young Turk move-
ment, edited by Ali Kemal,81 developed a still more radical nationalist ideology. “One day in
the future,” it wrote,
history, the eternal mirror of the truth of events, will precisely show that one nation
that has been unjustly confronted with the entire world’s enmity is the Turks ... Is it not
injust to ignore the distinct native talents of a nation which has developed from a small
tribe into a magnificent state?82
In other articles in this newspaper, the Turks are presented as “the British of the East.” We
glimpse here the foundations of the Young Turks’ ideological edifice, which associated con-
sciousness of the past and of history with pain, but also with the frustration bred by the end
of a golden age, which the new Turks dreamed of restoring in the guise of a modern state.
Türk repeatedly denounced Western economic penetration of the empire, which it said
went hand-in-hand with a “crusade of European powers against the Turks.”83 This theme hit
home because it reflected a frustration that many felt. Unable to offer a solution to these prob-
lems, the editors of Türk contented themselves with denouncing them. Many authors have
pointed out the importance of Yusuf Akçura’s famous manifesto, published in Türk, Üç Tarz-ı
Siyaset (Three Political Systems). Here, the ideologue sketches the beginnings of an answer to
the questions that one segment of the Turkish elite was asking itself. He lays out three alter-
natives – Pan-Ottomanism, Pan-Islamism, and Pan-Turkism – and identifies the third option
as the right one.84 Akçura’s approach, which called for taking over certain features of the
Western world for purely utilitarian purposes while rejecting the West’s humanist values and,
simultaneously, the political principles of Islam, illustrates the complexity of the equation to
be solved and the intellectual flexibility required to close this yawning gap. Akçura attempted
to do so by recommending that the Turks “take their inspiration from the West in order to
become stronger and make progress.”85 This was, in some sense, an obligatory passage that
would allow the pupil to acquire the means with which to hold his own with his teacher.
Turkism, however, also required a theoretical grounding on which to found its own pro-
cedures and build up its own intellectual constructs. To that end, it had no choice but to
“take its inspiration” from the vast corpus of social science being developed in Europe in this
period. It did so in the sense that one goes shopping to meet one’s basic needs for food and
clothing. Notions such as the state, the nation, race, and society, and their positivistic and,
especially, evolutionist translation, became the new Turks’ daily bread. A good many authors
have dwelt on the new Turks’ fascination for Social Darwinism and its biological and “sci-
entific” conception of human societies.86 These ideas were then popularized in the Turkish
context. They were a source of inspiration for certain militants, who asked for nothing more
than to translate them into practice in the Ottoman world.87

In the Young Turks’ vision, the Turkish “dominant nation” had to assume the supremacy
that Osman’s descendants had exercised over the empire for more than five centuries. The
Turkish nation was to be invested with the special status that had been reserved for the “Old
Turks” and, above all, with the legitimacy that they had enjoyed – their “natural” right to
govern. But the Young Turks had to ground this legitimacy whose transfer they were advocat-
ing in a Turkish identity whose contours were still blurred. The editors of Türk systematically
highlighted the virtues of Turkish cultural heritage and presented the Turkish language,
“with its present-day eloquence and perfection as the language of a civilized nation,” as the
most important and most highly developed eastern language.88 This affirmation, which
makes no mention of the Persian and Arabic contributions to Ottoman Turkish, contains
the seeds of the thesis, put in final form by the Young Turks’ Kemalist successors, claiming
that Turkish is the “solar tongue” and the mother of all other languages.89
Clinging firmly to the notion of their legitimate authority, the Young Turks assumed only
part of their heritage when it came to the non-Turkish nations of the empire – the part that
gave them the right to “rule” and to take the state’s destiny into their own hands. They did
not accept the obligations that formed the pendant to it. Modernization of the state and
society was a task incumbent on the “noble Turkish people.”90
Behind the construction of a Turkish identity lay the need to transform the Ottoman
Empire into a modern state with the help of a preferably Turkish entrepreneurial class.
Thus, alongside the stock image of the terrorist Armenian revolutionary manipulated by
the Western powers, there also appeared in Young Turk discourse that of the Armenian
profiteer and usurer. Evoking this image, an editor of Türk wrote that, “the fortunes that they
have made, the arts that they have mastered all arise from the fact that they have lived at
our expense,” and suggested that his readers draw their own conclusions and boycott these
merchants and craftsmen who “would [otherwise] increase as a natural consequence.”91 We
can already discern in such affirmations the theory of the Millî İktisat (National Economy),
which would seek to replace Armenian or Greek businessmen with “Turks” and Muslims or,
at the very least, to ruin the Armenians and Greeks. Also adumbrated is the rejection of
the idea that personal merit had something to do with the Armenians’ or Greeks’ successes,
which are here attributed exclusively to abuses whose victims are said to be Turks.
However, as we have already said, the principal determinant of the ideological orienta-
tions and mental universe of the Young Turk coalition was an obsession with the dismem-
berment of the empire, which the coalition sought to forestall by affirming a form of Turkish
nationalism sustained by an elite that was cast as “the potential liberator of a fatherland
that, inevitably, would be confronted with a catastrophe.”92 The Young Turks’ frequent
contact with Armenian activists and the sight of their determination and courage only
reinforced Turkish apprehensions about the empire’s future. In the face of these tightly
structured organizations of devoted militants, revolutionary intellectuals, and fedayis fight-
ing the Hamidian regime on a daily basis, the Young Turks probably questioned their own
capacity to organize a movement and shape the destiny of the country. They may even have
developed a sort of complex and erected the Armenian organizations into models whose
methods they sought to adopt. Although such ideas could obviously not be expressed in
public, they nevertheless made headway with the Young Turks and surely contributed to the
evolution of their positions.
The positions taken by the Young Turks toward the Armenian initiatives that we have
already described constituted an ideological corpus in their own right. Some of the concepts
involved were already well developed while others were still emerging. These positions, too,
were shaped by the Young Turks’ relations with the Armenian activists.
In other words, the image of the Armenians as submissive, deceitful, and disloyal, handed
down to the Young Turks by the Ottoman tradition, was being recomposed in this period.

Emerging out of it was a perception of the Armenians as an alien, albeit familiar, ethnic and
religious group that threatened the ruling group – that is, the Young Turks – who saw them-
selves as the Turks’ enlightened avant-garde.
Prince Sabaheddin’s League for Personal Initiative and

Decentralization: A Partner for the Armenian
Committees, 1902–7
Historians have observed that the ascendancy of Prince Sabaheddin’s majority over the
movement was not immediately translated into a program of action and that the alliances
concluded with the other elements of the Ottoman opposition produced no concrete effects.93
Not only were no operations conducted against the Hamidian regime for three years (that is,
until 1905), but the prince actually said very little about the situation in Turkey either.
Sabaheddin had, however, founded a League for Personal Initiative and Decentralization.
Since the January 1902 congress, he had been assisted in this undertaking by Abdüllah
Cevdet, the founder of the first small group of Young Turks. The name of the organization
indicates what it considered the best way to pull the empire out of crisis. The prince, an avid
student of the social sciences, was convinced that one of the conditions for the country’s
survival was the creation of a decentralized administrative system “guaranteeing the moral
and material interests of the different races living on the soil of the empire.”94
Prince Sabaheddin seemed to believe that the subordinate status imposed on non-Turkish
groups in the empire was standing in the way of modernization process. Without abandoning
the principle that the Turks should govern, he envisaged a kind of division of labor that would
allow the empire to benefit from the “know-how” of each group. Thus, he observed that
the Christians have developed private enterprise most fully; its absence is paralyz-
ing the Muslims. Unlike the Muslims and, in particular, the Turks, the Christians do
not expect to be rewarded with a civil service job, but attend to their own individual
interests.95
In this way, Sabaheddin posed the question of how to transform the relation between the
ruler and the ruled; only such a transformation, in his view, could liberate creative energies
and bring non-Turks to commit themselves to the project of a common state. It goes without
saying that this conception, although it ruled out division of the political sphere among the
different groups, ultimately implied dismantling the Ottoman model and replacing it with a
state not of subjects but of citizens.
From his position as a prince of the house of Osman, Sabaheddin analyzed the situation
rather perceptively:
If the minorities had discovered that the opposition wielded real power, they would
have changed their minds. But they see a notoriously baneful force in the regime and,
in the opposition, a vacuum in everything touching on the future. Hence it is not sur-
prising that they should look to separatist solutions. We should also bear in mind that
we have, for centuries, considered the Christians’ privileges not as rights, but as gifts
granted to them. We and the minorities have lived separately. We have thought sepa-
rately. Nothing has ever succeeded in bringing our social perspectives closer together.
Since we are the ones who have marched on their lands and conquered them, it is now
incumbent on us to soften their hearts. Our duty and our interests alike require that
we do so.96

This declaration may no doubt be regarded as the first introspective reflection of an Ottoman
statesman about the dominant nation’s traditional attitude toward the subject peoples, the
fruit of an effort to understand their position.
As we noted in discussing the first congress of the Ottoman opposition, Prince Sabaheddin
devoted special attention to the Armenians from the beginning. He continued to do so
in the years ahead, proposing the creation of a “common fatherland” in which Armenians
would have the same rights as Turks.97
Sabaheddin laid down conditions, however. In an “Open Letter to the Armenians,” pub-
lished in September 1905, he condemned terrorism while inviting the Armenians to participate
in a common project: “Our Armenian compatriots, instead of pursuing a propaganda of the
deed, would be acting in a way much more favorable to their interests if they pursued a propa-
ganda of ideas in Turkish circles.”98 The Armenian Committees had in fact been striving, since
their inception, to heighten awareness among the Turkish and Kurdish masses, but had not had
much success with these conservative or tribal societies. Moreover, the prince observed:
There exists, whatever the Armenians may say, a perfect harmony of interests between
them and the Turks. These two groups make up a society of peaceful laborers who
dream of order and peace and are exposed to the same danger: the periodical attacks
of tribes of Kurdish nomads.99
Although he does not use the word, the prince probably had the complementarity of the two
groups in mind.
Sabaheddin’s political program was moderate in comparison with that of the Turkist
members of the coalition. Hence, it was capable of appealing to the non-Turkish groups. The
official organ that he began to publish in April 1906, Terakki (Progress), promoted individual
freedoms, social prosperity, good relations among the empire’s different groups, and the rights
of the Ottomans in the face of the developed nations’ aggression. Sabaheddin even proposed
a platform for the defense of the rights of the empire’s non-Turkish elements. His program
called for political reform based on the principle of devolution and the idea that a decentral-
ized system of administration should be established in the provinces, the election of local
governments that would take part in the decision-making process, the consolidation of rela-
tions between the central government and the local authorities, proportional representation
for different groups in local government, equal rights for all Ottoman subjects regardless of
their ethnic background, and so on.100
Hanioğlu has surveyed the reactions that Sabaheddin’s program elicited from the Turkist
members of the Young Turk minority. They allow us to assess the Turkist positions on the
questions raised by the program.
Rıza described it as “elastic, vague and obscure.” Şakir, who had only recently arrived
in Paris, noted that the prince’s program would inevitably bring on division of the empire,
would benefit non-Turks above all others, and could only be realized at the Turks’ expense.
In their secret correspondence, the Young Turk leaders, who considered themselves to be
the legitimate defenders of their fatherland, repeated in chorus that Sabaheddin’s plan could
not but lead to disaster for the empire and that Sabaheddin was a traitor and a lackey of the
separatist committees.101 Şakir and Nâzım accused him of being “a British agent” and added
that he “approved of the program of the Armenians, who want to leave us.” The Unionists
also flung an accusation at the prince that they believed robbed him of all credibility and
legitimacy – namely, that he had Georgian blood in his veins. Finally, they urged that “this
man be stopped, because he defend[ed] decentralization.”102
The attacks of the Committee of Union and Progress were also directed against
Sabaheddin’s supporters: “Decentralization [was] a policy the Europeans and Armenians

wished to see enacted in order to annihilate Ottomanness.” Şakir went so far as to accuse the
prince of accepting the principle that Christians were superior to Muslims, then launched
an attack on the Armenian Committees. Alluding to the massacres of Armenians under
Abdülhamid, he wrote:
The real authors of the disaster of our Armenian compatriots are some stupid people
among the leaders who were running and administering the Armenian community,
the many vagabonds carrying out provocations under the title of committee mem-
bers ... In his memoranda, Sabaheddin bey portrays Armenian committee members as
innocent children and places all the responsibility on the government.
Şakir also contended that these militants were being manipulated by the Russian Armenians
who controlled the movement. He added that they defended a rash political line that jeop-
ardized the empire’s territorial integrity, inasmuch as they were seeking to bring on a foreign
intervention. They could therefore be considered, he concluded, a people in rebellion against
“our nation.”103
These reactions of the Young Turk coalition were apparently a response to Prince
Sabaheddin’s efforts to create an “organizational network from the west to the east of Asia
Minor with agents” – to develop such an organization, the League depended on support from
the ARF’s local networks. Once again, the Young Turk movement was confronted with the
problem of finding intermediaries in the population in order to promote its ideas. In the capi-
tal, Prince Sabaheddin’s League tried to elude the surveillance of the sultan’s political police
by creating a student organization, the Cemiyet-i Inkilâbiye (Revolutionary Committee).104
Can the revolts that broke out between 1905 and 1907 in eastern and western Anatolia
be imputed to the League and other revolutionary movements such as the Dashnaktsutiun?
Despite the absence of conclusive documents, there is every reason to believe that Sabaheddin
and the ARF leadership concluded a secret agreement to work together by the first half of
1905, at the latest. In May 1905, a member of the Western Bureau of the Dashnaktsutiun,
Aknuni, accorded an interview to Abdüllah Cevdet, a close associate of Sabaheddin’s, the
tenor of which leaves little doubt about how close relations between the two parties were.105
When a representative of the League, Captain Hüseyin Tosun,106 was dispatched to eastern
Anatolia to organize revolutionary activities there, the ARF took him under its wing. As
soon as he arrived, Tosun was arrested by a military patrol, which suspected him of being an
Armenian revolutionary. He emerged unscathed only because the commander of the patrol
turned out to be an old classmate. All available sources indicate that it was Tosun who created
the local committee and was at the origin of the revolt that erupted on 5 March 1906, where
the rebels demanded exemption from local taxes as well as the tax on domestic animals. We
should add, however, that the main lay and religious dignitaries in Erzerum put themselves at
the head of this rebellion.107 This indicates that the movement’s founders took pains to lend
the protest a social coloring, relegating whatever role the Dashnaktsutiun’s militants may have
played to the shadows. The reason, doubtless, was their fear of hostile reactions on the part of
the populace if their collaboration with “infidels” became a matter of public knowledge.
The presence of just one delegate from Prince Sabaheddin’s League cannot, however,
explain the protest movement that erupted in Sinop, in the vilayet of Kastamonu, on
9 December 1905 and resurfaced in October 1906 and December 1907. There was, to be
sure, nothing revolutionary about it.108 At most, we can assume that these local phenom-
ena inspired or encouraged the resolve of the two Young Turk movements to foment rebel-
lions. The revolt that was smoldering in Dyarbekir in August 1905 is equally unconvincing,
although it had the support of the city’s mufti: it was a protest against acts of pillage and other
crimes committed in the villages of the vilayet by the chieftain of the Kurdish Milli tribe,

İbrahim, whom Abdülhamid had elevated to the rank of pasha in 1902.109 These were all
ordinary phenomena in regions marked by tribal organization.
As to the events that occurred in Van after the 23 March 1908 murder of an informer
by the name of David, they were merely one more chapter in the ongoing wrestling match
between the ARF’s revolutionaries and the government. In his memoirs, Goms (the pen
name of Dr. Vahan Papazian) gives a detailed account of the skirmishing that took place
at the time, as well as of the ARF’s attempt to spring the famed Vartkes Seringiulian from
prison. Seringiulian would later become one of the CUP’s main Armenian interlocutors.110
Hanioğlu mentions a “bogus” Turkish organization, the Liberal Turkish Action Committee
or Turkish Revolutionary Federation, which the ARF created out of whole cloth in an attempt
to make its message more credible in the eyes of the Turkish and Kurdish populations of east-
ern Anatolia. Papazian, the chief of the party in Van in this period, reports that in summer
1904 a certain Haci Idris, a Turkish landowner, contacted him with the intention of col-
laborating with the ARF. Idris was soon joined by the emlak müdüri (the head of the land
registration office) in Van, Şeref; the assistant chief of the telegraph office, Halil; and a tax
official, Hakkı, all of whom were opponents of the regime.111 He also notes that he had some
of Sabaheddin’s and Rıza’s publications brought from Europe for his Turkish friends, adding
that they were a distinct success and that, finally, in fall 1906, at Şeref’s request, “we decided
to publish a bimonthly periodical in Turkish, which we wrote, edited and printed ourselves,
while they were responsible for distributing it.”112 Sabah ul-Hayr (Good Day), which called for
joint Armenian-Turkish action, was well received, according to Papazian. Şakir, however, was
convinced that “such a committee could never be Turkish or Ottoman.”113 Hanioğlu goes so
far as to describe it as a “bogus organization of the Dashnaktsutiun” because he is unaware of
the part, however modest, played in these anti-Hamidian propaganda campaigns by a hand-
ful of Turkish notables from Van.
The Parisian League seems to have been directly involved in the creation of the Ottoman
Constitutional League (Şûra-yı Osmani Cemiyeti) in Cairo late in 1906 by Arab, Turk,
Circassian, and Armenian intellectuals on the initiative of Ahmed Saib Bey and Abdüllah
Cevdet, as is clearly indicated both by the identity of its founders and its program. It was
doubtless not by accident that that the coalition’s official organ, Şûra-yı Ümmet, which regu-
larly described Pro Armenia as a newspaper “hostile to the Turks and an enemy of Ottoman
institutions,” described the League formed in Cairo in much the same terms. Moreover, the
Ottoman Constitutional League had close ties with the ARF’s Egyptian Committee. Şûra-yı
Osmani, the organ of the Cairo League, illustrated how close they were when it declared that
“a purely ‘Turkish revolution might cause the end of the existence of the state”114 – in other
words, that a rapprochement with the Armenians could do a great deal more to maintain the
unity of the country than unilateral action.
In his “Memorandum of the Turkish Liberals with respect to the Eastern Question,”
written in late 1906, Sabaheddin returns to the theme of the importance of coming to
terms with the Armenians. “The Turks,” he declared, were “an unquestionable and indis-
pensable element of equilibrium” in the Ottoman Empire. The Armenians, for their part,
were “persecuted for political reasons, which are not at all connected with religion ... An
attempt was made at suppressing them because they were the future allies of the Turkish
Liberals.”115
The Committee of Union and Progress and

the Armenians, 1905–6
The Young Turk Coalition, which from 1902 to 1905 only just managed to survive in the
shadow of Prince Sabaheddin’s League, was in the space of a few months transformed into

so powerful an organization that it appeared by early 1907 as a credible committee of activ-

ists capable of attracting new members – or even taking power. According to Hanioğlu, this
turn came about thanks to two little-known men who remained in the shadows and worked
exclusively within the Central Committee of the Committee of Union and Progress until
1918.116
The first of these two men, Dr. Bahaeddin Şakir,117 is without a doubt the one who
succeeded in forging the synthesis on which all energies were focused. Şakir had had a
career. Hardly had he graduated the Imperial Medical School then he became the per-
sonal physician of Prince Yusuf İzzeddin, second in the line of succession to the throne.
He took advantage of his position to establish relations with Ahmed Celâleddin Pasha,
the former head of the Ottoman Intelligence Service who had fallen into disgrace and,
naturally, joined the opposition in Cairo. Şakir, who was in contact with the members of
the coalition in exile in Paris, convinced the prince to finance their activities. Unmasked
by the political police, he was arrested and banished to Erzincan. He managed to flee to
Trabizond and, from there, board ship for Marseille. He arrived in Paris in September
1905.118
The young man of 26 presented himself in Paris as Yusuf İzzeddin’s emissary, but also as
an intermediary between the coalition and Ahmed Celâleddin. Two former Young Turks
describe him as a “very vindictive character” and “a very narrow-minded individual.”119
Narrow-minded or not, Şakir understood the situation perfectly well. He himself con-
fesses that he had already imagined uniting Rıza’s coalition, Prince Sabaheddin’s League,
and the circles grouped around Celâleddin in Cairo. In Cairo, precisely, his privileged
interlocutor was Diran Kelekian, responsible for the political section of the Journal du
Caire.120 Close to the former head of the Ottoman Intelligence Service and also to Prince
İzzedin, Kelekian had agreed, at the prince’s request, to help Şakir put his plans into prac-
tice. The doctor needed help publishing a revolutionary journal that appeared every ten
days, and the idea was to convince the former chief of intelligence to help finance it. The
members of the coalition, however, did not want to collaborate with Diran Kelekian, and
wanted even less to be financed by Abdülhamid’s former top spy. The Armenian journal-
ist nevertheless suggested that Şakir remain in Paris and try to come to an agreement with
the coalition.121
Şakir rapidly found acceptance in Paris with help from Nâzım, who encouraged Rıza to
undertake the complete reorganization suggested by Şakir and join the new committee that
had been created late in 1905 without his knowledge. In the newly founded organization
were Sâmi Paşazâde Sezaî Bey, Prince Muhammad Ali Halim Pasha as its treasurer, Nâzım,
and Şakir, who was put in charge of internal organization and relations with the sections.122
Rıza now lost his position as head of the organization (the post of president had been abol-
ished) and Şakir and Nâzım took de facto control of the committee. They would continue to
control it until the party was dissolved in October 1918.
The next order of business was for Şakir to convince Prince Sabaheddin and his asso-
ciates, Nihad Reşad and Ahmed Fazlı, to join his enterprise. He failed. With Ahmed
Celâleddin Pasha, who had himself founded an oppositional party in Cairo together with
“Bedri Bey” (the pseudonym of Diran Kelekian), he envisaged not a mere alliance, but
a merger. It would, he hoped, put the financial resources of the Egyptian network at his
disposal.123
In this matter as well as in many others, Kelekian, who had been active in Rıza’s CUP
in 1895–6 in Paris, became the Young Turk physician’s confidant and counselor. He pointed
out to Şakir, for example, that in its present form Şüra-yı Ümmet could not play the role of
an “opposition journal [, which] should carry out the function of a banner.” As for the new
organization, he recommended that his friend find a prestigious successor for Ahmed Rıza

and give the group a new name. Finally, he evoked the negotiations with Celâleddin Pasha
and the possibility of bringing him into the Central Committee, although not necessarily as
its leader.124
The former head of intelligence agreed to join the organization on four conditions.
Firstly, that it abandon the form “Young Turkey”; secondly, that the ARF and the SDHP
be included in the union, a move that, he said, could have very positive effects; thirdly that
Rıza’s role be restricted to that of a rank-and-file member – in other words, that he not be
given any post allowing him to take part in the decision-making process; and finally, that
Şûra-yı Ümmet continue to appear as the new party’s organ. Finally, Cêlaleddin demanded
that Kelekian draft a declaration calling on all the sultan’s opponents to unite under
the wing of the new organization. The coalition rejected these conditions. Cêlaleddin
Pasha nevertheless agreed to provide a monthly subsidy to the newly formed Central
Committee.125
To put the finishing touches on his project, Şakir drew up a draft agreement with the
non-Muslim committees, in particular the Armenian organizations. He wrote a memoran-
dum about this move, in which he asked Kelekian for advice. In his 9 April 1906 response,
Kelekian noted that Şakir’s text deviated from Rıza’s program, which, if it was “more favorable
toward the non-Muslims subjects, [was] not adequate for the purposes of achieving a union.”
If he wanted union, he would have to suggest a more far-reaching decentralization plan.
Kelekian reminded Şakir, as if to lay his apprehensions on this score to rest, that there was
nothing political about provincial government, which, “within the limits of autonomie locale,
should be extended, with more substantial rights in appointing officials and in discussing and
approving provincial budgets.” He also suggested the possibility of using local languages in
the provincial administration, alongside the country’s official language, Turkish. More gener-
ally, he contended that the “nations” could receive equal treatment “without causing disor-
der in the government’s administrative affairs,” asking why some enjoyed this privilege – such
as the Greeks on the Aegean islands or in Ionia and the Arabs in Beirut – whereas others,
such as the Albanians and Armenians, did not. The follow-up to this exchange was equally
frank. Kelekian wrote:
I am aware that your friends would not agree with this opinion. Events would demon-
strate to them, however, that the country can only be saved by such a liberalism, and
that nobody can be deceived by a liberalism based on the principle of Turkification.
The non-Muslim subjects are ready to become Ottomans, because they hope that by
preserving their nationality and making their nationality a component of Ottomanness
they would become Ottomans. Becoming Christian Turks by gradually forgetting their
racial [origins], however, would not be found beneficial by them. Despite this fact,
even if this program was accepted, most of the discontent caused by Mechveret would
disappear.126
In response, Şakir asked Kelekian to draft a memorandum on the subject so that he could
discuss it with the members of the coalition. This time, Kelekian dealt head on with the key
questions, identifying what he considered and did not consider acceptable in the program of
the Committee of Union and Progress. He noted that the
Turkish nation, which has pursued a “dominant nation/religious community” policy

since the establishment of the sultanate, wishes to save the freedom that it wishes for
the country on this condition ... The offer by the Turks to the non-Muslim nations
is simply inviting them to a union based on “égalité individuelle.” I wonder if the
non-Muslim nations would accept such a union? The experience of the last ten years

indicates that they would not ... . The elements which find individual equality inappro-
priate and demand “égalité raciale et sociale” would naturally act as they wish.
With regard to the risk of European intervention, Kelekian added that it could be obvi-
ated only by “basing domestic politics on maximal liberalism and unequivocal justice.” He
concluded his memorandum by emphasizing that “it is necessary to regard the fatherland as
common for all, to abandon the claims of superiority and hegemony, and to limit oneself to
being a ‘partner’ instead of a ‘superior.’ ”127
The opinions formulated in this document by Diran Kelekian, the former editor-in-chief
of the Istanbul daily newspaper Sabah, well known for his pertinent analyses of Ottoman
society, sum up all the questions confronting the “non-Muslim nations.” Hence they also
shed light on the solutions proposed in the Young Turk organization’s emerging program.
It hardly need be said that Kelekian’s suggestions did not find grace in the eyes of the
Young Turk leaders. Şakir, nevertheless, decided to engage a dialogue with the Armenian
Committees after familiarizing himself with these revolutionary parties’ founding principles,
with Kelekian’s help.128 One of the members of the SDHP’s Central Committee, Stepanos
Sapah-Giulian, has given a detailed account of his meetings with the Young Turks,129 in
which another eminent member of his party, Murad, also took part.130
Late in July 1906, Şakir visited the SDHP’s Parisian headquarters. He introduced himself
as the former personal physician of the prince and heir to the throne Yusuf İzzedin, mention-
ing his clandestine activities in Constantinople and the Hnchak militants who had been
hanged at Trabizond, as well as those he had known in Kirason and Samsun, on the shores
of the Black Sea. After this preamble, he revealed that he was a member of the Committee
of Union and Progress. The two Hnchak leaders pointed out that Rıza and Nâzım were very
hostile to the SDHP. Şakir answered that Rıza and Nâzım were not representative of the
party as a whole and that there were more open-minded people in it. After several informal
meetings, he suggested that his interlocutors organize official meetings between the two par-
ties. The first of these meetings was attended by Şakir, Rıza, and Nâzım, on the one hand,
and Murad (Hampartsum Boyajian) and Sapah-Giulian on the other. Rıza began with the
remark that, in view of the country’s current plight, it was crucially important that they
come to an agreement and that he was determined to do all in his power to bring one about.
He added that he had received, from activists in the Caucasus,131 Egypt, and Bulgaria, and
from Turks in responsible positions as well, letters demanding that an accord be reached on
the basis of mutual concessions. Şakir, for his part, said a few words on the party’s situation
in Salonika, Smyrna, and Macedonia.
Sapah-Giulian observes, in his description of this initial encounter, that the evolution
of European policy toward the Ottoman Empire had certainly helped convince the Young
Turks to modify their positions. They sensed, he says, that the empire would collapse and
disintegrate if nothing was done. They were alarmed by the Arabs’ anti-Turkish position,
as well as by the agreements that the Armenians “had reached with Arab intellectuals.”
Without fully understanding the direction in which the Balkan states were moving, they
had also perceived that the situation in Macedonia was explosive. Finally, Sapah-Giulian
notes that they continued to believe that all was not lost and that they could still save their
empire. The Armenians were, in their view, in a better position than the Arabs to help
them do so, and it was no longer possible to postpone coming to an agreement with the
forces of the internal opposition if the external dangers threatening the empire were to be
warded off. Rıza also asked Murad – who had just spent ten years in prison – to forget the
past and “act like a patriot.” Finally, he said, “if I were Armenian, I would have taken the
position that you have taken, but I don’t think that you would have taken a position differ-
ent from mine.”132

It was decided that both parties would study all these questions one by one before any
further meetings were held. The following points were to be examined in the following order:
1) the Armenian question and the goal of a single state; 2) autonomous Armenia and Turkey;
3) a democratic constitution and the Midhat Constitution; 4) the Armenian question and
foreign intervention; 5) socialism and nationalism; 6) nationality and Ottomanism; 7) organ-
ization, propaganda, and revolutionary actions; 8) organs of liaison and relations between
the parties; and 9) the question as to what parts of any agreement reached should be made
public.133
With regard to the first point, the Young Turks proposed to resolve the Armenian ques-
tion within the framework of a single Ottoman state. On the second, Nâzım sought to show
that foreign intrigues would render reforms ineffective – until the state was reformed and
modernized, he suggested, broad local reforms were all that could reasonably be hoped for.
The Hnchak leaders contested this approach, which came down to postponing reform
until the arrival of better days at some unspecified point in the future. Şakir then asked
“what the Armenians were going to do with the Turks and Kurds living in Armenia.” He
was told they would stay where they were, enjoying all the political, economic, and social
rights that Armenians did.134 Nâzım raised the question again, in these terms: “Since the
majority is Muslim, what purpose would autonomy serve?” Sapah-Giulian retorted: “The
overwhelming majority is on our side, although the question is more meaningfully posed in
historical, cultural and national, rather than in quantitative terms. Hence the number of
non-Armenians can in no case play a decisive role.” At this point, Rıza announced that in
order to reach an agreement, the Young Turks were prepared to accept the principle of an
autonomous Armenia, but that they wished to familiarize themselves with the details, such
as the proposed region’s borders (that is, the villages and towns it was to include), as well as
the form of autonomy proposed, the conditions under which it was to be realized, and the
nature of the proposed region’s connection with, and relations to, the Ottoman state.135
This last discussion, although it created the impression that the Young Turk leaders were
ready to make concessions, seems in fact to betray their underlying objective of making a
precise assessment of the SDHP’s position on these fundamental questions.
At the next meeting, Murad and Sapah-Giulian presented Kiepert’s “Map of Historical
Armenia,”136 on which Russian and Persian areas were marked off. They showed their
interlocutors the borders laid down in the agreement of 11 May 1895. The Young Turks
reacted rather coldly – indeed, they even said that they were stupefied by these preten-
sions. The two Hnchak leaders replied that autonomy did not mean independence. Nâzım
retorted that “if separation does not come about today, then it will come about in five to
ten years.”137
The basis for examination of the remaining points was, broadly, the plan of 11 May 1895 –
administrative autonomy, participation in the general budget, a governor general whose
appointment was to be confirmed by the Council of Ministers, a parliamentary regime, and
so on. Disagreement persisted on Cilicia. Here, the Young Turks were willing to accept noth-
ing more than local reform. For Armenia itself, they were prepared to accept “autonomy
on non-secessionist bases.” Sapah-Giulian concludes: “This was hard for them to swallow,
but history and the general political situation forced them to come to this conclusion ... We
understood that the knife had reached the bone.” The solutions considered at these negotia-
tions, which were, after all, binding on only two opposition groups, clearly showed just how
far the Armenian demand for local autonomy went. This was no doubt what Şakir, Nâzım,
and Rıza were after. It explains their willingness to “negotiate” with the most uncompromis-
ing of the Armenian Committees.
Calling for the adoption of a democratic constitution stripped of all references to divine
right and theocratic institutions, the Hnchaks reminded their interlocutors that they

advocated secularization of the state even as they envisaged the future in an Ottoman frame-
work. The unanimous response of the Young Turk leaders showed that this demand was
out of the question: adopting a constitution of that type, they replied, was tantamount to
handing “state power over to the non-Turkish elements.” The Midhat Constitution, “with
which the Turkish population [was] already familiar,” was more appropriate in their view.138
Socialism was rapidly dropped from the discussions. The question of Ottomanism, on the
other hand – the affirmation that there was only one nation in Turkey into which all the
others should melt – remained a major, non-negotiable Turkish demand.
We cannot rule out the possibility that both sides sincerely wished to reach an agreement.
The SDHP’s proposals to create common propaganda organs and committees responsible for
organizing revolutionary actions were not, however, seriously entertained. Confronted with
the telling silence of his interlocutors, Sapah-Giulian told them that the ideological distance
between their two formations was decidedly too great to be bridged.139 We are accordingly
inclined to believe that the sole purpose of the Hnchaks’ proposals was to test the Young
Turks’ willingness to collaborate, while the Young Turks, for their part, were merely sound-
ing out their interlocutors’ positions. Indeed, in an essay published immediately after these
negotiations, Sapah-Giulian felt obliged to rebut accusations of “nationalism” and isolation-
ism.140 Referring to the situation in the eastern provinces and the threats hanging over the
Armenian population, he pointed out that,
between Armenians, on the one hand, and Turks, Çerkez and Kurds on the other,
there is an essential difference, even if all of them are in much the same economic and
political situation. Unlike the Armenians, the other groups are not threatened with
complete annihilation. The Turkish government does not have, vis-à-vis these other
groups, a domestic policy the purpose of which is to liquidate them. “To resolve the
Armenian question, it is necessary to eliminate the Armenians – to leave only groups
of Muslims in the heart of the Taurus Mountain region.” This sword of Damocles is
not dangling over the heads of any group living in Turkey, with the exception of the
Armenians.141
As for solidarity with the Muslim groups living in the eastern provinces, Sapah-Giulian
observes that years of effort have failed to produce results. Such solidarity is fine in theory,
he writes, but unattainable in practice: the internal workings of the Muslim societies in these
provinces and the local context make it difficult to recruit individuals caught up in the clan
or tribal system.142 He points out that if Turkey is to preserve its territorial integrity, the dif-
ferent elements it comprises have to want to live together. “But do they?” he asks. Macedonia
wishes to secede; “this is clear as day.” “As for Crete,” he writes,
it is now only a matter of time, of days ... Arabia has a certain inclination to
break away ... Who is left? The Kurds, the Çerkez, the Avshars, the Laz? Are these
groups capable of working toward the creation of a new state out of a crumbling
Ottoman empire, when some of them are still not sedentary and others are still half
barbarian?
Sapah-Giulian’s essay delivers an uncompromising verdict on the Young Turk movement:
As for the dominant Osmanlı element ... there are currently two small groups among
Turkish youth: one is gathered around Terrakkı, the other around Meşveret. The first
accepts, together with the Midhat Constitution, a system of administrative decen-
tralization for the other peoples, but this movement ... has attracted only a handful of

individuals and has no organization or local branches. The members of this movement
have set all their hope on intervention from the outside by the European powers and
their “great men.” The Meşveret group, as is well known, is made up of out-and-out
nationalists who are so intolerant that they do not even want to hear the Armenian
question or [reform] plan of 11 May mentioned. They do not have a functioning
organization, either ... They want merely to restore the Midhat Constitution ... which,
in its [current] form, cannot satisfy any of the groups in the empire or bring about an
improvement in the situation.
Sapah-Giulian further contends that the history of the past few decades has shown that all
attempts to achieve reform in Turkey have failed: “Everything goes to show that it is impos-
sible to reform Turkey in general, absolutely impossible.” He concludes:
May Turkey continue to live; but we, too, must live. Yet, given that neither the old nor
the new dominant element in this country will grant us even minimal conditions of
existence and both are opposed to implementation of the project of 11 May, we are
not the one who can reverse the historical current and, with our very limited forces,
accomplish what the European powers themselves have not succeeded in accomplish-
ing for centuries.143
After these negotiations came to an end in October 1906, Murad proposed to convene a
congress of Armenian revolutionaries. This initiative, however, came to naught.144
In December 1906, Sapah-Giulian again considered the possibility of joint action with
the Young Turks. He remained skeptical, however, in the face of those he called “radical
nationalists,” who had not evolved in the least, and went so far as to ask whether “it was wise”
for the Armenians “to put [their] hopes of survival in general reforms.”145 He was equally
skeptical about the Midhat Constitution, which he analyzed in considerable detail, only to
reaffirm that “it would bring nothing of a constitutional nature, even if it was an application
of [constitutional] principles.” The Young Turks’ attempt to bring the Armenians to commit
themselves to the struggle to restore it, he added, was intended only to bury the Armenian
question: the constitution “merely confirms, legalizes and popularizes the government’s unre-
servedly theocratic, despotic and tyrannical principles.” The Hnchak leader emphasized, in
this connection, that the articles of this constitution, notably articles 3, 4, 7, 11, 27, and 87,
which spelled out the sultan’s political-religious prerogatives, were purely theocratic in nature,
and that article 5, which absolved the sovereign of all responsibility for his actions, also gave
him the power to appoint and dismiss ministers. The only important novelties introduced
by this constitution, Sapah-Giulian contended, were its recognition of individual liberties,
which had earlier been denied, and the fact that it acknowledged that state power was held
and exercised by men, “not an entity desired and created by divine pronouncement.”146
The event that left the deepest mark on the years 1905–6 was the ARF’s assassina-
tion attempt against Sultan Abdülhamid. It took place on 22 July 1905, at 12:30 p.m.,
in the square before the Hamidiye Mosque, and left 78 people dead or wounded.147 It
might even be said that this operation constituted a turning point in the evolution of
the anti-Hamidian opposition, for it showed that a well-organized group, even one whose
members came from the ranks of a “subject people,” could make an attempt on the life of
a sultan. The archives of Operation Vishab (Dragon), an operation entrusted to the “cell
for demonstrative operations” (tsutsagan marmin), illustrate the logistical problems that
this ARF commando had to resolve. In summer 1904, for example, the members of the com-
mando, meeting in Piraeus, discovered that it was not possible for people with Armenian
names to enter Istanbul safely, since those who did so were immediately tailed by the secret

police. The commando also observed that the sultan very rarely left Yıldız Palace. He went
only twice a year to Dolma Bahçe during the Bayram festivities, in order to receive the hom-
age of various state bodies, and was then escorted by thousands of armed men.148 From the
commando’s report on the operation, we learn that the terrorists finally succeeded in making
their way into Istanbul by presenting themselves as married couples, less suspect in the East
than bachelors.149 The report also contains a detailed description of the methods it used to
bring explosives into the city.150 It further points out that all the houses around the square
in front of the Hamidiye Mosque had been demolished, so that it was impossible to come
within more than a half a mile of it. Several options were therefore examined: shooting from
rooftops a half a mile away, packing a car full of explosives (melinite), or launching grenades
from a pavilion reserved for foreign visitors.151
Most instructive of all, however, are the Young Turks’ reactions to this assassination
attempt. Many members of the opposition, despite their hatred for the sultan, were shocked
at the idea that Armenians had dared to get mixed up in what the Young Turks considered
to be a purely “family affair.”152 Kâzım Karabekir declares in this connection that the Turks
“would have regarded the assassination of a Turkish padishah by Armenians or other non-
Turks as a blameworthy act.”153 In other words, as the Young Turks saw matters, the fact that
“foreigners” had presumed to settle Turkish “family problems” was intolerable.154 Or, if one
likes, it was intolerable that others had very nearly succeeded in doing what the Young Turks
themselves were unwilling or unable to do.
The Transformation of the Committee of Progress

and Union and Its Fusion with the
Ottoman Freedom Organization:
the Decisive Turning-point
While Şakir’s attempts to unify the Ottoman opposition did not produce the desired results,
the reorganization of the CPU was successful. It succeeded, notably, in bringing the move-
ment to adopt revolutionary practices, previously limited to the non-Turkish opposition, and
to “secretly assemble under the same banner” men who had the same ideas. Drawing the les-
sons of its past failures, the CPU drew up new party statutes, including internal regulations of
decisive importance. As Hanioğlu notes, the CPU was at this time more interested in order
than in ideology.155
The new statutes provided for the nomination of a director and four autonomous sections
of the Central Committee, each of which could work independently of the others and had the
right to stamp the results of negotiations with the seal of the Central Committee. The first
section, headed by Rıza, was responsible for publishing Mechveret Supplément Français and for
relations with foreign groups. The task of the second, led by Sâmi Paşazâde Sezaî Bey, was
to publish Şûra-yı Ümmet. The third, led by Nâzım, was responsible for party finances. The
fourth, jointly directed by Şakir and Nâzım, was charged with working and corresponding
with all the branches of the party – that is, with attending to internal business. The Central
Committee also included two young officers who had broken with Istanbul, Lieutenant
Seyyid Ken’an and Lieutenant Mehmed Fazlı, as well as two princes in disgrace, Mehmed
Said Halim and Mehmed Ali Halim. In 1907, let us add, when the Central Committee
decided that Şûra-yı Ümmet would henceforth be published in Paris, not Cairo, Şakir became
its de facto editor-in-chief. Thus, he assumed effective, albeit unofficial, control of the party
apparatus, seconded, as always, by Nâzım.156
At the time, the CPU did not have a single branch worthy of the name, except perhaps
for the one in Cairo, which was, however, confined to the house and person of Ahmed Saib.

A specialist points out that the CPU took its inspiration from the organizational structure
of the ARF, a revolutionary federation of branches linked in a network, as it was putting its
own loose network of Young Turk groups in place.157
While there was progress in this domain, it should be emphasized that it was registered in
the Balkans, among the Muslim population, in particular the officers in the many Ottoman
units that controlled or tried to control this explosive region, regularly plundered by armed
bands.
The 18 September 1906 creation of the Osmanlı Hürriyet Perverân Cemiyeti (Ottoman
Freedom Organization/OFO) in Salonika was, precisely, the result of a fusion between these
young officers serving in the Balkans and the “veterans” of the CUP.158 The small group of
the OFO’s founders comprised Mehmed Talât,159 Midhat Şukrü (Bleda),160 Mustafa Rahmi
(Evranos),161 Lieutenant İsmail Canbolat,162 Major Bursalı Mehmed Tahir,163 Lieutenant
Ömer Naci,164 İsmail Hakkı,165 Major Naki Bey (Yücekök), Captain Edib Servet (Tör),
Captain Kâzım Nâmi (Duru), and Lieutenant Hakkı Baha (Pars). The composition of the
first “Supreme Council,” made up of Mehmed Talât, Mustafa Rahmi, and İsmail Canbolat,
attested that leadership responsibilities were shared out among civilians, notables, and offic-
ers, while also evincing the radicalization of the movement, the statutes of which excluded
non-Muslims and dönmes from the committee. Some of these men had been members of the
first CUP cells and had kept up relations with Paris: thus, Midhat Şukrü was still in con-
tact with Nâzım, and Mehmed Talât with Ahmed Rıza.166 But it was the arrival in Paris of
Lieutenant Ömer Naci (in May 1907), and Captain Hüsrev Sâmi (Kızıldog’an)167 (in August
1907), and their adhesion to the movement, which speeded up the rapprochement between
“Parisians” and “Salonikans.” After Talât presented Nâzım with the proposal to merge the
two organizations, Nâzım, himself a native of Salonika, left for the Balkans.168 After discus-
sions lasting several weeks, he sent, on 27 September 1907, a unification plan back to the
CPU’s Central Committee. Paris unanimously approved it on 16 October of the same year.
From this point on, the CPU was represented by a domestic Central Committee based in
Salonika and an external Central Committee based in Paris.169 Thus, from 1908 to 1918, the
members of the CUP’s Central Committee came mainly from the two entities that fused at
this time: Şakir, Nâzım, Rıza, and Naci had roots in the Parisian CPU, while Talât and Şükrü
came from the OFO in Salonika.
It seems plain that Şakir and Nâzım played equally important roles in this unification
process and that Şakir led the reorganization of the new party with firm resolve. Complaining
that the domestic Central Committee took too many chances, he suggested that it adopt
the underground methods of the non-Muslim committees, especially the program and stat-
utes of the ARF, which were used in elaborating the internal operating principles of the
unified CPU.170
Among the innovations inspired by the Dashnaktsutiun’s methods was the creation of
local sections made up of volunteers prepared to make the supreme sacrifice – the fedayis.
The local executive committees alone knew the identity of these men, whose mission was
to carry out “special operations.” The ceremony at which new members of the committee
were inducted also seems to have been modeled on that of the Armenian revolutionaries:
new members swore an oath of loyalty to the party while holding a Koran in one hand and
a dagger or revolver in the other. Also taken over from the Armenians was the custom
of keeping Central Committee members’ names and the location of party headquarters a
secret.171
Among the profound changes the CPU underwent in this period, the most decisive
would appear to be the growing influence of young officers on the Committee. Responsible
for this freely made choice were, it seems, two physicians on the Central Committee who
were convinced of the need to attract “young officers ready to sacrifice themselves” rather

than pashas and beys. It was in this way that there began to flourish in the official organ
of the party the militaristic discourse that made officers the “guides” of the nation and the
“light of the eyes of our society,” for the army was “the only institution capable of carry-
ing out a revolution.”172 This choice also allowed the CPU to organize bands of irregulars,
modeled after those Bulgarian, Macedonian, and Greek ones infesting the Balkans in this
period, that were capable of carrying out armed raids and political murders. Involved here
was both a response to what the Young Turks considered to be the challenge thrown down
by the non-Muslims, and also a way of financing the party similar to the one used by the
Armenian Committees.173 The logical next step for these bands, under the command of
young officers who were members of the party, was to recruit criminals and deserters who
had become highwaymen. Major Enver (the future minister of war) and Major Eyüb Sabri
(Akgöl) were the first to recruit such criminals, in Macedonia early in 1908.174 Doubtless,
these initial experiments can be considered the origin of the Special Organization, which
was to constitute the military wing of the Central Committee of the CUP during the First
World War. Then, however, it was no longer a question of armed raids, but of the systematic
liquidation of a civilian population.175
Among the many officers who joined the OFO in fall 1906 were Ahmed Cemal176 and
Halil (Kut),177 the uncle of Major Enver, who himself joined the organization on 9 October
1906 and founded a branch of the party at Manastır.178 Unification with the OFO, a process
in which Nâzım played a major role, enabled the CPU to put down deep roots in the Ottoman
Balkans, but was obviously only the opening stage of the two CPU leaders’ plan. In December
1907, Nâzım again went secretly to Smyrna, this time in order to create a Young Turk branch
there. He turned for support to the ARF’s local networks, which were solidly implanted in the
port city.179 A few months earlier, in May 1907, Şakir, for his part, had traveled to Istanbul on
a false passport in order to reorganize the branch of the CPU there.180 Profiting from the rela-
tions of his confidant in Cairo, Diran Kelekian, he met with Armenians from the capital who
agreed to help create a local committee. Kelekian and Şakir also envisaged assassinating the
sultan with the help of subsidies that Kelekian had obtained from Ahmed Celâleddin Pasha
– the former director of Ottoman Intelligence was still living in Cairo – and Yusuf İzzedin.181
These efforts did not, however, yield the expected results. It was, in the end, the OFO’s net-
works that united the different groups in the capital under Silistreli Hacı İbrahim Paşazâde
Hamdi’s lead: they had a membership of 70 at the time, including a fair number of officers,
such as Kâzım (Karabekir).182 Moreover, on his return trip to Paris in June 1907, Şakir met
in Bucharest with the famous İbrahim Temo, a historic figure of the CUP, and succeeded in
convincing him to organize branches in Romania and among the Albanians. The historical
CUP leader even obtained the support of leading Albanian Muslims for the CPU.183
Also indicative of the CPU’s ambitions was, finally, Ömer Naci’s November 1907 journey
to eastern Anatolia for the purpose of founding local sections of the party.184 These con-
servative tribal regions did not, however, offer the advantages that the Balkans did. Only the
Armenian Committees could survive there.
The ARF’s Fourth Congress: Vienna,

22 February to 4 May 1907
When the Fourth General Congress of the ARF opened in Vienna on 22 February 1907
in a building belonging to the Austrian Socialist Party,185 the Young Turk opposition was,
as we have just seen, going through a period of profound changes. The same held for the
Dashnaktsutiun itself, which capitalized on the opportunity offered by the congress to draw

up the balance sheet of its past actions in the field and also assess the evolution of the
Young Turk movement. Those present at the congress – 24 delegates from the local commit-
tees and the party’s Eastern and Western Bureaus186 – were intellectuals and also militants
active at the practical level. They held more than one hundred sessions, during which many
issues were examined in depth, notably the question of collaboration with the Ottoman
opposition.
Although the ARF was democratic in its internal functioning, it was handicapped by
the fact that, first, socialists, anarchists, and nationalists – all with very different working
methods – coexisted within it. Second, it was led by “a voluntaristic, traditional oligarchy.”187
This leadership comprised the party’s two supreme bodies – the Western Bureau, which had
jurisdiction over the committees in Europe and those in the Ottoman Empire lying west
of a line that ran north-south from Kirasun through Harput to Dyarbekir, and the Eastern
Bureau, which had jurisdiction over the regions to the east of that line and also over the
committees in Russia (it appears from this division that the ARF conceived of Armenian
political reality as a unity). These two bodies were elected by a congress that convened, in
principle, every four years. This congress alone was empowered to define and adopt the party
program and budget. The ARF consequently functioned in somewhat rigid fashion, even if
its regional committees enjoyed broad autonomy of action. Thus, when the Young Turks in
exile sought contact with the Dashnaktsutiun, they applied to its historical headquarters in
Geneva, where the editorial board of Droschak had had its offices since the party’s founda-
tion. The Young Turks were probably unaware that Geneva also happened to be the seat of
the party’s Western Bureau.
The Fourth General Congress published a declaration of principles as soon as it had fin-
ished its work:
To put an end to baseless misunderstandings widespread among the Turks, the

Congress deems it necessary to declare that the Dashnaktsutiun has never had and
does not now have secessionist aspirations in Turkey, but that its objective has, rather,
always been complete equality among the nations constituting the country and, in
accordance with the principle of broad local autonomy, the establishment of admin-
istrative autonomy in the six Armenian vilayets. This is not contrary to the rights of
the other nations.188
This profession of faith, in which the ARF firmly rejected the recurrent accusations of
secessionism that the “Turks” leveled at Armenians in general and the party in particu-
lar, ratified the conclusions reached at the congress. It reaffirmed a principle that had
not once been challenged during the discussions held there. The logged minutes of the
congress show that the party’s primary concern was the disastrous economic and social
plight of the Armenian provinces and the insecurity that permanently reigned there. The
first delegate to address this subject, Vana Ishkhan, representing Lernabar (Rshtunik/
Moks), painted a bleak picture. He stressed, to begin with, that the situation had grown
worse since the massacres of 1895–6. The Kurds, encouraged by the government, had
acquired greater influence since then, and the mountain districts found themselves in
the worst situation, since they lived almost exclusively from animal husbandry. Famine
also was now chronic in the region because the population no longer had the right to
seek work in other regions of Turkey, given the restrictions that had been imposed on
circulation. Finally, Ishkhan brought up the land question, which he declared to be of
vital importance. The shortage of arable land, he said, as well as pressure from tribes of
mountain Kurds who harassed and plundered both the Armenians and sedentary Kurds
aggravated the problem. He noted that, on the plain of Vasburagan, 70 per cent of the

land belonged to village communities and 20 per cent to individual landowners or stock-
breeders, whereas in the districts of Kiavash, Khizan, and Spargerd, where large numbers
of Kurds lived, the Armenian peasants paid tribute to Kurdish chieftains. In Shadakh,
Hayots Tsor, and Timar, the peasants lived in dire poverty and rejected the demands of
the Kurdish tribal chiefs.189
Thus, the land question was at least partially bound up with the state of relations
between Kurds and Armenians. The sedentary Kurds, with whom the Armenians worked
on a day-to-day basis, did not represent a problem, according to Ishkhan, whereas the tribal
populations harassed their sedentary neighbors, especially in areas where the latter had not
organized their self-defense.190 Antranig’s contribution to the discussion, which bore on
the situation in the region he represented, Mush-Sasun, confirmed that relations with the
Kurds were quite simply power relations: the Armenians’ erstwhile friends turned against
them just as soon as an order from the national government authorized them to act with
impunity.191
The seventh chapter of the Western Bureau’s report, presented by Aknuni,192 broached
the subject of greatest interest to us here: the relationship between the party and the
other organizations struggling against the Hamidian regime. The preceding congress had
assigned Aknuni responsibility for this question.193 A number of speakers focused on rela-
tions with the Young Turk movement. Aram-Ashod (Sarkis Minasian),194 a delegate from
the committee for the Balkans, recalled the antagonism between the CPU, which he
described as “exclusively nationalistic and constitutionalist,” and Prince Sabaheddin’s lib-
eral tendency, which “accepted a system based on a degree of decentralization.” The CPU,
he went on, was firmly opposed to the liberals’ political program, because “it believe[d] it
contained the seeds of a future partition of Turkey.” Aram-Ashod noted that, in late 1902,
an editorial committee including Turks, Armenians, Albanians, and Macedonians had
been formed to publish La Fédération Ottomane, but that the Turks had suspended their
collaboration after one or two issues had appeared. He nevertheless believed that it was
necessary to cooperate with and even to take the initiative of reunifying the opposition.
“The nationalities,” he said, “by preserving their identity on their native soil – something
that is vital for us – will also ensure the territorial integrity of the Ottoman Empire.”195
Aram (Manukian), the delegate from Van, approached the same question from a differ-
ent angle, contrasting the Young Turks in exile with “the activists who live among the
Turkish masses”:
I place no great faith in the Young Turks who have found refuge in Europe; they are,
for the most part, palace revolutionaries who in one sense or another have dynastic
interests. If we begin with them, we are going to encounter a great many problems.
In any case, it is more appropriate to begin with the activists who live in the country
and among the Turkish masses as they actually are. I must say that these movements
have no ties to the Young Turks abroad. Indeed, we are the ones who distribute the
newspapers and literature of the Young Turks in exile inside the country. I propose that
we create, with the Turks in Turkey, mixed committees in which our forces are united.
These communities should deal, in particular, with questions common to all nation-
alities, such as propaganda, political terrorism, protests based on our united forces,
boycotts, and so on.196
This approach, reflecting tendencies observed among activists doing practical work, was
contested by Rupen Zartarian, a delegate from the committee for the Balkans. Zartarian
said that he was skeptical about the “Turkish masses’ ” inclination to make a revolution in

the near future. He also reaffirmed that the party had never had separatist goals, but on the
contrary wished to keep within an Ottoman framework.197 However, Avetis Aharonian, a
delegate representing the Kars committee, pointed out that this was not how the Young
Turks perceived the ARF:
The Young Turks discern a separatist tendency in our movement because we are
working toward the creation of a special administrative regime for the six vilayets
inhabited by the Armenians ... This is by itself enough to convince the Young Turks
that we are not far from having separatist tendencies, while their objective is to
maintain Turkey’s territorial integrity. At the [1902] Paris Congress, in which I
participated,198 Rıza turned to us and said “you are Ottomans.” Sabaheddin, who
wanted to collaborate with the Armenian revolutionaries à tout prix [at all costs],
remarked that “what you are demanding for the six vilayets, we should demand for
all the others as well.”199
At the ninety-ninth session of the congress, held on 23 April, the subject came up again
during a discussion of two motions on “solidarity among the oppositional groups in Turkey.”
The first to take the floor was a figure of historical importance in the ARF, Rostom (Stepan
Zorian).200 He recalled that the party had proved more than once that it did not harbor
“separatist tendencies,” as the decisions of the 1904 congress “distinctly” showed. He added
that he was in favor of a policy of solidarity with the opposition, but noted that the party
had made great efforts to this end without having tangible results to show for it. He was
even more dubious when it came to the creation of “mixed committees with the Turks and
Kurds, because the Kurds are led by their affluent class and begs.”201 As for Zartarian, he was
firmly opposed to the creation of local mixed committees, “for the Turkish masses are not
sufficiently educated and, what is more, such collaboration could lead to new massacres.” The
socialist sensibility of certain party members makes itself clearly felt in their inclination to
endorse a common struggle against the sultan, yet their awareness of the gap between these
ideals and practical social realities is also evident.
Aram (Manukian), in defending his motion for unity of action with the whole Ottoman
opposition, made an interesting remark about the protest movement that had emerged in
Asia Minor over the past two years. “It is a fact,” he said, “that the movements with a politi-
cal coloration that have appeared in Turkey have been led by us. It is possible that a good
many of our comrades are unaware of this.” This very general remark should be taken with
a grain of salt. A penchant for secrecy and the obvious desire of the author of the motion to
convince his comrades of his point of view may have predisposed him to attribute all the acts
of political “rebellion” observed in Turkey to the ARF, even if it was obvious that some of
them lacked all “political coloration” and owed nothing to the party. Drawing the conclusion
that followed from his premises, Aram argued that the ARF should meet the opposition’s
expectations and join it in its efforts.202
Murad Sepastatsi,203 a delegate from Lernabar, declared that he found some of his com-
rades rather too optimistic. He did not share their feelings, he said (with, of course, Aram’s
remarks in mind), for he had doubts about “the revolutionary nature of the movements that
[were] emerging among the Turks.”204 Arshag Vramian, invited to take part in the congress
as a delegate-at-large, took a similar position. He urged prudence, suggesting that the party
limit itself to making financial contributions to the opposition movements that sprang up
in the provinces of the empire, without coming forward openly.205 Aharonian returned to
the accusations of separatism, refocusing the debate on the ARF’s relations with the Young
Turks in exile: “Yes, we are simply regarded as separatists. The Turks propose that we support

Sabaheddin’s project. If we refuse, we will be considered separatists.”206 Vramian207 reacted

in these terms:
No one is considering secession from Turkey. That would be stupid, not because we are
not capable of achieving it, but because our socio-economic interests mandate that we
remain part of the country. The Turks do not understand the nature of the federation
we are demanding; they take it as evidence of separatism. It is crucial that we bring
the Turks round and make them understand that this is the only way of [preserving]
Turkey’s territorial integrity. The alternative is the partition of Turkey.
Minasian added:
Not even the Young Turks can grasp our conception of solidarity; how can the untu-
tored Turkish populace be expected to? The Turks are still guided by religious think-
ing; if Turkey should go to war with a Christian state, any Christian state, they would
immediately turn on the Armenians.208
After this discussion was closed, Manukian’s motion in favor of concerted action with the
opposition was carried. The ARF thereby effectively agreed to make concessions as to the
type of reforms to be introduced in the eastern provinces so as to lay the accusations of sepa-
ratism preoccupying the party to rest.209 An article published in its official organ, Droschak,
shortly after the congress was adjourned, tends to show that the party leaders had taken due
note of the ongoing mutation of the Young Turk movement under the influence of Şakir in
particular. They did not hesitate to declare:
We have not forgotten the positions taken by the leaders of the “Turkish liberal par-
ties” when the Armenian movement was in its infancy. While we applauded all their
declarations of hostility to the sultan’s regime, they constantly embittered and disap-
pointed us. A Murad Bey, a well educated, pragmatic man considered to be the sole
leader of “Young Turkey,” declared one fine day, in the name of his party in Europe, in
a brochure written in French, that the Armenian revolutionaries were vulgar bandits
or criminals whose actions invariably targeted the Muslim peoples and whose objective
was to massacre them. As for Murad Bey’s faithful successors – Rıza Bey, Ottomanus
[Pierre Anmeghian] and so on – they presented the Armenian revolutionaries to Europe
as Russian government mercenaries ... Now, however, things have changed ... It would
appear that a new generation is coming up that has renounced passivity ... a generation
quite different from its predecessors, who, only yesterday, under the flashy, seductive
name “Young Turkey,” were wasting their days bombing their surroundings with paper,
in the form of naïve exhortations and appeals addressed to Europe. [The younger gen-
eration] takes its inspiration from new slogans; it appeals to the noble “principle” of
self-reliance. Let us hope that our premonitions are not mistaken; let us hope that fate
will at last smile on our unfortunate peoples and the whole of our bloodstained country,
which has long stood in need of cooperative cultural action. Let us wipe the last rem-
nants of prejudice from our hearts; let us stretch our hands out to our neighbors with
love as they wake from their slumbers.210
This official declaration was, very probably, a direct consequence of the negotiations
engaged a few months earlier with the CPU’s new leaders. It was a profession of good will.

Chapter 2
The December 1907 Second Congress

of the Anti-Hamidian Opposition: Final
“Preparations for a Revolution”
W
e have already discussed, among Bahaeddin Şakir’s other preparatory work, the
fruitless overtures that he made to the leaders of the Hnchak Party in sum-
mer 1906. His exchanges with the ARF seem to have been more productive.
According to Hanioğlu, the initial negotiations between the two parties were conducted
amid the greatest possible secrecy; no public declaration was ever made about them.1 We
know only that Ahmed Rıza was sent to Geneva by the CPU to engage in discussions with
the ARF’s Western Bureau and that the ARF, for its part, sent Aknuni to Paris to continue
the negotiations there.2
During his stay in Paris, the Dashnak leader had a conversation with his classmate from
Tiflis’s Nersesian Academy, the Hnchak Stepanos Sapah-Giulian, at the latter’s request. The
Dashnak representative informed Sapah-Giulian that he had come to carry out a decision
reached at the Vienna Congress, which had voted to organize a second congress of the
opposition in collaboration with the Young Turks, with the objective of coming to a gen-
eral agreement with them. Sapah-Giulian and Aknuni wished to come to terms themselves
before pursuing their dialogue with the CPU.3 Before entering into the discussion proper,
Sapah-Giulian asked his interlocutor if it was true, as Şakir had told the Hnchaks, that
the ARF had already established relations with the CPU and had begun to negotiate an
agreement “about the option of a centralized state, with preconditions such as abandon-
ing the Armenian question.” According to Sapah-Giulian, Aknuni confirmed that this was
indeed his party’s orientation.4 Examination of the preparations for the congress makes this
plausible.
Şakir’s private correspondence suggests that he was, for his part, persuaded that the
Armenian Committees had no choice but to rally to the CPU, since the Armenian people
was threatened with destruction by the Czarist regime as well as by Abdülhamid, while the
policy of the great powers was, at the time, non-interventionist.5 We can form a more precise
idea of the CPU’s objectives and Şakir’s strategy by examining their correspondence. It shows
that the CPU leaders’ maneuvers were informed by a certain cynicism: they invited the non-
Turks to take part in joint actions revolving around Ottomanism, even while reaffirming,
internally, that they had rejected this concept of the nation and adopted a clear policy of
excluding non-Turks.6
The 1905–6 “events” in the Caucasus – that is, the eruption of violence between
Armenians and “Muslims,” especially the Turkish-speaking population of Baku – prob-
ably had a greater impact on Young Turk circles than has previously been supposed. While
this violence resulted, on the analysis of the Armenian Committees, from a policy of

provocation orchestrated by agents of the Czar’s regime,7 Turkish-speaking circles perceived

it as a Turkish-Armenian conflict for control of the South Caucasus. Bahaeddin wrote, in
response to a March 1906 letter in which the Tatars of the Caucasus complained about
Armenian “encroachments,” that “the authors of the detestable massacres are not you, but
those Armenian revolutionaries who are enjoying themselves by offending humanity.”8 In
public, the CPU’s official organs took a vaguely neutral stance toward the Armenian-Tatar
conflict. In private, however, Şakir suggested “putting an end to Armenian wealth and
influence in the Caucasus.” He also suggested to his “Muslim Brothers” that they propa-
gate “the patriotic idea of unification with Turkey” while simultaneously declaring to the
Russians that they were “loyal to the Russian government” and not engaged in a religious
war, but “in a stuggle against Armenians only because [they] have wearied of Armenian
acts of agression, outrages, and atrocities, and only in order to defend [their property and
honor.”9 These Turkist positions obviously did not prevent the CPU from negotiating with
the Armenian Committees and even, as we have seen, from cooperating with independent
Armenian personalities.
To date, the ARF has been credited with initiating the organization of the second con-
gress of the Ottoman opposition, approved of in principle by the Party’s Fourth General
Congress. Documents presented by Hanioğlu seem to suggest, however, that it was in fact
the CPU which took this initiative.10 In any event, both organizations expressed a desire to
collaborate. Thus, Şakir observed that Aknuni was “extraordinarily favorably disposed” and
showed great flexibility during the preliminary discussions, so much so that the Young Turk
leaders became rather suspicious of his motives. At the Dashnak leader’s request, Prince
Sabaheddin’s League for Personal Initiative and Decentralization was associated with the
mixed commission that was to prepare the congress. This commission comprised Ahmed
Rıza and Sâmi Paşazâde Sezaî Bey, members of the CPU’s Central Committee, Dr. Nihad
Reşad and Ahmed Fazlı of the League, and Aknuni, the ARF’s official representative. Şakir
was not a member of the commission, but archival material shows that he was the real initia-
tor of the congress.11
Interestingly, the twelve-point document drawn up by the mixed commission begins by
laying down the principle of the territorial integrity of the Ottoman Empire and the invio-
lability of the order of succession to the throne, and concludes with a mention of the “legal
and revolutionary” means to be mobilized to bring down the Hamidian regime and restore
the constitution. It also rejects all foreign intervention and “terrorism,” even while allowing
for the possibility of violent action in certain circumstances requiring further definition. The
last stipulation states that “the Armenians especially should not participate in the revolt in
Erzerum unless we [the CPU] approve it.”12
The three “puissances invitantes,” – the CPU, the ARF, and Prince Sabaheddin’s League –
invited the committees of the SDHP and the Verakazmial to take part in the congress.
Both refused. The Hellenic League in Paris also received an invitation. Given the League’s
relative lack of influence, the debates were in fact an exchange between the CPU and the
ARF. A problem cropped up when it came to choosing a name for the national representa-
tive body of the “régime représentatif” with which the country was supposed to be endowed.
The Young Turks categorically rejected the formula “assemblée constituante” proposed by the
Dashnaktsutiun. After an exchange between the ARF’s Western Bureau on the one hand,
and the Salonika Committee on the other, an agreement was finally reached on the term
“national parliament.”13
Besides these questions of principle, which are indicative of the two parties’ objectives,
bitter debates raged around the decision to use “legal and revolutionary” means to bring down
the government. It is easy to imagine the uneasiness that the ARF’s revolutionary practices
caused the CPU’s leaders, and we may suppose that, in negotiating with the Armenian Party,

Final “Preparations for a Revolution” 45
they intended to bring these practices under control. Among the means proposed by the
Armenian revolutionaries were civil disobedience, draft resistance, the organization of armed
bands, a general insurrection, a general strike with the participation of government officials
and the police, and, finally, terrorist acts with individual or institutional targets. This vast
program, coming from militants who had already proved that they were capable of carrying
out extremely difficult operations, panicked the CPU leadership, since it maintained, despite
all, a legalistic approach and was preoccupied with the fate of the Ottoman Empire. Thus, it
made sense that the Young Turks should demand that the activities of the armed bands be
closely supervised, that there be no call to resist the draft (for reasons of national security and
so as not to weaken the army), and that the ARF abandon collective terrorist action, limiting
itself to actions targeting specific individuals.14
When all was said and done, the ARF had made major concessions, agreeing not to call
for implementation of the reforms in the eastern provinces or great power intervention in the
empire’s internal affairs, while rallying to the idea of a centralized state.15 In exchange, the
Armenian party doubtless hoped that the future state would, at least to some extent, have
a representative character and respect democratic rules. The ARF may even have expected
to acquire a degree of influence over state affairs. Despite this conversion, the Young Turks,
who were used to battling their Armenian compatriots’ plans for administrative autonomy,
apparently displayed some reluctance to collaborate with them. The Armenian Committee,
in turn, had to find acceptable foundations on which to ground its legitimacy in its own com-
munity. Precisely because Sabaheddin’s League was among the organizers of the congress,
the inclusion of other non-Turkish components of the anti-Hamidian resistance among the
prospective participants helped to legitimize the ARF’s choices, since it was now acting in
the framework of a vast Ottoman opposition rather than allying itself with the Young Turks
alone, a move for which it was harder to gain acceptance.16 Negotiations with opposition
movements such as the Interior Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (IMRO) proved
much more difficult and ended in failure despite the efforts of the ARF, which had long-
standing ties to this movement. A few Jewish and Arab delegates took part in the work of
the congress, but exercised no real influence over it.17
Once all the preliminaries had been completed and the work of the various commis-
sions cleared away, the congress could finally take place. It lasted for three days, from 27 to
29 December 1907.18 The preliminary work performed by the commissions notwithstanding,
several proposals caused problems. Rıza’s last-minute appeal to the Armenian delegates to
acknowledge the rights of the Ottoman Sultan in his capacity as Caliph, for example, led to
a heated exchange. These socialist militants, who considered religion proof of obscurantism,
can only have perceived this demand as one more manifestation of the “positivist” leader’s
conservatism. Fazlı and Şakir managed to resolve the problem by wringing an admission of
“the issues of the caliphate and the sultanate which have been considered sacred by [their]
Turkish compatriots” from the Armenians. The other source of tension, needless to say, had
to do with the adoption of revolutionary methods. In this connection, Hanioğlu nicely brings
out the difference between the conceptions of the members of the CPU and the Dashnak
militants – that is, between the approach of the former, for whom such methods were simply
a form of activism by which to attain their objectives, and the socialist vision of the latter,
who were revolutionaries in the true sense of the word.19 The bitter discussion of this issue
was carried to its conclusion during the closing banquet, a rhetorical exercise during which
all the participants expounded their conceptions of society and the state, without calling the
final declaration into question. This declaration called, on the one hand, for the abdication
of the sultan, a radical transformation of the existing administration, and the establishment
of a consultative system and a constitutional government; and on the other, as a means of
arriving at these objectives, it envisaged armed resistance, a general strike, non-payment of

taxes, and propaganda activities in the armed forces. Finally, the congress decided to create
a “standing mixed committee” responsible for organizing propaganda work and sending out
calls to all social classes and the constitutive groups of the empire.20
This accord historique found a by no means negligible echo in the Western press of all
political tendencies, including the socialist press, which, as might be imagined, had no love
for the CPU. At the same time, the Young Turk Central Committee instructed its local
branches to monitor the Armenian Committees and, in particular, report whether they
respected the Paris accord. It also called on them to launch a systematic boycott of Prince
Sabaheddin, who continued to be accused of disseminating “seditious ideas.”21
The active role played by the Young Turk Central Committee in Paris, especially when it
came to relations with the other Ottoman groups, should not blind us to the Salonika Central
Committee’s growing influence in the party. On the eve of the July 1908 “revolution,” a good
many of the six thousand members of the OFO were army officers by background,22 recruited
from the forces concentrated in the Balkans that were supposed to keep these regions under
control. The creation of numerous Balkan branches of the party, notably in Manastır,23
Serres, Skopye, and Resen, was a direct result of this internal transformation. The Salonika
Central Committee, which included Mehmed Talât, adjutant Major Hafız Hakkı, Captain
İsmail Canbolat, Manyasizâde Refik, and Major Enver,24 was, with its majority of officers,
itself militarized like the party as a whole. Yet, the CPU was still far from being able to carry
out spectacular operations capable of hastening the fall of the regime. Mehmed Talât’s vain
attempts to convince his friends in the ARF to launch bombs “to Salonika and Istanbul”25
revealed a certain powerlessness, even as they attested to the CPU’s utilitarian approach to
its Armenian allies.
Most historians agree that the implementation of reforms in Macedonia (the Mürtzeg
Plan), occurring against the background of the diplomatic crisis between Russia and Great
Britain, facilitated the recruitment of rebel officers and made it possible to mobilize Muslim
public opinion in the Balkans, which had been unsettled by the prospects opened by the
European plans for the region. It is also commonly assumed that these reforms undermined
the position of the Sublime Porte, whose main priority remained the maintenance of mili-
tary control over the region.
The reinforcement of the British commitment to the reforms in Macedonia that came
in March 1908 was perceived by the CPU’s Central Committee as an imminent threat of
“partition and extinction of the Ottoman State and expulsion of Turks from Europe.”26 The
CPU’s reaction showed what the Young Turks understood “reform” to mean: it was, for them,
tantamount to “partition.” They even feared that the European plan for Macedonia could
well lead to the loss of Albania, push their capital out of Europe, and “make us a second or
even a third class Asiatic power.”27
The 9–12 July 1908 meeting at Reval between the Russian Czar Nicolas II and the British
sovereign Edward VIII seems to have been the event that finally convinced the CPU to
throw itself into the battle against the regime. It is also likely that the sultan, whose political
acumen is universally acknowledged, concluded at the same moment that he was no longer
in a position to resist the pressure of the great powers – in other words, he had no choice but
to yield to the pressures of the CPU in the hope that he could take matters back in hand
once the crisis had passed. When he decided to restore the Midhat Constitution and allowed
the Young Turks to make their entry onto the stage of history, he was probably well aware
that they were much more legalistically minded than many supposed and were by no means
averse to maintaining the monarchy. The main objective was to call a halt to the reform
process in Macedonia, sure to lead, ultimately, to the partition of the empire.
On of the best experts on the Balkans at the time, the journalist Aram Andonian, points
out that “the Young Turks very adeptly took advantage of the enthusiasm [engendered by

Final “Preparations for a Revolution” 47
the revolution] to send the European officials who had just taken up residence in Macedonia
politely back home.”28 The Young Turk revolution, which was supposed to make good the
democratic deficit and ensure the security of all the empire’s subjects, had another effect as
well: it brought all armed activity conducted by Albanians, Macedonians, or Armenians to
an end, for they all supported the new regime. However, as Andonian points out, “in putting
a successful stop to the scheduled reforms in Macedonia, the Young Turk regime paved the
way for events that eventually led to the Balkan War.” In other words, in refusing to heed
those who advised it to enact reforms in order to allay separatist tendencies, it simply post-
poned the day of reckoning. Austria-Hungary compensated for this Young Turk success by
annexing Bosnia-Herzegovina, while Russia seized the occasion to intervene in the Balkans,
well aware that the new regime would not implement reforms there and would thus spark
new revolts with its political intransigence.29
However that might be, the CPU immediately understood that it was by setting out from
the Balkans, where it had found a fertile breeding ground, that it was most likely to succeed
in bringing down the regime and taking power. Its commitment to the region, especially
Macedonia, made a rapprochement with the local committees indispensable, beginning with
the Macedonian IMRO. The revolution would come from Europe, not Anatolia. The alli-
ance with the ARF accordingly lost some of its relevance or even utility.30 It is not our task
here to review the circumstances that brought about the neutralization of the Macedonian
committee, but it may be noted that the process was greatly facilitated by the assassination
of its leaders Boris Sarafov and Ivan Garvanov, militants who were close to the Armenian
revolutionaries. The Greeks, for their part, remained passive, refusing to take part in these
operations.
The CPU nevertheless needed the support of local organizations struggling for auton-
omy, which of course comprised non-Muslim elements, and even had to recruit members or
volunteers directly from their ranks. At the same time, it could not reject the principle of
the exclusively “Turkish” nature of the party. As often in the past, the Albanians provided
the contingents that would carry the day; they were backed up by Muslim recruits from the
Balkans. A few promises from the CPU to satisfy the Albanians’ demands, revolving around
the preservation of their identity, allowed the Turks not only to weld together substantial
local forces, but also to extinguish a revolutionary project that had been smoldering for
months. The work of Ahmed Niyazi, himself of Albanian origin, facilitated recruitment in
Resen, Manastır, and Ohrid. There can also be little doubt that Albanian notables played
a crucial role in rallying local forces to the Young Turks’ cause. They doubtless hoped to
receive special treatment in return, particularly regarding the cultural rights that they had
been calling for, a demand that the CPU already regarded as a separatist tendency.31 The
CPU leaders’ discourse had not been quite as successful when it came to rallying Jewish
circles in Salonika, who had already been giving the local Young Turks logistical support
for several years, although the CPU had made no concessions to speak of. The relations
they forged with the Jews were nevertheless sufficient to provide conservatives all the occa-
sion they needed to describe the revolution as “a cabal of Salonikan Jews, Freemasons, and
Zionists.”32
The latent revolt simmering in the armed forces, the first signs of civil disobedience, and
the fact that it proved impossible to carry out the Sublime Porte’s orders to bring the situa-
tion back under control left the sultan no other choice than to sign the decree restoring the
constitution. It was promulgated on 24 July 1908.33
In Paris, the opposition in exile packed its bags and set out for its native land. In late July
1908, the Ottoman Consul General and Ahmed Rıza visited the Paris headquarters of the
SDHP in order to invite the party’s leaders to return to Constantinople. They promised the
Hnchaks that they could operate there as they saw fit, even, if they wished, as an opposition

party. This invitation, extended to the CPU’s most uncompromising opponents, can be
interpreted in various ways. It is likely that, in opting for this course of action, the Young
Turks were seeking to neutralize external sources of opposition – they doubtless preferred to
have them close to hand in the capital, where it was obviously easier to keep an eye on them
than if they remained abroad. When Murad and Sapah-Giulian paid their visit to the Young
Turks, they learned from Rıza that a CPU Congress would soon be held in Salonika. True to
form, the positivist leader asked that they cease to attack Abdülhamid, who was now their
sovereign and caliph.34
The next day, the two Hnchak leaders met with Prince Sabaheddin, who told them:
If the Ittihad controls the government for more than eight months and runs the affairs
of state, rest assured that the future of all the nations making up the empire, especially
the Armenians, will be compromised and then finished ... Certain persons have held
confidential conversations with me: we spoke openly with each other, as Turks. What I
say appeared clearly in their declarations and admissions. That is why you must imme-
diately consider your own situation and decide what you have to do.35
This prophetic warning, coming from a leader who had been relegated to the margins, bears
witness, at the very least, to the mood prevailing among the Young Turk leaders from the
moment they took power, and to the duplicity of their discourse.
On 15 August 1908, Sapah-Giulian and Murad left Paris for Constantinople.36 The
Dashnak leaders, too, turned their backs on Geneva and set out for the Ottoman capital.
Bahaeddin Şakir reached it first.

PART II
Young Turks and Armenians Facing


Chapter 1
Istanbul in the First Days of

the Revolution: “Our Common
Religion is Freedom”
I
n an editorial published late in July 1908, doubtless a few days after the restoration of
the constitution, the Hnchak leadership observed, clearly alluding to the CUP: “In order
to develop, Turkish nationalism needs more liberal political conditions than those the
Hamidian regime offered it.” In the same text, the Hnchaks reminded their readers of the
SDHP’s positions: “We are opposed to ‘Young Turkey’ if it proposes to establish the rule of
one nation or race over the others ... Complete equality of all nations has to be an inalien-
able right. We reject the absolute centralism defended by the Party for Union and Progress.”
The Hnchaks also continued to advocate the establishment of local autonomy, of “autonomy
for Armenia,” and a truly democratic constitution. Thus, they returned to Constantinople
without excessive enthusiasm.1 Yet, they boasted that they had sparked the Young Turks’
activism. “As far as revolution is concerned,” wrote the official organ of the Hnchak party,
“the Armenian people has been the educator of the Turkish people.”2
Despite the fact that the SDHP maintained these positions, which illustrated the con-
stancy of its leaders’ political choices, the Young Turks did not give up hope of changing
their Armenian compatriots’ minds. Thus, the Hnchak leaders Stepanos Sapah-Giulian and
Hampartsum Boyajian received a visit from Dr. Bahaeddin Şakir a mere ten days after their
arrival in Istanbul. Şakir had arrived in the capital a little earlier and had already assumed
leadership of the local Ittihadist clubs. He informed the Hnchaks that his colleagues on the
Central Committee of Salonika had just arrived and wanted to meet them. Sapah-Giulian
and Murad accepted the invitation, their reservations about the Young Turks notwithstand-
ing. They were received at the headquarters of the Committee of Union and Progress by Şakir,
Mehmed Talât, Şazâde Başi, and Enver. Talât informed them that the Central Committee of
Salonika had sent him to the capital to meet with all the leaders of the various parties and
study all the existing currents, and that he was therefore hoping that the Hnchak leaders
would explain the basic principles of their movement to him. This way of broaching matters
was no doubt designed to sound out the Hnchaks’ attitude toward the CUP in its new role
as a party of government and also to discover the nature of the relations between the SDHP
and the ARF. Talât did in fact ask his interlocutors what they thought of the Dashnaks; the
Hnchak leaders responded that he should address himself to them directly. He also wondered
how the Dashnaks “could include the term ‘revolutionary’ in their name.” “Has anyone ever
seen the government of a country,” he asked, “authorize the existence of a party calling itself
‘revolutionary’?”3
To Talât’s suggestion that the SDHP position itself on the terrain of Ottomanism, Sapah-
Giulian and Murad replied that “Ottoman and Turkish were synonyms” for each other.

“There are no Ottoman Armenians,” they said, “and there cannot be; there are Ottoman
subjects, there are Armenians who are Ottoman citizens.”4 Despite this response, the Young
Turk leader proposed that they try to come to an understanding and establish the basis for an
agreement – he even promised them that the Hnchaks would have total freedom of action as
a political party.5 A few days later, Hagop Babikian, an Armenian jurist who was a member of
the Young Turk movement, was sent to SDHP headquarters in order to bring his compatriots
around. He affirmed that the Ittihadists wished to reach an agreement with the Hnchaks,
were prepared to guarantee them the number of parliamentary seats they had demanded,
and would make all other necessary concessions because they wanted to make sure that the
country would enjoy a period of political calm.6
The basis of the deal that the Young Turks doubtless proposed to all the Committees
consisted of a few verbal concessions, combined with a promise of support in the upcoming
elections for the Ottoman National Assembly. Armenian circles surmised that the CUP
was attempting to exploit the old antagonism between the ARF and the SDHP fanning the
flames of their rivalry by promising more parliamentary deputies to both sides, all the bet-
ter to bind each of them to itself. Thus, the official organ of the Dashnaktsutiun defended
itself against the Hnchaks’ acerbic criticisms of the ARF for its cooperation with the Young
Turks.7
As we have already seen, the agreement reached at the December 1907 second congress of
the opposition had no real impact on the course of events. The Dashnaks seemed to be aware
of this. However, they consoled themselves with the observation that
after hesitating for a long time, the Young Turks, once they felt that they had become
strong enough to do so, adopted terrorism as the most appropriate means of strug-
gling against the network of spies and terrorizing the regime’s protectors as well as the
Sultan’s entourage.8
Droschak hastened to quote a statement that Dr. Nâzım had made in Smyrna: “We owe
the Armenians rather than the Ottoman army a debt of gratitude, for it is the Armenians
who accompanied us on the path to liberty.”9 These words are puzzling. Can we reasonably
attribute such flattery to feelings of gratitude on the part of one of the oldest Young Turk
militants still active? Probably not. Yet, Nâzım’s remarks sufficed to give the Armenian com-
mittee the impression that it had played a role during the “revolution” in one way or another,
and had accordingly acquired a new legitimacy. If it is borne in mind that the ARF’s revo-
lutionary activities in Sultan Abdülhamid’s day were severely criticized in Armenian circles
in the capital, it becomes easy to understand how important it was for the party to gain a
degree of recognition. From this standpoint, the revolution represented a triumph for the
ARF within the Armenian community. Overnight, it opened the doors of all the Armenian
national institutions before the Dashnaks. This should not, however, blind us to the bitter
debates that occasionally raged within the party leadership. Although some ARF leaders,
such as Mikayel Varandian or Aknuni, both members of the Western Bureau, saw 1908 as a
“golden age,”10 others such as Ruben Ter Minasian and Antranig were more skeptical: they
pointed out that the sole objective of the officers’ coup de force was to preserve the territo-
rial integrity of the empire, and expressed concern about “a revolutionary party’s chances of
survival in a period of peace.”11 The broad majority of the party leadership, however, crystal-
lized around Ottomanism and the principle of the integrity of the empire. In other words, it
decided to pursue its collaboration with the CUP on the Ottoman political scene, placing its
bets on the establishment of a liberal regime.
The position taken by Aknuni, the leader of the ARF delegation to the December 1907
Paris Congress, doubtless played a determining role in the party’s decision to collaborate

Istanbul in the First Days of Revolution 53
with the Young Turks. Arriving in the Ottoman capital before all the others in August
1908,12 he wrote to his colleagues at the Western Bureau in Geneva:
You cannot imagine how happy I am to be able to write you from this city without the
slightest censorship or control. After thirty-two years of silence, the city is chanting
“Freedom”; the crowds are drunk with joy. No matter: thirty years of silence are well
worth thirty days of inebriation ... When the reaction re-establishes its rule, we shall
rejoin the “club of the mute.”13
This enthusiasm becomes easy to understand when we recall that it was the enthusiasm of
a militant who had spent long years in exile and whose party had been persecuted in both
Russia and the Ottoman Empire. The restoration of the constitution opened up heady pros-
pects: the ARF could now hope to lead a fully public existence, become a legalized political
party, and play its role in the political, social, and cultural life of the Armenian nation, while
also participating in the Ottoman political game.
Another event that occurred in the same period and had symbolic value was the September
1908 return of the exiled Prince Sabaheddin to the Ottoman capital. To mark the occasion,
a ship with “occupants of the Palace and nobles” aboard went out to welcome Sultan Mecid’s
grandson. The SDHP created another powerful symbol when it decided to hire to go out to
meet the prince a ship bearing Stepanos Sapah-Giulian and Murad, among others. The two
revolutionaries were invited aboard the ship of the “occupants of the Palace,” where they
were received by Deli Fuad Pasha, who had just returned from exile. Before this constella-
tion of dignitaries, including Ahmed Rıza and Bahaeddin Şakir, the pasha waxed eloquent
on the role played by the Hnchaks: “[they have] done much to help rouse the country from
its torpor and bring down the Hamidian regime.”14 These militants, villains only yesterday,
were suddenly being celebrated as heroes. They were not alone: an Armenian delegation
representing the Patriarchate had set sail from the Golden Horn on the Princess Maria on
2 September, around 11 in the evening, making for the Dardanelles in hopes of welcoming
Prince Sabaheddin before the others. The delegation included the lawyer Krikor Zohrab,
who had himself returned from exile a few days earlier.15 These signs of Eastern courtesy,
however, only thinly veiled the CUP’s hostility. The very day the prince arrived, the Istanbul
press launched a vilification campaign against him: it was rumored that he had arrived in
the capital in the company of 300 French nuns with the intention of “modernizing” Turkish
women and 300 paters who would lead Turkish youth to atheism. The authors of this cam-
paign, which we have every reason to believe were of Young Turk origin, had not misjudged
their audience. Their strategy for denigrating the prince, whose long stay in France was sup-
posed to have warped his moral fiber, relied on the public’s conservative reflexes, particularly
its rejection of “Western ways.”16
The CUP’s first “secret” congress to be held on Ottoman soil opened on 18 September
1908. It showed that the Young Turk Central Committee was now controlled by the leaders
from Salonika, as well as Dr. Nâzım and Dr. Şakir. Ahmed Rıza had been quite simply pushed
aside. It was also clear that Mehmed Talât and the two physicians had come forward as the
true masters of the committee and were more powerful than the Council of Ministers.17
The eternal question about these much-discussed “secret” conferences is just what was
decided at them. Sapah-Giulian, about whose revolutionary activity we hardly need say any-
thing more, was a privileged witness to these events; he affirms that he sent one of his agents,
Bedır Bey Bedırhan,18 to Salonika to gather information on the decisions made by the Young
Turk congress. According to this informant, the CUP decided to check the development
of other political parties, to continue to struggle against Sabaheddin and his liberal ideas,
to bear with the Armenian parties until the committee was stronger, to keep the Hnchaks

under surveillance, to propagate the principle of Ottomanism, to promote Muslim control

of the economy and foster the development of industry and trade among the Turks, and to
maintain a Turkish majority in the Ottoman National Assembly at all times.19 Of course, this
information must be taken for what it is – a series of “revelations” that were put in writing
in 1915 – but it should not therefore be dismissed out of hand. The secret correspondence of
the Young Turk leaders unearthed by Hanioğlu20 clearly shows that they systematically used
a double language or adapted what they said to the context, without deviating an inch from
the pursuit of their political objectives. These documents indicate that the CUP decided
to maintain its military character at this congress, and also to have loyal members of the
committee as well as fedayis appointed to all important posts. This meant all rectors and
university professors, as far as the posts under the authority of the Ministry of Education
were concerned; all valis, mutesarifs, and kaymakams for those falling under the authority of
the Ministry of the Interior; and, at the Ministry of Justice, all judges.21 This is another way
of saying that the CUP’s objective was to bring the whole machinery of the state administra-
tion under its control and leave nothing to its political “allies.”
We should note one last element that was characteristic of the Young Turks’ debut on
the Ottoman political scene – the CUP’s attachment to the Ottoman throne. Those who
had participated in the December 1907 second congress of the Ottoman opposition in Paris
were not surprised by this, for they had already observed that, when all was said and done,
the Young Turks had a rather conservative conception not of society, but of the state. It does
not matter much that it was Ahmed Rıza who came forward as the sultan’s main defender at
the congress: he simply said what his young comrades thought but could not openly express
without risking their credibility as determined activists. Thus, one understands why, “after
1908, Ahmed Rıza had become the beloved child of Abdülhamid, who carried courtesy to
the point of personally serving him a glass of water.”22 The positivist leader, who came from
a milieu with ties to the Ottoman court, was, after all, in his element when he was received
at Yıldız palace. In contrast, young men who had barely reached their thirties, such as Talât,
Nâzım, and Şakir, must have been intimidated by the idea of taking the reins of power
directly, to say nothing of the aversion to appearing in public common to all these militants,
who were used to secrecy and had become veritable komitacis. The weight of Ottoman tradi-
tion, the prestige of the Sublime Porte, the handicap represented by their age – an impor-
tant factor in Eastern societies – and their lack of experience23 unquestionably increased
this hesitation to assume power forthrightly, which would be unprecedented in the Eastern
world. Herein, no doubt, lies the explanation for the fact that no fewer than 11 cabinets were
formed between July 1908 and June 1913.24
When the restoration of the constitution was officially announced, the reactions that
most surprised observers were the scenes of wild rejoicing by the broad masses of the people
as well as the demonstrations of fraternization that could be observed not only in the capital,
but also in the provinces. How are we to interpret the display of mutual respect or the hom-
age paid to the victims of the 1895–6 massacres in a capital in which a little more than ten
years earlier thousands of Armenians had been publicly disemboweled? Can these reactions
be explained as an effect of what sociologists call “the trauma of the executioner,” a sort of
public display of bad conscience? This was the case with some people, at any rate. Or was
the phenomenon the result of instructions that the CUP had issued to its networks in order,
say, to show the world the image of a country all of whose component groups had come back
together after thirty years of Hamidian “tyranny”?
To make a public display of its bad conscience over its treatment of non-Muslims was
unthinkable for the dominant group. Moreover, Ottoman society, which was sharply hier-
archical, was known not for its tendency to react spontaneously to events, but rather for its
inclination to follow instructions from its clerics or government officials. It is thus hard to

imagine that Muslim clergyman suddenly drew closer to their Armenian compatriots on
their own initiative. This no doubt explains the stupefaction of the Armenians in the capi-
tal when they learned that a mullah had summoned the faithful to go to pray on Armenian
graves at the cemetery of Balıklı in homage to the victims of the 1895 and 1896 massacres.
Another circumstance would seem to indicate that this was no spontaneous outpouring:
in the eastern provinces of Van and Mush, it was the local civilian and military authorities
who organized receptions, complete with bands and “fraternal” banquets, for the Armenian
fedayis who had come down from the mountains. No popular movements of the sort were to
be observed.25 The explanation may well reside in the complete lack of Young Turk networks
in these regions in this period. Thus, it is probable that the authorities were instructed by the
national government to invite the Armenian militants to abandon the maquis.
The CUP seems to have taken special pains to convince the Armenians of its benevolent
attitude. According to a French diplomat, one of the first proclamations that the CUP made
during the July 1908 revolution had to do precisely with the Armenians: “You are no longer
confronted by a troop of Armenians endeavoring to re-establish an Armenian kingdom, as
the government led you to believe. From now on, the Armenians will be struggling alongside
us to deliver our fatherland from tyranny.”26
A report on a conversation that Dr. Nâzım, “one of the main leaders of the movement,”
had “with the representative of a great power” is our richest source of information on the
CUP’s role in the first days of the revolution:
We found a terrain admirably prepared by the suffering that the Turkish people endured
for more than thirty years. Yet it took the qualities of this admirable people [the
Armenians], qualities of patience and firmness of character, integrity and honesty, to
convince a people – one whose most savage instincts [its masters] had striven to arouse,
one that had been set upon the Christians and taught to slaughter and plunder them –
to mend its ways, comprehend the horror of the acts that it had been led to commit
and prove itself worthy of the freedom that we allowed it to glimpse ... Wherever, in
times past, massacres had occurred, we organized ceremonies of expiation; and when I
saw tears streaming down the cheeks of officers and soldiers rarely given to such mani-
festations of tender feeling, I only needed to put the question to them to confirm that
they had taken part in these massacres and were cognizant of the crime whose active,
irresponsible agents they had been.27
Such rhetoric leaves little doubt about the “pedagogical” intent of the scenes of fraterniza-
tion staged in this period.
Whatever the origin of the phenomenon, the immense majority of the Armenians in
the capital became convinced supporters of the new regime. The lawyer Krikor Zohrab, an
emblematic figure of the Istanbul intelligentsia, had returned from exile on 2 August. Three
days later, he announced that he wished to found an Ottoman Constitutional club. On
13 August, this club organized a public meeting in the Taksim gardens attended by 50,000
people of all origins. Zohrab addressed the crowd in Turkish, arousing its enthusiasm with
the declaration: “Our common religion is freedom.”28
Another example from the Armenian world is indicative of the way it responded to the
revolution. On 30 August, the Sahagian Middle School in Samatia organized a lecture
on the revision of the constitution. Zohrab, who had a reputation as an orator, spoke this
time in Armenian; he underscored the necessity of recasting this Constitution, which no
longer met contemporary needs. Two Dashnak leaders, Rupen Zartarian and Aknuni, were
present at the meeting and engaged in a dialogue with Zohrab on the burning questions of
the day.29

In the capital, the ARF was led by the frères ennemis Aknuni and Simon Zavarian; they
were gradually joined by exiles from Europe and the Caucasus, all of whom were appar-
ently optimistic about the future and in favor of collaborating closely with the CUP.30 The
central Committees of the eastern provinces were, moreover, put under the authority of a
badaskhanadu marmin (“responsible Committee”) in Istanbul that was headed by Aknuni.31
The revolutionary network in the capital was dissolved immediately following the July 1908
crisis. The party had to think about finding civilian occupations for its fighters, since they
had been ordered to give up their arms under pressure from the CUP.32 “The ARF wishes,”
Aknuni declared, summing up his party’s hopes, “to open a window between Turkey and the
civilized world of Europe; Turkey is going to follow the example of the French Revolution.”33
Concretely, these tendencies led to an August 1908 meeting between Major Cemal (the future
pasha) and Aknuni, at which the two parties envisaged carrying out common projects.34
The sultan’s general amnesty for common-law prisoners also benefited Dashnak activists
such as Aram Manukian, an ARF leader in Van, or the fedayi Farhad, who was released from
prison on 1 August 1908 along with 19 other Armenians.35 This goodwill gesture was very
well received by the Armenians, but nothing indicates that the CUP was behind it. It was,
more likely, a general measure taken by the government to mark the beginning of a new era,
one that happened to redound to the benefit of Armenian revolutionaries as well.
In contrast, the 10 September 1908 arrest of one of the participants in the 1905 assassina-
tion attempt on Abdülhamid, Kris Fenerjian (alias Silvi Ricchi), on the orders of the prefect
of police in the capital, Azmi Bey, stirred up a veritable storm in Istanbul. The day after
Fenerjian was apprehended, the Council of Ministers ordered his release, the Patriarchate
and Zohrab having interceded on his behalf.36 As in the preceding case, there is every reason
to believe that the move was initiated by the government or, more precisely, that what was
involved was a knee-jerk reaction on the part of the Hamidian administration.
According to Vahan Papazian, the ARF maintained friendly relations with the Ittihad
during the latter’s first few months in power. The CUP preached patience. The country, it
said, was in an anarchic state: the state apparatus had ceased to function properly and the
conservative social strata were still influential. It was therefore necessary to strengthen the
constitutional regime. To do so, it told the ARF it was counting on the Armenian party’s
support. This discourse was intended to bridle the impatience of the Dashnak leaders, who
had to deal with the frustration of militants in the provinces irritated by the slowness or even
total absence of the promised changes.37 The Armenian activists were at a loss to understand
certain events, among them the fall 1908 arrival in the Ottoman capital of people from the
Caucasus, such as Mardan Bey Topçibaşev or Ahmed Agayev. Agayev had been accused by
Papazian (who took part in the operations conducted by his party during the conflict between
Armenians and Tatars in the Caucasus) of being one of the organizers of the 1905 massacres
of Armenians in Baku.38 The arrival of these men in Istanbul was the more perplexing in
that they openly advocated Pan-Turkist ideas. Although a part of the Ittihad rejected such
ideas, the mere presence of Agayev or Topçibaşev in the CUP alarmed even the most imper-
turbable observers.39 Papazian later summed up the reasons for their uneasiness: “We clearly
felt,” he wrote in his memoirs, “that the dominant element would sooner or later curtail the
rights of the minority nations.”40 However, the ARF had its priorities at the time, such as
its desire to become an established Armenian institution and also to be represented in the
Ottoman parliament, in which it hoped to play a political role. To ensure that its deputies
would be elected, it had to come to an understanding with the CUP. In particular, it had to
conclude agreements to cooperate with it in the provinces.
The Hnchaks took a fundamentally different approach to the political situation. Their
Central Committee nevertheless drew its conclusions from the changes that had occurred
in the country and abandoned all notions of subversion. It decided to develop a network

of cultural centers with libraries, reading rooms, and theater groups, which together con-
stituted, in some way, the educational aspect of the SDHP’s activity.41 Yet it by no means
quit the political arena. On 24 November 1907, the party reached an accord with the
Verakazmial Hnchaks, represented by Bishop Mushegh (Seropian), Mihran Damadian, and
Vahan Tekeyan, to unite their forces or, at the very least, work together in the Ottoman
political sphere. The two parties renewed their relations as soon as they returned to the
capital. The SDHP suggested that its former dissidents found a Ramgavar (“liberal demo-
cratic”) party capable of recruiting among the Armenian bourgeoisie and conservative social
strata, which could thus be brought into the political domain. In the following months, the
Armenian Democratic Liberal Party (ADLP) was indeed brought into being with the help of
the SDHP, which provided the elements required to develop the ideological bases of the new
party. With this, the Armenian political landscape took its final form. Shortly thereafter,
the ADLP enthusiastically embraced Ottomanism. This was a bitter pill to swallow for the
Hnchak leaders, who denounced Ottomanism as a form of Turkism.42
Rather soon, to be sure, opposition to the Young Turks broadened to take in certain
“Muslim” circles as well. Their combined hostility to the CUP was variously motivated, but
focused above all on the way the Young Turks distributed lucrative posts in exchange for
bribes and also on the fact that the highest offices were systematically handed out to the
Ittihadist leaders’ close friends and relatives regardless of how little competence or expe-
rience they had.43 Thus, there existed fertile ground for the emergence of an organized
opposition among the Turks. The SDHP in particular worked toward creating this with
Maniasazâde Retik Bey, a well-known lawyer respected by both Turkish liberals and Muslim
circles. After a meeting organized by the SDHP in Kadiköy that was attended by 6,000
people – the majority of them Turks – the party drew still closer to this lawyer, who had
defended Hnchak militants in court at no charge under Abdülhamid. In a series of meet-
ings, Retik and the SDHP elaborated a platform capable of bringing together those dis-
satisfied with the prevailing situation in a dynamic party of opposition to the Ittihadists.
These circles made no secret of their hostility to Young Turk nationalism and especially to
Ahmed Rıza, who took a public position against the “modernity” of women, which he said
was contrary to Koranic law.44
The SDHP campaigned consistently for Retif Bey, a candidate in Istanbul during the first
November–December 1908 legislative elections.45 Things did not take a serious turn, how-
ever, until Retif and the SDHP were joined by forces from the Çerkez and Albanian demo-
cratic opposition. They met quietly near Sirkeci, in the home of one of the CUP’s historical
founders, Dr. İbrahim Temo, who had broken with his former Young Turk friends.46
To be sure, a key figure was absent from this nascent movement – Prince Sabaheddin.
The smear campaign launched against him as soon as he returned to Istanbul had of course
had its effects. However, as Sapah-Giulian points out, the prince did not follow through on
his ideas. Their exchanges did not produce the results Sapah-Giulian had been hoping they
would, for Sabaheddin, he writes, “had considerably watered down his principles.” It must be
added that his palace had “accidentally” caught fire shortly after he resettled in Istanbul and
that he had been obliged to leave for Europe again for a certain period.47 Moreover, by 1908,
“the committee considered even Muslim non-Turks as potential enemies or traitors.”48 That
is, at any rate, what the private correspondence of its leading members suggests.
Very quickly, the Young Turk Central Committee had taken to playing the role that
had earlier fallen to Yıldız Palace, issuing decisions by the hundreds just as the sultan had
issued his imperial decrees.49 Apart from its methods of filling government posts mentioned
a moment ago, it had taken on the role of a kind of “Committee of Public Safety,” interfering
in the nomination of all high-ranking officials, valis, diplomats, and so on. The committee
sent directives to the ministers, without paying undue attention to the grand vizier, with

whom it corresponded directly.50 It governed without saying so by means of a “phantom

cabinet” and sought to block the development of a pluralistic political system. By creating
specialized satellite organizations for the ulemas, women, and guilds, it endeavored to control
the networks that had influence over Ottoman society. In many respects, it evinced a desire
for hegemony that even the most powerful sultans had not dared admit.51
One can readily imagine how hard it was for the parties of the opposition to maintain
a place in the public sphere under these conditions. They were not mistaken when they
said that the CUP conducted itself not like a political party, but like a cabal. Although the
Ittihad officially created a parliamentary faction in 1909, it was merely a transmission belt for
the Young Turk Central Committee, which continued to meddle in everything. Indeed, one
faction in the committee, representing fedayi officers, was opposed to the transformation of
the CUP into a classical political party; it rejected constitutional rights and tried to impose
a more radical political line.52
It is also important to note that the CUP already saw itself as a “Holy Committee” which
had the self-imposed duty of creating a governing civil-military elite.53 With its fedayis and
officers clubs, it was effectively a paramilitary organization, and set about restructuring not
only the army – by placing members of these clubs in the military – but the civilian admin-
istration as well.54 Nothing better illustrates this orientation than the fact that both soldiers
and the sultan were obliged to take an oath of allegiance not to the constitutional regime but
to the committee. Furthermore, schoolchildren were required to learn the CUP’s military
anthem, with its opening words: “Oh, glorious, grand, honorable organization / Your name
and renown are the pride of a nation.”55 Such lyrics had probably been composed by one of
the Ittihad’s leaders. The oath that new CUP members had to take included, moreover, a
clause revealing its conception sui generis of political struggle: “I swear,” it ran, “to kill ... any-
one who fights against the [committee] with my own two hands.”56
A few statistics provide the best proof of the Young Turk Central Committee’s program
having indeed been translated into reality. Between July 1908 and March 1910, all the valis
of the empire’s twenty-nine vilayets were replaced. Ninety-three per cent of the directors of
regional telegraph offices, 93 per cent of provincial directors of education, 100 per cent of the
empire’s ambassadors, and 94 per cent of its chargés d’affaires were dismissed and replaced by
men loyal to the regime.57
It is thus easy to understand why one of the committee’s pivotal figures, Bahaeddin Şakir,
could proudly announce late in 1909 that the CUP had 360 clubs in the country and a mem-
bership of over 850,000, and that it had won the battle for “public opinion.”58
The Revolution in the Eastern Provinces in

the First Electoral Period
We have said that the July 1908 revolution was basically “Balkan,” with the result that it was
only feebly implanted in the provinces of Asia Minor. This state of affairs was a major handi-
cap for a Committee that aspired to extend its influence throughout the empire. Hence,
one of the first tasks the CUP undertook was to send delegates to Asia Minor to explain its
political project there and set up local Young Turk clubs. It was not hard to create such clubs
in these sometimes remote regions, which continued to function in accordance with clan-
based and, even more frequently, tribal traditions. As frequently happens in environments of
this kind, a number of traditional leaders lost no time rallying to the new regime. According
to Hanioğlu, the resulting network was made up of local notables as well as high-ranking
military and civilian officials. They so often took advantage of their new positions to enrich
themselves or meddle in local affairs that the CUP was very soon forced to purge its ranks

and put young officers known to its central leadership at the head of local party branches.59
Of greater relevance to our purposes, these CUP projects also provided the Ittihad with an
occasion to test the solidity of its alliance with the ARF.
How much real political strength did the ARF have in the eastern provinces in this
period? According to historians of this party, it was implanted, above all, in areas that had
a large Armenian majority, such as the Van region, the area south of Lake Van, the Sasun
district, the plain of Mush, the Dersim district, and the Erzincan region. It often had, how-
ever, a merely symbolic presence limited to a few dozen militants whose relationship with
the Armenian peasantry was ambiguous, to say the least. The villagers were proud of their
heroes, these resistance fighters who defied insuperable odds. At the same time, they were
aware that they themselves, as the targets of state retaliation, had to pay a heavy price for
every operation the fedayis undertook. Opinion was accordingly divided among the popu-
lace. Some believed that self-defense was a necessity, even if it brought on reprisals; others
considered the presence of the fighters to be a burden and held them responsible for every
imaginable ill.
The clandestine Dashnak leaders, long the only ones to put up resistance to Abdülhamid’s
regime, now emerged from underground. In Van, Vahan Papazian60 and his men were in their
mountain refuge when they received confirmation of the news that the Constitutionalists
had carried the day. Aram Manukian, one of the ARF’s local leaders, had just been released
from prison – he invited Papazian to join him in Van to celebrate the restoration of the
constitution. Harassed by Ottoman troops only yesterday, the fedayis had a hard time per-
suading themselves of the reality of the new situation: they did not return to Van until
31 August. Papazian and Manukian were invited to the konak (local authorities building
or palace), where the vali received them with honors. “We were foes; from now on, we are
friends. Yesterday, tyranny reigned; today, the Constitution does. I am convinced that we
shall defend it together,” declared their enemy of yesterday before the stunned Armenian
leaders.61
In Mush/Muş, the ARF’s local military chief, Ruben Ter Minasian, was just as surprised
by the news – it was some time before he decided that it was not a trap set by the Hamidian
regime. A message sent by two militants, Dadrak and Carmen, read:
God’s grace is upon us. Today, the prefect visited the prelate; he told him that, thanks
to a revolution, “Sultan Abdülhamid has promulgated the Constitution. All prisoners
are going to be set free. Write to Ruben and tell him to remain calm; a decree amnesty-
ing him, too, is on its way.”62
When he reached the center of Mush, Ruben was stupefied by the official reception, com-
plete with a marching band, that the governor, Salih Pasha, gave him in front of the konak.
No fewer than nine regiments marched past the Armenian fedayis, who watched them
with mixed feelings: “There are the fedayis, our brothers. We used to point our bayonets at
them, because there were blindfolds on our eyes. The old regime was to blame. Long live the
Constitution! Long live the revolutionaries!”63
Ceremonies of the same sort were staged elsewhere as well. In Smyrna, the local ARF
representatives, Hrach Tiriakian and Harutiun Kalfayan, listened as Dr. Nâzım, who had
been living in the city since December 1907,64 spoke of the “indissoluble bonds” between
Armenians and Turks.65 In Dyarbekir, in a Kurdish environment, Vartkes Seringiulian,
the former head of the party in Van who had only recently been set free after spending
several years in prison, enthusiastically participated in the official receptions alongside the
local Young Turks. The Dashnak militants of Dyarbekir, however, remained on their guard,
“refusing to reveal, notwithstanding the opinion of the future parliamentary deputy, their

organizational structure or the source of their arms.”66 It must be added that these militants
had witnessed the re-appearance on the local scene of two former executioners of Armenians,
Arif and Feyzi Bey, who had recently rallied to the CUP’s cause.67
This handful of examples leaves us with the general impression that the militants active
in the field were skeptical and suspicious of the new regime, in contrast to the leaders who
had returned from exile and settled in the capital.
A symptomatic episode says a great deal about the relations between the ARF and the
CUP. Early in August 1908, Ömer Naci Bey, a member of the Ittihad’s Central Committee
responsible for inspecting the local CUP branches, arrived in Van together with Mirza Said,
an Iranian Constitutionalist, and two leading Dashnak militants from Persia, Marzbed68 and
Sepastatsi Murad.69 In the city, it became clear that Naci decided everything on the advice
of Cevdet Bey, the son of the former vali of Van, Tahir Pasha. Papazian and other local party
leaders were invited to a banquet given by the vali in Naci’s honor. The conversation turned
to local problems, in particular that of replacing government officials who had enforced
Abdülhamid’s repressive policies. The Young Turk propagandist declared, in a jocular tone:
We Turks are lagging far behind European civilization, whereas you have made consid-
erable progress. If it is true that it is indispensable to move forward together and live
together as brothers, you will have to pause for a while and wait for us to catch up. If
you don’t, we shall have to latch on to your skirts to prevent you from advancing.70
Despite such scruples and second thoughts, the two movements cooperated. They needed
each other: the CUP needed the ARF’s help in putting down local roots, while the ARF
needed the CUP in order to be able to play a political role in vilayet affairs. A few days after
Ömer Naci’s trip to Van, Cevdet Bey was named interim vali of Van and, of course, charged
with founding a Young Turk club in the city.
It is probable that Naci’s mission was not only to see to it that Young Turk clubs were set
up in the area, but also to assess the ARF’s real influence in the eastern provinces and rally
local forces to the CUP. Thus, on 8 August 1908, Sarkis and Ghevont Meloyan, two local
activists, as well as Murad and Marzbed, went to Erzerum to attend a regional ARF congress.
They were accompanied by Naci Bey. There they met Colonel Vehib Bey (the future General
Vehib Pasha), a CUP delegate who had been one of the small group of Young Turk officers
at the head of the 1908 rebellion in Macedonia. Together, they tried to convince the local
notables to collaborate with the new regime. At the congress, the Ittihadists and Dashnaks
decided to rapidly organize in Bitlis a meeting of local Ittihad and ARF leaders as well as
Kurdish begs.71 The meeting was held in November 1908. Ishkhan,72 Meloyan, Carmen,73
Marzbed, Sarkis, and Pilos represented the ARF; Mehmed Sadik, a friend of the Armenians,
was the Kurdish representative; the CUP sent Ömer Naci and Vehib Bey.74 According to a 6
January 1909 letter from Simon Zavarian to ARF members in the Daron district, the purpose
of the Bitlis meeting was to organize joint actions in the eastern provinces.75 The reality of
the matter, however, was a great deal more complex.
The meeting’s aftermath offers a very different picture of the nature of the relations between
the Young Turk military leadership and the leading Armenian fedayis. After the Bitlis meet-
ing, Vehib Bey spent another ten days in Mush, then traveled through the surrounding area
with Ruben, Ishkhan, and Aram – the chiefs of the ARF in the regions of Sasun-Mush,
Lernabar, and Van, respectively. Relations between the Turks and the Armenians were char-
acterized by a mixture of mutual admiration and mistrust. On the long horseback journey
that took them from Mush to Van by way of the southern shore of Lake Van, Vehib Bey and
his aide, Mustafa Kâmil,76 had the time to make Ruben’s and then Ishkhan’s acquaintance.
Ruben’s detailed account of their conversations shows that one of his party’s objectives was to

convince the two Ittihadist officers that the ARF was influential in the region and that the
local Armenian population was well disposed toward it. When the little group rode through
Armenian villages, of which there were a great many on its route, it was indeed greeted by
enthusiastic crowds. The Armenians had erected triumphal arches made of greenery and
vegetables and crowned them with banners in Armenian that showed where they stood:
“Long live the ARF and the Ottoman Revolution!” But it was Vehib Bey who was offered
salt and bread, in the traditional gesture of welcome. In fact, Ishkhan had carefully prepared
the reception of the visitors, giving precise instructions everywhere. According to Ruben,
Vehib was favorably impressed by the Armenian population’s hospitality and political matu-
rity and surprised that the inhabitants of the Kurdish villages seemed indifferent to events
and apathetic. The Armenian fedayis reminded him that the Constitutional regime could
only be detrimental to the interests of the Kurdish begs, whom the old regime had privi-
leged and allowed to act as they saw fit. In Vostan/Aghtamar, the halfway station, Ishkhan
welcomed the little group, reminding Vehib that a few years earlier Vehib had shelled the
island of Aghtamar, where Ishkhan and his fedayis had taken refuge.77 The reception that
the Armenian fedayis gave the official delegate of the Young Turk Central Committee had
one overriding objective – to show him that Ishkhan’s fedayis were the real masters of the
region. Ruben’s account of these events confirms, moreover, that the ARF leadership bodies
in Istanbul had instructed their local activists to take Vehib Bey in hand on his trip through
the eastern provinces.78 The aim was to justify the agreement to collaborate concluded by
the CUP and the Armenian party.
The picture of Vehib Bey that Ruben paints in his memoirs shows how well informed the
militants were about their guests’ history, and also reveals the interest that each side took in
the other. “He called himself a Turk,” Ruben remarks. He was educated, intelligent, expe-
rienced, and a good speaker, he added. He had served as a vali, had fought in the Balkans
and Yemen; he affirmed that he was in favor of the equality of all the empire’s subjects, but
was opposed to political or administrative autonomy for the “nations,” to socialist ideas, to
foreign intervention in any form, and to a policy of decentralization.79 What Ruben does
not explicitly say, although we can read it between the lines of his account, is that he was
made uneasy by an individual such as Vehib, who had a personality quite similar, in certain
respects, to that of the fedayis. Evoking his state of mind at the time, the Armenian fighter
confessed that the disarming of the fedayi commandos imposed by the ARF leadership in
Constantinople had seemed to him to be a mistake and even an act of treason, for it left the
party at the mercy of every shift in the political winds.
The fedayi leaders found the first months after the restoration of the Constitution dif-
ficult: after years of combat and a rough-and-ready life in the mountains of the area, they felt
that they had suddenly become useless. Ruben was among the first to draw the consequences
and left for Europe to study engineering. The fedayis had lost their motivation. Their roman-
ticism had turned into bitterness. They had seen themselves as the incarnation of the nation,
as its “saviors”; now they were forced to accept the strategy of collaboration dictated by the
intellectuals of the capital.
It was in this state of mind that Ruben, Ishkhan, Vehib Bey, and Mahmud Kâmil were
greeted at the gates of Van by Aram and the vali and then conducted to the city in horse-
drawn coaches as if they were high-ranking dignitaries. In front of the konak, soldiers stand-
ing at attention and a huge throng listened to the speech begun by Vehib Bey under the
ironic gaze of the Armenian leaders, with a formula that had been heard a thousand times
before: “This is an exceptional day.”80
To round out this brief evocation of the atmosphere reigning in the eastern provinces,
we should also say a word about the working meeting held in Van during the same period in
November 1908. It was attended by several members of the ARF’s Eastern Bureau81 and the

three military chiefs of the southern zones – Ruben Ter Minasian, Ishkhan (Nikol Mikayelian),
and Aram Manukian (these southern zones had heretofore been under the jurisdiction of the
Eastern Bureau, but came under the de facto authority of the party’s Istanbul leadership after
the July 1908 revolution). The strategy of cooperating with the Young Turks adopted at the
1907 Fourth General Congress was confirmed at this meeting, which also ratified the more
recent decisions to disarm the fedayis and engage in legal activities as well as to work toward
improving the educational level of the population.
An interesting, revealing phenomenon appeared among the party’s most emblematic per-
sonalities in this period: they returned to the homeland, setting an example for others by
giving up their political functions in order to work amid the Armenian population. As one
of them, Simon Zavarian, reports: “After twenty years of struggle, the militants were in sore
need of the peace that now prevailed and the possibility of working under legal conditions;
they threw themselves wholeheartedly into peaceful activities.”82 Thus, Zavarian himself
volunteered to take a post as a school inspector in order to reorganize the Armenian school
system in the Mush-Sasun area.83 He introduced modern teaching methods, hired qualified
teachers, and set up village commissions to manage local schools. Educated as an agricul-
tural engineer, he devoted part of his energies to developing agriculture as well. His copious
correspondence allows us to form an idea of the social and economic situation on the plain
of Mush and the mountainous Sasun district, as well as the complex relations between the
Armenians and the sedentary and nomadic Kurdish populations.84 The other remarkable
example is provided by Arshag Vramian, an ARF intellectual who moved to Van in 1909 and
became its representative in the Ottoman parliament a few years later.85
Despite the official speeches and the friendly declarations by representatives of the CUP,
Papazian notes that the Armenians’ relations with the local authorities became less friendly
after Naci’s visit. He also remarks that the Kurds in the region hated the Ittihadists and that
early in the fall the leaders of the Haydaran tribes – Kör Hüseyn Pasha, Emin Pasha, Mehmed
Sadık, and Murtula Bey (all of them close to the Armenians) – paid him an impromptu visit
in Van to discuss the credibility of the new regime.86 Exchanges of this sort sum up the explo-
sive political situation reigning in the “tribal provinces.” The Kurdish begs, conservatives
who had, generally speaking, been shown all the honors under Abdülhamid, were suspicious
of these Young Turk militants, who spoke French with the Armenian revolutionaries and
had dared to attack the Ottoman sovereign and caliph.
With the beginning of the electoral campaign for the Ottoman parliament in September
1908, immediate interests took precedence over all others. Papazian, an official ARF candi-
date, later described with a wealth of detail how the joint CUP-ARF meetings were organ-
ized in Van and the surrounding region. The campaign gave rise to almost comic situations:
candidates harangued meeting halls that were full to bursting, preaching “solidarity” and
defending the constitution before Armenian notables who passionately hated the Dashnak
revolutionaries and Muslim notables notorious for having been the previous regime’s staunch-
est supporters.87 The two candidates endorsed by the CUP and the ARF – Tevfik Bey, a big
landowner, and Papazian – were elected to represent the vilayet in parliament.88
To understand why the CUP was able to dominate these elections, we need to examine
the electoral law that made the sancak (that is, the prefecture, subdivided into kazas, or sub-
prefectures, and nahies, or counties) the basic electoral district and gave the right to vote to
all males 25 and over. The electoral rolls identifying these male voters were established by the
imams, priests, muhtars (village headmen), and other notables. On the basis of these lists, the
mutesarif (prefect) decided how many parliamentary deputies a sancak would have, “in accord-
ance with the following rules: one deputy for an adult male population between 25,000 and
75,000, two deputies for an adult male population between 75,000 and 125,000, and so on.”

Candidates had to be at least 35 years old to be eligible. A parliamentary deputy’s term ran for
four years. Civil servants and officers, if elected to parliament, had to give up their posts.89
What gave the system a special twist, however, was the fact that each group of 500 voters
designated an elector of the first degree who chose, in turn, an elector of the second degree
in accordance with quantitative criteria: one elector for 500 to 750 voters, two for 750 to
1,250, and so on. The second-degree electors then met in the administrative seat of the san-
cak in order to elect the members of parliament (a quorum of 80 per cent was required). As
a French diplomat who described the system points out, “applying these rules led to major
difficulties that aggravated still further the absolute non-existence of anything resembling an
accurate census.” The result was widespread dissatisfaction and distortions in the distribution
of seats.90
The two Armenian deputies elected in the capital, Krikor Zohrab and Bedros Halajian,91
were not ARF members. Halajian belonged to the CUP. Interestingly, the Ottoman
Constitutional Club nominated both men on 18 September in an election by secret ballot
held at the Club.92
In the provinces, the ARF’s candidates were not successful everywhere, despite official
support from the CUP. While the Dashnaks carried the day in Erzerum, where Vartkes
(Hovhannes Seringiulian)93 and Armen Garo (Karekin Pastermajian)94 were elected, and in
Mush, with the victory of Kegham Der Garabedian,95 the party was defeated in other areas.
Thus, Spartal (Stepan Spartalian)96 and the “Young Turk” lawyer Hagop Babikian97 were
elected in Smyrna, the Hnchak Murad (Hampartsum Boyajian)98 won in Sis/Kozan, and
Cilicia and Dr. Nazaret Daghavarian99 carried the day in Sıvas.
Thanks to “judicious” utilization of the electoral system, the CUP won by a landslide,
obtaining 160 seats, including those of Babikian and Halajian, both CUP members. Still more
revealing are the figures that show that, of a total of 288 seats up for election, no fewer than one
140 went to Turks, 60 to Arabs, 27 to Albanians, 36 to Greeks, 14 to Armenians, 10 to Slavs
and 4 to Jews. To put it differently, 220 Muslims and 46 Christians were elected to parliament.
Thirty per cent of the deputies were clergymen, 30 per cent were big landowners, 20 per cent
were civil servants, and 10 per cent belonged to one of the liberal professions.100 The Ittihad’s
triumph was confirmed on 17 December 1908, when parliament opened its doors to the new
deputies after 30 years of silence. It was inaugurated by a “speech from the throne,” delivered
by an Abdülhamid surprised by the ovation he received from the deputies. The Young Turks
were not the slowest to take up his invitation to dine in Yıldız Palace on 31 December, follow-
ing the example of the newly elected president of parliament, Ahmed Rıza.101
The European diplomats stationed in the provinces attentively followed these elections
and sometimes made rather perceptive analyses of them. The French vice-consul in Erzerum
began by noting that
throughout the vilayet, the Muslim elections were monitored and controlled by the
Young Turks. They skillfully foiled the intrigues of the partisans of the old regime ... As
for the Armenian elections, they were run throughout the sancak by emissaries of the
Dashnak Committee. The Committee used all the means at its disposal to reach its
goal: it succeeded in having two of its members elected thanks to persuasion, pressure
and, sometimes, the threats that its agents proffered during the first-degree elections.
To obtain the required majority of votes in the second-degree elections, however, it
needed the support of the Young Turks, and it is clearly thanks to this support that the
vilayet now has two Armenians among its representatives.
Here we have confirmation of the methods used by the Young Turks and their Dashnak
allies.

The social and political profile of the deputies elected in Erzerum also reveals the careful
balance concocted and imposed by the central CUP authorities. Thus, we find among them
a lawyer and “advocate of the liberal regime,” Seyfulla Effendi; a hoja, Haci Sevket, a native
of Lazistan, educated in medreses in Erzerum and later Constantinople, but considered to be
a moderate; a magistrate, Haci Hafız Effendi, a native of Keghi/Kıgi, a judicial inspector in
the vilayet of Baghdad “reputed to be a liar”; and our two Armenian revolutionaries, who,
according to the French vice-consul, had “very advanced socialistic ideas; in parliament,
they will be, not representatives of this province, but spokesmen and tools of the revolution-
ary Committees.”102
The CUP was sometimes less generous vis-à-vis the minority candidates, or else unable to
influence the political process in certain localities. Thus, in the vilayet of Angora, all 12 of
the deputies elected in fall 1908 were Turks; the 125,000 Christians living in Angora did not
obtain a single representative:
The Young Turk Committee, which controlled these elections, had initially desig-
nated four candidates, of whom one was a Christian. But as it was unable to alter the
Muslims’ mentality, they did not fail to put a distinctly confessional stamp on these
elections. Thus ... they refused to vote for Christians, whereas Christians did not hesi-
tate to cast their ballots for Muslims.103
The circumstances surrounding the election of 11 or 12 deputies from the vilayet of

Salonika offer further proof that the region had become a CUP stronghold. Elected here
were Rahmi Bey (Evrenos), “descended of a family of conquerors”; Midhat Şükrü, the former
assistant director of the public school system in Salonika and a “mason in the local masonic
lodge”; Dr. Nâzım, “a physician and a major in the army [who had] enjoy[ed] great pres-
tige since the proclamation of the Constitution”; and Mehmed Cavid Bey, a teacher at the
Feyiziye school, of which he was also the principal. All were leaders of the CUP.104
The by-elections, held in the vilayet of Aleppo one year later in order to replace deputies
who had resigned, are indicative of the CUP’s strategy in “ethnic” provinces such as Syria.
Of the two new deputies promoted by the CUP, one was a Turk and the other an Armenian:
Bab Effendi Emirizâde, who worked in the vilayet’s accounting office and was “fanatic and
xenophobic,” and Artin Effendi Boshg[h]azarian,105 a lawyer from Ayntab who had settled
in Aleppo after the 1895 massacres and been named to the Criminal Court of Appeals in
1908.106 Yet the region was populated by Arabs. This choice of candidates can therefore
appear surprising, unless one bears in mind that the CUP thus had these candidates in its
grip, since they had no real electoral base, and simultaneously deprived the Arab nationalist
movement of any opportunity to express itself through deputies elected from its ranks.
The Armenian National Institutions and

the Integration of the Revolutionaries
For the non-Turkish elements of the empire, the Imperial Ottoman model, based on mil-
lets, or ethno-religious nations, had at least the advantage of allowing them a degree of
autonomy. In the Armenians’ case, the Constantinople Patriarchate was central to their col-
lective existence. Under Abdülhamid, however, this institution, the workings of which were
democratized from 1863 on, was dealt blow after blow. In September 1891, the Armenian
constitution was suspended by the sultan. The Armenian chamber,107 which had its seat in
Galata, was forced to break off its activities, which paralyzed the internal administration
of the millet. The chamber was convened only four times in over 17 years, after the sover-
eign had personally authorized it to meet on 7 December 1894 to elect Patriarch Mattheos

Izmirlian; on 6 November and 20 November 1896 to elect Patriarch Malakia Ormanian; and
on July 1906 to settle major administrative problems.108
Thus, it was essentially under the Patriarchate of Malakia Ormanian that the nation had
to come to grips with the situation that had been forced upon it. The leadership with which
the patriarch had to work in this period was a truncated political council consisting of a few
high government officials delegated by the Sublime Porte, such as Artin/Harutiun Dadian,
Dr. Stepan Aslanian, and Gabriel Noradunghian.109 Despite that undeniable handicap, this
team did a great deal on behalf of an Armenian population that had been battered by the
1895–6 Hamidian massacres: it created schools for the 60,000 children orphaned in those
years and organized a system of financial aid for families whose property had been looted or
put to the torch.110
Given the nature of the relations that the patriarch and his “counselors” had to main-
tain with the Ottoman sultan, one can readily imagine that the Armenian revolutionaries
held them in low esteem, and even understand why they organized an assassination attempt
against Patriarch Ormanian on 6 January 1903. Struck by two bullets from the revolver of
a young student as he was leaving the Sunday church service, the prelate survived.111 The
Political Council was, after ten years in office, finally renewed with the sultan’s blessing: on
25 July 1891, the 61 deputies who were still alive – they had been elected 15 years earlier in
1891 – chose a new council, led by Gabriel Noradunghian and Diran Ashnan.112
It was thus to be expected that, after the July 1908 revolution, there would be changes
not only at the head of the country, but in the Armenian millet as well. Patriarch Ormanian,
who represented for militants of all stripes the Armenian face of Hamidian repression, was
unjustly accused of collaborating with the tyrant and confiscating power to personal ends. A
violent press campaign portrayed him as a declared partisan of the sultan’s. On 16 July, at a
meeting of the mixed council held while Dashnak militants demonstrated outside its cham-
bers, Noradunghian, with his usual political acumen, demanded and received the patriarch’s
resignation.113 This first blow, which the Armenian revolutionaries had of course helped
prepare, heralded the Dashnak leaders’ integration into Armenian national institutions. In
the following weeks, the parishes proceeded to renew the Armenian chamber, electing a fair
number of Dashnak and Hnchak activists who had abandoned their underground activity
or returned from exile. As goes without saying, the laurels with which the Istanbul press
and the Ittihadists had deliberately crowned the Armenian Committees helped boost their
popularity and smoothed the way for their election.
Thus, even as it cultivated relations with the CUP, the ARF also sought to assert itself
within its own group. But Istanbul Armenian society was a complex entity with peculiar
sensibilities, and it was not easily convinced. It had its own networks; the ARF had had
great difficulty recruiting members in Istanbul in the past. Aknuni and his friends had to
compose with these realities and work patiently to gain a legitimacy that was not spontane-
ously accorded to them. After the Hamidian interlude, the Constantinople Armenians were
rediscovering their democratic reflexes.
The Armenian national chamber reopened its doors on 3 October 1908. It had 80 depu-
ties. At the head of the new political council was a liberal, Stepan Karayan,114 along with
two members of the Dashnak and Hnchak leaderships, Harutiun Shahrikian115 and Murad
(Hampartsum Boyajian), and, finally, Krikor Zohrab. For the first time, the political parties
were taking a direct hand in running the nation’s affairs, side by side with the still numerous
conservatives. It was a period in which alarming reports of persistent insecurity continued
to pour into the Patriarchate. During the session of 17 October, Zohrab, speaking on behalf
of the political council, presented the chamber with a report on the general situation in
Armenia and the means that would have to be mobilized to improve it. It thus became clear
that, despite the proclamation of the constitution, nothing had really changed: the governors

continued to implement Hamidian policies and famine had driven several thousand refugees
to the capital, where they lived on alms from the Patriarchate. Zohrab proposed a number of
ways of bringing the situation back to normal. They included creating a mixed Turkish and
Armenian commission of inquiry invested with executive powers; dismissing valis and offic-
ers of the hamidye (regiments) who had committed atrocities; trying looters and murderers
in a Constantinople court; restoring confiscated land to its rightful owners; according exiles
who wished to return to their villages rights and exemptions similar to those granted to the
muhacir (Muslim migrants); taking measures to prevent the beys and ağas from continuing
to extort money from Armenian peasants; helping populations on the brink of famine get
through the winter by giving them wheat and seed; and, finally, issuing orders to the military
authorities to carry out the decisions taken in the field by the mixed commission.116
The chamber accordingly designated a delegation to negotiate these matters with the
Sublime Porte. Led by Zohrab, Hrant Asadur,117 and Dr. Vahram Torkomian,118 the delega-
tion was assured that all available means would be mobilized to restore the Armenians’
rights.119 We thus see that the chamber’s concerns about the Armenian population in the
provinces were quite similar to the revolutionaries’. It was, however, the eminent members of
the Constantinople Armenian community who were sent to present the nation’s grievances
to the Ottoman government.
Simon Zavarian, one of the ARF’s historic leaders, sent a long report to the patriarch
in November 1908, shortly after assuming his post in Mush. In it, he portrayed the general
condition of the region as catastrophic. “I am not among those,” he wrote, “who think that
all the different problems that have killed a whole generation can be resolved by means of
individual reforms.”120 Zavarian consequently advocated radical changes at the highest levels
of the state, especially among the caste of high-ranking government officials who blocked
all the reformist impulses of progressive circles. After evoking the chaos reigning in the
Armenian provinces, he observed that,
in Constantinople, it is possible to survive if one works. But what are the prospects for
an inhabitant of Daron or Sghert [Siirt], where the barbaric system has filled the fields
with nomads and their herds and brought all work and all production to a halt?
Indeed, after centuries of resistance, the Armenian peasants were giving ground to the
Kurdish nomads. The Kurds, who had received favored treatment from Abdülhamid, had
arrogated considerable rights to themselves and were not inclined to relinquish them, even
after the changes that had come about in the country. Zavarian, for his part, asked the
Patriarchate to make a priority of supporting the peasants who were trying to resettle in their
villages in Armenia, while cutting back the aid it allocated to the many refugees who were
present in Constantinople in 1908. The parliamentary deputies as well as the politicians
knew only too well that the fate of these regions turned on developing the economy and
re-establishing secure conditions.
The Armenian Deputies in the First Ottoman

Parliament of the Young Turk Period
The restoration of the constitution, a Young Turk battle horse for as long as the CUP was in
the opposition, should have made it possible in theory to democratize the country’s political
life and allow the opposition to be heard. The heart of democratic life, in which the appro-
priate space for debate was supposed to be created, could only be the parliament, in which
the people were represented. Like certain other groups, the Armenians, as we have said,
hoped that they would have the means to promote the liberalization of the Ottoman system

there. They very quickly discovered, however, that this tribune was reserved for others; the
CUP121 had seen to it that it would dispose of a majority large enough to enable it to reduce
the number of non-Turkish deputies to a minimum while according the opposition merely
symbolic status (the sole opposition party was the Osmanlı Ahrar Fırkası, the Ottoman
Freedom Party).122
The four Dashnak deputies, it must be added, did not have a mastery of the official lan-
guage of parliamentary debate, Ottoman Turkish; as a rule, they had to express themselves
through the Armenian deputy representing the capital, Zohrab. They also had to deal with
the demands of the Armenian chamber, which regarded them as the parliamentary rep-
resentatives and spokespersons of the millet. These handicaps seem not to have prevented
them from making an active contribution to the Armenian parliamentary delegation. One
of them, Dr. Vahan Papazian, notes in his memoirs that the Armenian deputies concerned
themselves exclusively with matters of general interest during the first parliamentary session,
never once bringing up questions specific to the Armenian world.123 He points out, for exam-
ple, that Zohrab played a pivotal role on the committee charged with drafting a bill on the
reform of the court system; that Garo, an engineer by training, worked on the “Chester” plan
for a railroad connecting Istanbul to the Iranian border; that he himself worked on reform-
ing and “secularizing” the school system; and that Daghavarian, a physician and agronomist,
wrote most of the provisions of the basic law for the promotion of agricultural development,
and another aimed at reforming the health system and improving hygienic conditions.124 All
this indicates the spirit (“what is good for the country is good for us”) in which the deputies
representing the Armenian millet worked, without ulterior motives, toward reforming the
empire. The parliamentary activity of Krikor Zohrab, whose decisive role in the creation
of the Ottoman Constitutional Club we have already pointed out,125 is exemplary in this
regard. Although certain conservative circles had no love for Zohrab, whom they criticized for
“knowing only the literary aspect of Armenian life,”126 he became the spokesman and guid-
ing spirit of the group of Armenian deputies. Before attending the inaugural session of parlia-
ment, he had first to pay a visit to CUP headquarters on Nuri Osmaniye Street, no doubt in
order to make it clear that he owed his election to the Ittihad; he left the headquarters sitting
beside a Young Turk judge, Mustafa Asım, in a coach.127 Also significant was the fact that
he took his seat in parliament next to Hüseyin Cahit, the editor-in-chief of the Young Turk
newspaper Tanin.128 Both facts are indicative of the influence that the Ittihadist movement
exercised over the Ottoman parliament. The Armenian lawyer’s first parliamentary speech,
on 24 December, illustrates the “misunderstanding” between the Young Turk and Armenian
deputies that would grow worse as time went by. Zohrab denounced the obviously improper
election of a certain Serdatazâde Mustafa, who had a reputation as a bandit and murderer in
his electoral district of Şabinkarahisar. However, Zohrab was rebuked by his colleagues, who
did not seem to have been shocked by Serdatazâde Mustafa’s personal history.129
Istanbul circles were troubled by the fact that not a single deputy had spoken up in support
of Zohrab’s position, although it was common knowledge that Serdatazâde Mustafa had been
deeply implicated in the November 1895 massacres in his native region. This first incident
provided an occasion for muted expression of a criticism that would recur regularly in the
debates: the Muslim deputies from the eastern provinces who had been elected on CUP lists
were often former partisans of the Hamidian regime who had been more or less complicit in
the 1894–6 massacres. The apparently baseless rumors to the effect that Zohrab had received
death threats illustrate, in any case, the first signs of tension.130
While Armenian institutions and the Armenian deputies did not openly express their
bitterness over the government’s tolerant attitude toward those who had only recently been
the Armenians’ executioners, they deplored the fact that the “Red Sultan” – whom they, and
especially the revolutionaries among them, had hated with a passion ever since his decision

to decimate the Armenian people – was still being treated with kid gloves by their progres-
sive Young Turk friends. The sultan, for his part, had probably been relieved to learn that the
Armenian deputies, some of whom had organized an attempt on his life not long before, had
coldly turned down the invitation to dine in Yıldız Palace with which he had honored all the
newly elected deputies.131
There were, however, other contradictory signs that came as surprises, such as Zohrab’s
November 1908 appointment to a professorship of penal law at the Istanbul Law School and
the success he enjoyed there. More than 700 students abandoned their classrooms to throng
into the hall in which he delivered his inaugural lecture.132 This was evidence of something
like a thirst for knowledge, the polar opposite of the conservative reactions observable in
the Ottoman parliament, something resembling a desire to sample knowledge coming from
elsewhere.
An interview that Zohrab granted the correspondent of a Bulgarian newspaper late in
December 1908 offers an even more precise illustration of the archaic side of Ottoman politi-
cal life. Zohrab told his interviewer that he deplored the lack of organized political groups into
which “the nationalities could melt” instead of working in the form of antagonistic national
blocs. The Armenian deputies, he said, wanted “above all, to work toward the general welfare
of the Empire. The particular interests of the Armenian nation come afterwards.”133 Thus,
he took the floor in parliament on 21 January 1909 to demand that a commission of inquiry
be formed to investigate the conditions under which the Hejaz railroad was being built, for it
seemed that management of the project had been marred by serious financial corruption.134
In other contexts, he suggested that the government establish a draft budget and submit it
to a parliamentary vote, that it elaborate a genuine tax policy, and so on. If he was virtually
the only Armenian deputy to intervene in the debates, he more than made up for his col-
leagues’ silence.
The Stakes of Power: The CUP and the Opposition

The explanations given at the 13 February 1909 session of parliament, at which a vote of
norconfidence toppled Kâmil Pasha’s cabinet (formed on 5 August 1908), led Zohrab to inter-
vene in the debate. His remarks disconcerted his Young Turk colleagues. It was well known
that with its continual meddling in government affairs, the CUP’s Central Committee had
often exasperated the grand vizier, leading to abiding tension between the two sources of
power. When Kâmil Pasha had sought to ram through the appointment of new ministers of
defense and the navy against the committee’s advice, the Ittihad had ordered its deputies to
vote in favor of a motion of censure, because it would under no circumstances relinquish its
control of the army.135 The pasha had tried to free himself of a form of supervision too restric-
tive for his tastes and had immediately had to pay the price for his presumption; he fell victim
to the Ittihadists’ first “coup d’état.”
Hüseyin Hilmi Pasha succeeded Kâmil on 14 February 1909. Although this officer was
reputed to stand closer to the CUP, he was not treated any more gently by it. Hardly had
he been appointed grand vizier than he learned, at a meeting at the Sublime Porte with
the future Ottoman ambassador to Spain, Ali Haydar Bey (son of the famous Midhat
Pasha), who had come to receive his letters of accreditation, that the diplomat had been
ordered to wait for the arrival of Major Enver Bey, who would give him the instructions he
needed about the line to take with the Spanish government. Faced with Ali Haydar’s firm
refusal to take his instructions from anyone other than the minister of foreign affairs, the
new grand vizier had to confront, for the first time, the rage of the Young Turk Central
Committee.136 This episode, which is banal after all, offers only a glimpse of the chaotic
functioning of the state in these first months, in which an administration still redolent

of the old regime shared power with a committee that still lacked experience in handling
state affairs.
Another structure put in place by the Ittihad reveals the general nature of the regime that
was now being put in place: the systematic utilization of secret paramilitary forces entrusted
by the committee with special missions ranging from making threats to murdering oppo-
nents or journalists. This underground structure had made great strides since it was founded
in 1907. Its cadres were almost without exception graduates of Istanbul’s Military Academy.
After the officers who, like Eyüb Sabri (Akgöl) and Ahmed Cemal, had rallied to the com-
mittee in summer 1908, other officers now joined this paramilitary organization: Hüseyin
Rauf (Orbay),137 Monastırlı Nuri (Conker),138 Kuşçubaşızade Eşref (Sencer),139 Yenibahçeli
Şükrü (Oğuz),140 Kara Vasıf141 and Kâzım (Özalp)142 or, again, Abdülkadır († 1926), Ali
(Çetinkaya), Atif (Kamçıl), Sarı Efe Edip, Sapbanclı Hakkı, Halil (Kut) (Enver’s uncle),
Filibeli Hilmi, Ismitli Mümtaz, Hüsrev Sâmi (Kızıldoğan), Süleyman Askeri, Yenibahçeli
Nail (Şükrü’s brother), Yakup Cemil († 1916), and Cevat Abbas (Gürer) (1887–1943).143 We
shall see the decisive role these men played in the eradication of the Armenian population
during the First World War.
The Ittihadist Central Committee did not hesitate to use such extreme methods as mur-
der to rid itself of its opponents. The oppositional journalist Hasan Fehmi was assassinated
on 6 April 1909 and Ahmed Samin, a member of the opposition, was murdered shortly
thereafter. These practices illustrate the conception of political struggle that held sway in
the CUP. For the committee, the opposition was an assortment of “reactionaries, thieves,
swindlers, drunks, gamblers, good-for-nothings and murderers.”144 One of the “saviors of the
Empire,” Enver, formulated the matter more precisely: “All the heads dreaming of sharing
power must be crushed ... we have to be harsher than Nero as far as ensuring domestic peace
is concerned.”145
Some of the Unionists confirm in their memoirs what people suspected of the CUP when
certain events occurred. The Ittihad’s former secretary general, Midhat Şükru, reports how
one of his colleagues on the Central Committee, Kara Kemal, personally led a retaliatory
action against the headquarters of the organization Fedakaran-ı Millet (Those Devoted to
the Nation) at the head of a band that demolished its offices.146
According to one of the best connoisseurs of the political life of the day, “virtually all the
opposition parties in the Unionist period advocated a liberal economy, were Westernizers,
[championed] the unity of the [Empire’s ethnic] groups and favored decentralization.”147 These
parties initially came together in the Ahrar and, thereafter, under the banner of Hürriyet
ve Ittilâf Fırkası (Liberal Alliance), which was the product of a fusion between İbrahim
Temo’s Democratic Party, Gümülcineli İsmail Bey’s Party of the People (Ahali), the Mutedil
Hürriyet-perveran Fırkası (Moderate Liberals’ Party)148 and the Independent Party.149
After the events of 31 March, which we shall be discussing later, General Şerif Pasha,
a former “fellow traveler” of the Central Committee in Salonika, founded the Islahat-ı
Osmaniye (Radical Party) together with other CUP dissidents such as Refik Nevzat, Albert
Fua, and Mevlanzâde Rıfat. Exiled in Paris, they ferociously opposed the CUP, especially in
their French language review, Mécheroutiette, which ceaselessly denounced the Ittihadists’
political crimes and corruption. These “radicals” demanded, notably, that the army cease to
meddle in politics, that the committee stop operating like a secret organization and designate
deputies, and that the CUP abandon its project of Turk-ifying the country.150 Indeed, these
demands, cast in the form of accusations, were common to the entire opposition, including
the Muslim circles that had come together in the Ittihad-ı Muhammedi (Mohammedan
Association), founded on 5 April 1909. In its organ, Volkan, Ittihad-ı Muhammedi criticized
the Young Turks’ atheism and their rejection of Islamic values.151

In revolutionary Armenian circles, in particular among the Hnchaks, these movements

sparked some hope that the Ottoman Empire would adopt a domestic policy more favorable
to non-Turkish groups. The SDHP, which had been opposed to the Ittihad from the outset,
clearly sought to combat the CUP so as not to leave it the leisure to apply its Turkish pro-
gram.152 Its rapprochement with Ahrar and then with the Ittilâf had no other purpose than
to combat the nationalist Young Turk regime. Sapah-Giulian notes in this connection that
the day the Ittilâf and the SDHP signed an agreement to cooperate, “the apprehensions were
palpable in the Ittihadist milieu” and that by way of this cooperation, his party influenced
the Ittilâf’s politics, moving them in a more progressive direction, while playing a major
role in organizing it and forming its branches in the provinces.153 “While it is true that the
Ittihad,” says Sapah-Giulian,
could, by massacring Armenians in the provinces and ordering pillage and kidnap-
pings there, fairly claim to have advanced one of its projects, it suffered significant
setbacks elsewhere, among them the uprising of traditional Turkish circles in Konya,
the Constantinople rebellion and the events in Albania and Rumelia.154
Its practice of governing from behind the scenes notwithstanding, after eight months in
power the CUP had undeniably succeeded in displeasing everybody. Despite appearances, it
did not yet wield much power: while its policy of forging a broad alliance of forces initially
enabled it to rally once loyal partisans of the sultan to its side, notably by offering them seats
in parliament, the CUP was disillusioned by the alacrity with which these circles turned
their coats. It also discovered that the society on which it wished to impose its vision of the
future was even more unsympathetic to its projects than it had thought. The CUP learned
this bitter lesson with the first violent blow struck against it, on 13 April 1909.

Chapter 2
Young Turks and Armenians Facing

the Test of “The 31 March Incident”
and the Massacres in Cilicia
T
he two events that took place in April 1909 – the “reaction” to the establishment
of the Young Turk regime in Constantinople and, concomitantly, the massacre of
the Armenians in Cilicia, better known as the “Adana events” – allow us, in many
respects, to evaluate the transformations that had taken place in the Ottoman Empire since
the restoration of the constitution. Since they antedated the laws on the press and freedom of
association that were passed in summer and fall 1909, and since they occurred in plain view
of external observers and a free oppositional press, they offer an ideal standpoint from which
to observe Ottoman realities. They bring us to the question of the significance of the “reac-
tion” of April 1909, of the Young Turks’ responsibility in the organization of the Adana mas-
sacres and, consequently, of their national and international credibility. But it is the way in
which the CUP handled these two matters that here has the most to tell us about its practices
and its vision of the Armenian element of the empire. The Armenian institutions’ manage-
ment of the crisis is equally instructive, for it provides us insight into the Armenians’ feelings
about the Young Turk regime and their horizon of expectations. The question that obsessed
the Armenians more than any other, as the declarations of their leaders in the Chamber
of Deputies clearly indicate, was whether the massacres represented the last gasp of the old
regime or were rather the inaugural act of a new policy of extermination.
“The 31 March Incident”

Most historians consider the reaction against the Young Turks, better known by the euphe-
mism The “31 March Incident” (13 April by the Gregorian calendar), to have been an opera-
tion directed by circles loyal to the old regime that were described as reactionary by the press
of the day: it leagued soldiers from the garrisons of Constantinople and officers who had
risen through the ranks with the religious opposition, the ulema and sheikhs of the orders of
Dervishes who took their inspiration from the Ittihad-ı Muhammedi and the Ahrar party.
Some detect in this reaction a maneuver designed by the British Foreign Office to destabi-
lize the CUP after the fall of the cabinet headed by its “protégé,” Kâmil Pasha. Whichever
hypothesis one adopts, the radicalization of the liberal and religious opposition in this period
was undeniable, as was the growing antagonism between officers who had risen through
the ranks (alaylı) and graduates of the military academy (mektemli) – the alaylı complained
that the mektemli completely dominated the army.1 The question remains how these diverse
forces united in order to take to the streets, occupy the parliament building, and instigate a
hunt for Ittihadists throughout the capital.

The reactionary aspect of the uprising was quite real (even if examination of the press of
the day shows that it was probably retrospectively amplified by the CUP), inasmuch as the
insurgents demanded a return to the sharia. First and foremost, however, what was involved
was a hostile reaction to the Young Turks. Thus one of the principle architects of the move-
ment, Vahdetti, issued a call to “Christian and Jewish Ottomans” in which he assured them
that they need not fear for their property or their lives “thanks to our sharia” and recom-
mended that they “not withdraw from the union with Islam ... or follow the enemies of civili-
zation and traitors to the sharia.” The Ittihad-ı Muhammedi also pointed out that the sharia
protected the rights of Muslims and non-Muslims alike. These declarations prove that the
leaders of the movement were well aware of the non-Muslims’ demands. Their political plat-
form even called for “justice for the Christians as well,” predicting that “they will fraternize
with us.”2
The example that historians most often adduce to illustrate the reactionary nature of the
movement is that incarnated by the public activist and journalist Mizanci Murad Bey, edi-
tor of the newspaper Mizan, who, “more deeply estranged from his former companions than
ever, threw oil on the fire by stirring up religious passions and denouncing equality [between
Muslims and] non-Muslims.”3 If the insurgents’ official declarations are to be believed, this
former Young Turk leader, who was exiled as early as October 1908 and did not reappear
on the scene until April 1909,4 was the only “reactionary” hostile to non-Muslims. He was,
nonetheless, counselor to the ephemeral liberal grand vizier who emerged from these events,
Ahmed Tevfik Pasha. To pin the same label of “reactionary” on both Muslim and liberal
strata comes down to endorsing the arguments used by the Young Turks to discredit the
opposition and liquidate it the more effectively. The liberals, who tended to favor a policy
of decentralization and integration of non-Muslims, seem to have been unjustifiably lumped
together with the reactionaries.
Let us recall that the Young Turk Committee was, to say the least, in a difficult pos-
ition on the eve of these events. It was entangled in somber affairs involving the murder
of journalists and political opponents and was under pressure from the opposition. Did it
capitalize on the situation to take control of the country militarily and eliminate opposi-
tionists of all stripes? Several circumstances suggest that this was indeed the case. After the
insurgents had taken over the parliament building, killed a few deputies, and sacked the edi-
torial offices of the main Young Turk newspapers, the situation was taken back in hand by
Tevfik Pasha, at which point the rebels of the First Army Corps, based in Constantinople,
returned to their barracks. The Ottoman parliament then convened, deciding at its April 17
session to send a delegation to Çatalca to meet with Mahmud Şevket Pasha and his troops
in Rumelia. The delegation was to inform him that the rebels had returned to their bar-
racks and asked for pardon, so that it was no longer necessary to march on the capital; this
could only lead to a pointless bloodbath. Şevket, after initially accepting the proposals of the
deputies who had been sent to confer with him – Yusuf Kemal, Krikor Zohrab, and Vartkes
Seringiulian – decided to occupy Constantinople after all.5 This general, a product of the old
school who was surrounded by a general staff of Young Turk officers, probably consulted with
the Ittihadist Central Committee before carrying out the repression that followed his arrival
at the capital. Once the ephemeral Tevfik cabinet had fallen – named on 18 April, it resigned
on 26 April – the declaration of a state of emergency and the creation of a court-martial
made it possible to hang rebels, and especially members of the opposition, in droves. Among
them were a number of journalists and liberal politicians who were first carefully tagged as
anti-Constitutional “reactionaries,” a useful charge that justified reprisals. In the name of the
constitution, the CUP rid itself with little effort of the whole opposition; it contented itself
with exiling the best-known personalities, such as Prince Sabaheddin, in order to prevent its
basic objective from becoming too obvious.

“The 31 March Incident” and Massacres in Cilicia 73
How did Armenian circles react to these events? The daily press of 14 and 15 April 1909
evinces perplexity mixed with apprehension in the face of this rebellion. Some feared that
it was a coup mounted by their bête noire, Abdülhamid, because he wanted to abrogate
the constitution again. The general impression given by all the declarations in the press is
that the Armenians’ overriding concern was that the announced reforms should be carried
through and lead to the creation of a state based on the rule of law and the restoration of
civil peace. In an article entitled “The Current Crisis,”6 the editor-in-chief of the Istanbul
daily Piuzantion, Piuzant Kechian, reported that on the evening of 16 April the ARF organ-
ized in a room in the Hotel Splendide a meeting of 30 leaders of various Ottoman political
currents – the CUP, the Ahrar, the ARF, the SDHP – with a view to bringing about a
rapprochement based on “defense of the Constitution.” The same newspapers also wrote
that Armenian volunteers from Tekirdağ had joined the troops of Rumelia “to defend the
Constitution”; on 27 April, the Armenian community of Constantinople organized a mas-
sive funeral for the volunteers who had fallen in the fighting in the capital.7 From Dashnak
sources we learn, more precisely, that the ARF, with the approval of the Ittihad, organized
militias to support the Action Army, including 550 men from Adabazar who helped quell
the insurgents from the Selimiye barracks.8 Moreover, one of the ARF’s military leaders,
Ruben Ter Minasian, had been sent to Tekirdağ to recruit Armenian volunteers there;
Şevket, however, had been unwilling to provide them with arms.9 In Smyrna, finally, the
vali and the local Ittihad club had asked the Dashnaks and Hnchaks to “form groups of
volunteers in the next twelve hours”: the following afternoon, 230 young Armenians from
the city and the surrounding villages, as well as Turks, Greeks, and Jews, had been armed
and sent to the Smyrna-Kartal train station.10
All this clearly indicates that Armenian circles approved of the constitution and the
ARF’s alliance with the CUP. But the clearest proof of their attachment to these positions
was provided by the way the parliamentary deputy Bedros Halajian – who would later be
named minister of public works – reacted when the insurgents invaded the Ottoman cham-
ber, on the morning of 13 April 1909, to demand that the sharia be restored and that the
president of the parliament, Ahmed Rıza, resign.11 Although several deputies had just been
killed in the city and most of those in the chamber lay down on the floor to protect them-
selves, Halajian stood up and, in a scene reminiscent of the French Etats Généraux, declared
to the insurgents, who were quite impressed by his aplomb: “We have been elected by all the
peoples of the Empire. A representative of the people does not have the right to let anyone
tell him what to do [while threatening him] with bayonets ... Look out the window! The
rabble that is peppering our breasts with lead is over there ... Go ahead, kill me, I’m on my
feet.”12 Another circumstance illustrates, were there any need for further illustration, the
close bonds between the Armenian deputies and their Young Turk colleagues as well as the
confidence reigning between them: in the five days of anarchy that followed the outbreak
of the insurrection of 13 April, at a time when the Unionist militants were being actively
pursued, the leader of the Dashnak party, Aknuni, hid Mehmed Talât in his home,13 while
Zohrab took in another CUP leader, Halil Bey (Menteşe),14 and the ARF militant Azarig
provided refuge to Dr. Nâzım.15
In the days leading up to these events, the Young Turk press, particularly the daily Tanin,
had not passed up the occasion to attack certain Armenian deputies in its columns. One
of these attacks was aimed at Zohrab, who then figured as the leader of the Armenian par-
liamentary group, and the editor-in-chief of Ikdam, Ali Kemal (elected to succeed Rıza as
president of parliament shortly afterwards). Tanin criticized the two men for taking advan-
tage of their posts as professors at the law school to “manipulate their students and make use
of them to defend their own political opinions.”16 What motivated these attacks on Zohrab,
which had been orchestrated by his neighbor on the benches of parliament, Hüseyin Cahit?

Had the growing importance that Ottoman public opinion accorded the lawyer alarmed
the CUP? Did it find him somewhat too enterprising? The nature of the attack does not tell
us much; to all appearances, the students of the law school played no role in the events of
31 March. Had Zohrab’s and Kemal’s courses, which put the accent on the role of law in the
creation of a democratic society, irritated the Young Turks?
In sum, it may be observed that the events of 31 March simply confirmed, at least as far
as the leaders of the ARF were concerned, the solidity of the alliance with the CUP and the
hostility of all Armenian circles to the possibility of a restoration of the old regime.
Young Turks and Armenians Facing the Test of

the April 1909 Massacres in Cilicia
Understanding the origins of the explosion of violence that culminated in the massacre of
25,000 Armenians from Cilicia in April 1909 was an absolute priority for the Armenians.
This massacre, all too reminiscent of the ways of the old regime, threatened to undermine
their commitment to the Constitutional process, as well as the ARF’s alliance with the CUP.
To put it differently, it was the sincerity of the Young Turks’ desire to collaborate with the
Armenians – their real determination to improve the lot of the populations of the eastern
provinces – that was thrown into question under the circumstances. The Armenian political
institutions sought to make this issue a test of the Young Turks’ intentions; they wanted to
know to what extent the CUP was responsible for the Adana events. This indicates just how
decisive an impact the crisis had on the way relations between the Armenians and the Young
Turk government evolved.
A French diplomatic dispatch sent from Maraş, Cilicia on 4 January 1909 announced the
threat of massacres and reported exactions against both the local Young Turk club and the
Christians “who had been the most enthusiastic about the establishment of the new regime.”
No action was taken against those responsible for these excesses.17 There were also reports on
the anarchic situation prevailing in the vilayets of Dyarbekir and, a few weeks later, Mamuret
ul-Aziz: there had been a settling of scores between Kurdish tribes, it was said, and hostile
reactions to the Young Turks, accompanied by a rise in Muslim fundamentalism.18
In a 1 September 1908 dispatch, the consular agent responsible for the vice-consulate
in Van, evoking the consequences of the July 1908 revolution in that city, remarked that
“a Committee of Union and Progress” had been formed there. It had, he said, “twenty-one
members: seven military personnel, seven Armenians and seven Turks.” The Committee, he
added, corresponded “with Salonika, from which it received its instructions.”19
In Cilicia, the formation of local Young Turk Committees had made it possible, above
all, to settle scores with the two main representatives of the state, whose policy of appeasing
Christians was not particularly popular in this region, still steeped in tribal custom. Thus,
the Young Turk Committee of Adana, made up of the principal Turkish notables of the
region, had first arranged for the ferik (military commander) to be replaced and had then
trained its sights on the vali of the vilayet, Bahri Pasha, demanding that he resign. Accused
of “sympathizing with the Christians,” Bahri had had to leave the city secretly, but was
arrested by villagers on the border of the vilayet at the request of his personal enemy,
Bağdâdizâde,20 and then released on orders from the Committee in Adana ... He [was]
said to have resisted, for five hours running, pressure from the Committee in Adana
that was demanding his resignation; he claimed that thirty thousand Armenians
would rise up in his defense. The Committee is supposed to have retorted: “See if they
will: you won’t even find thirty.”21

These few remarks are indicative of the mood reigning in Adana shortly after the revolution:
they reveal the local Turkish notables’ real assessment of the ability of Cilicia’s Armenian pop-
ulation to stage a revolt, of which they were to make so much over the following months.
Later, on 15 October, Bahri Pasha’s successor, Cevad Bey, arrived in Adana:
In anticipation of all eventualities, [Cevad] has asked Damascus to send him reinforce-
ments ... The pessimists were even speaking of a massacre of Armenians by that date
[the end of Ramadan], but this eventuality seems rather unlikely, unless the Armenians
maintain their outrageous attitude, which is as imprudent as can be ... This attitude of
the Armenians is just what is required to alienate the Young Turks. Young and Old
Turks now seem to be putting their differences behind them on the basis of patriotism
and Islamicism. Already, in the mosques, the mullahs are summoning the faithful to
defend “their rights” with vigor ... It is Bağdâdizâde who is urging the Turks on, the
same Bağdâdizâde who, they say, arrested Bahri Pasha during his flight.22
All the elements of the problem come together in the passage just quoted – the first
rumors of massacre and the first allusion to the “provocations” of certain Armenian mili-
tants. In other words, the official dialectic of “provocations, revolt, and massacre” is here put
in place and echoed without second thought by the French vice-consul, whose inconsistency
and cowardice during the April 1909 events would come in for comment from officers and
missionaries among his compatriots.
The ambiance in Cilicia was indeed oppressive during the Ramadan celebrations of
October 1908. The Muslims found the changes brought about by the Constitutional revolu-
tion hard to swallow, especially the fact that the Christians, beginning with the Armenians,
had taken a rather high profile – that is, that they had vigorously defended the constitution.
An unverifiable rumor was even making the rounds in Adana’s Turkish neighborhoods: the
Christians were getting ready to attack the barracks and bring it under their control before
launching an assault on the Turkish population.23
This said, we need to examine the justification for the charges of provocation and revolt
that certain Turks and also some foreign observers regularly repeated in Cilicia and else-
where in the Armenian provinces, in order to understand the origins and content of those
charges. In this connection, the dispatches that the French consular agents in the provinces
sent to the French minister of foreign affairs and the ambassador in Constantinople are a by
no means negligible source when it comes to gauging the tensions that persisted here and
there, despite the proclamation of the constitution.
From Van, Captain Dickson, who presided over the French vice-consulate, reported to
the minister on his conversations with the Armenian leaders. “To try to improve the very
tense situation,” he wrote,
I met with the Tashnak [sic] leaders, Aram [Manukian] and the Doctor [Vahan
Papazian], and I gave them some advice. I advised them to conduct themselves with
prudence and moderation, to drop, for the moment, their exaggerated ideas, to treat
the compromised figures of the old regime gently, rather than with an eye to taking
revenge, and not to call for excessive punishment. Fortunately, they lent an ear to my
counsel.24
This first, revealing report reminds us that, under the old regime, Abdülhamid’s policy of arm-
ing the Kurdish hamidiye regiments and setting them loose on the populations of the eastern
provinces gave local Kurdish tribes a sense of impunity and omnipotence; they profited from
the situation to seize a great deal of land and other real estate from the Armenians. With the

restoration of the constitution, local Armenian leaders, as well as their colleagues in parlia-
ment in Constantinople, emboldened by their new-found legitimacy and the Ittihad’s appar-
ent support, demanded that these abuses be punished or, at the very least, redressed – that is,
the property be restored to its rightful owners. This implied that thousands of suits had to be
settled, threatening positions acquired by tribal chieftains who still had considerable power
in their native regions and who were also in some cases members of the provincial Young
Turk clubs or even members of the Ottoman parliament. Yet, as the French chargé d’affaires
in Constantinople, Boppe, remarked:
The Kurds were ill-prepared for the reforms that the constitution brought to the
empire ... The Kurds find it hard to forget the privileges that they enjoyed during
Abdülhamid’s reign. They miss the distinctions and gratifications that were sent to
them from Yildız as recompense for the crimes and depredations that they perpetrated
against the Armenian population.25
Confronting local dignitaries by challenging the positions they had acquired was part of
the tradition for the Armenian revolutionaries, who, as we know, did not hesitate to “punish”
the Kurdish chieftains who had committed the most abominable crimes. It was also quite
reasonable from the standpoint of these militants, who spoke in terms of social progress
and were steeped in progressive ideas, to demand that they be given a role in running the
affairs of their region. Obviously, former “terrorists,” who had been received with honors on
their return from exile or emergence from the underground and were once again in good
odor, could only arouse distrust among high-ranking officials who had spent the previous 30
years persecuting and mistreating the Armenian population with the Sublime Porte’s bless-
ing. It must indeed have been difficult for such people, set in their ways, to grasp in a short
span of time the transformations that Ottoman society was now supposed to undergo. It is
equally probable that the integration of these former clients of Abdülhamid’s into the new
democratic institutions shocked the Armenians, who vehemently denounced the inclusion
of these locally powerful men in the new arrangements. What was perceived as a “provoca-
tion” at the time was no doubt this demand for justice, unquestionably somewhat idealistic,
especially in a society that still held that there could be no question of equality for all the
empire’s subjects. To come forward with demands was itself a “provocation.”
The very fact that Hnchak or Dashnak militants returned to Cilicia and often joined
local Young Turk clubs irritated certain consuls accustomed to reasoning along lines laid
down by the state, whatever the nature of the state in question was. The French vice-consul
in Mersin and Adana remarked, for example, that the Armenians’ “ringleader is a certain
[Garabed] Geukderelian, long imprisoned because of the part he played in the affairs of
Armenia.”26 This is a curious way of judging a militant who had been persecuted for years,
a renowned lawyer who, just after the revolution, was assigned the mission of founding a
Young Turk club in Hacın together with Captain Abdüllah in order to promote a climate
favorable to good relations between the various elements of the town’s population. Let us
note, however, that this same Captain Abdüllah, after being received by the local notables
and drinking a cup or two, had betrayed how he really saw matters to the Armenian bishop:
“Si, sous la Constitution, les Arméniens continuent de cultiver des idées séparatistes, nous les
tuerons tous jusqu’au dernier.”27 As a former Hnchak activist, Geukderelian in fact remained
suspect in some people’s eyes. Above all, he annoyed – or aroused the jealousy of – the local
notables, who were rather hard put to accept his newfound influence, which threatened their
own prerogatives.
Beyond such general accusations, an exceptional bundle of charges was leveled against
the Turkish authorities’ main bête noire, the bishop of Adana, Mushegh Seropian, who was

universally accused of having done more than anyone else to provoke the Turks and thus
bring on the massacres in Cilicia.28 Seropian’s case is even more revealing of the differences
in “mentality” or the “misunderstandings” that emerged in the period. An educated man, the
bishop represented a new generation of Armenian prelates. He did a great deal to develop the
educational structures of the Armenian community and improve its general level of educa-
tion, and missed no chance to promote the growth of democracy in the region. This “intel-
ligent, energetic man of around thirty-five” was nevertheless supposed to be, according to the
French Rear-Admiral Pivet – echoing, no doubt, what he had heard from the high-ranking
Turkish officials in Adana whom he held in great esteem and from missionaries who were not
a little embittered – “frenetically ambitions and, seemingly, a religious sectarian, although he
has, in reality, no religion at all.”29
An event reported in the liberal newspaper Serbesti and the daily Piuzantion provides some
sense of Seropian’s character. To protest against the press law, which restricted freedom of
the press and imposed censorship, Turkish and Armenian liberals in Adana had organized,
against the prefect’s advice, a 14 February 1909 rally in the municipal park that drew nearly
10,000 people. A mixed committee had been founded for the occasion. It included Ihsan
Fikri, the president of Adana’s Young Turk Club and editor-in-chief of the CUP’s official
organ in the region, Ittihal; Tevfik, an imam; and, from Sis, Haci Süleyman. Representing the
Armenians on the committee were two notables, the lawyer Garabed Chalian and Krikor
Kljian, and also Bishop Mushegh. At the rally, the prelate said:
The many crimes that have blackened Turkey’s and the Ottoman fatherland’s name
have been its ruin. They were the consequence of the enslavement of the population.
Slavery in whatever form is unbearable, but the slavery of the spoken and written word
is the worst of all forms of servility. If, down to the present day, so many crimes and
injustices have been committed, if the empire has, until today, slid steadily toward its
ruin, the main reason is that we were deprived of the right to speak out, of the right
to protest, of our capacity to defend the legitimate rights of our sacred fatherland. The
tongues of those who demanded justice were cut off; the pens of those who inveighed
against injustice were smashed.30
It was the same prelate and author of “provocations” who, on 10 January 1909, sent
vali Cevad a famous report that listed the various provocations and exactions aimed at
Armenians in the previous weeks, so that measures might be taken to bring them to an end.
Mushegh’s report denounced above all the machinations of the mutesarif of Cebelbereket,
Asaf Bey, who had been inciting the Muslim population with declarations to the effect that
it was unacceptable that Armenians should enjoy the same rights as Muslims did, and that
Armenians were arming themselves in order to attack Muslims. This official intervention by
the prelate seemed inadmissible to the vali, who sent several reports to the interior minister
(notably on 16 January) demanding that the bishop be replaced because he was “inciting the
Armenians against the government and laws and gradually poisoning the minds of his fellow
citizens.”31 The commander of the French fleet in the eastern Mediterranean, Rear-Admiral
Pivet, corroborated these accusations in his fashion. The Armenians, he said,
although they were perfectly well aware that the Turks of Adana were, as a rule,
attached to the old regime – or, rather, precisely because they were aware of this – have
not tired, since the promulgation of the new constitution on 11 July 1908, of provok-
ing and threatening them. At the instigation of their bishop, a man named Mushegh,
they have created insurrectional Committees and circulated proclamations identifying
the ministers and principal leaders of a future Armenian kingdom. What is more, they

have armed themselves with up-to-date weapons and enjoy showing them off to the
Turks.32
In the report that vali Cevad sent to Constantinople on 16 January 1909, it is also said
that Mushegh had donned the costume of a Cilician king and had himself photographed
in it, that he had organized theatrical performances in which “mythical” kings of Armenia
appeared on stage, and that he had encouraged the Christian population not to pay military
and local taxes.
The charges leveled at Mushegh were serious, all the more so since the main blame for
the massacres would also be laid at his door. Why was the Armenian prelate in particular
the butt of these accusations? Were the accusations justified or did they stem from a mistaken
interpretation of his acts? These are the questions to which we now turn.
Let us begin by noting that the bishop was a man with a strong personality. He was
upright and perhaps stubborn, and, as his speech at the rally of 1 February 1909 clearly
shows, he had a marked aversion to the old regime and those who had served it. He was
plainly one in the group of young men who had inscribed the values of the Constitutional
revolution on their banners and considered themselves the agents of a social mission. He
had even been a member of the SDHP. As such, he had very probably clashed with the reac-
tionary circles of Adana that, according to all witnesses, were still influential. Vali Cevad,
for his part, was of another generation and, as the indictment of the court marital shows, a
pure product of Abdülhamid’s Yıldız. Thus, it would seem that everything set these men in
opposition. Moreover, when the young prelate drew up his famous report of 10 January 1909,
which noted all the excesses that had occurred in the vilayet, he offended the sensibilities
of the old government official on two scores. First, the bishop put his finger on practices that
were, for Cevad, perfectly legitimate as long as they affected only Armenians. Second, Cevad
found it intolerable that a Christian cleric could meddle in affairs that he regarded as his own
preserve. When the 16 January report in which the vali demanded that Mushegh Seropian
be transferred to another post is read against the background of these tensions, it becomes
easier to understand why Cevad, with considerable bad faith, leveled such exorbitant charges
at the bishop’s door – to say nothing of the pressure that certain Turkish circles in Adana
must have been putting on the vali.
Thus the fable that Mushegh had donned the costume of an Armenian king is a far-
fetched interpretation of the ceremonial dress that an Armenian prelate wears when cel-
ebrating religious festivals. As for the photograph of Mushegh that the vali denounced, taken
under the portico of a church the bishop was leaving after celebrating mass, it was simply a
picture taken to immortalize a religious holiday. The theatrical performance that was appar-
ently a serious cause for alarm in the eyes of the Ottoman authorities and the local Muslim
population was a dramatization of the holiday known as Vartanants, which memorializes
those who fell at Avarayr, a battle that was fought against the Persian Zoroastrians in 451
and is celebrated every year by the Armenian Church. As for Mushegh’s supposed exhor-
tations against paying military and local taxes, they come down to the fact that he had
demanded that the excesses committed when these taxes had been collected in the sancak
of Cebelbereket be redressed.
In the end, it is Rear-Admiral Pivet’s veritable denunciation of the bishop that seems
to weigh the most heavily against both him and his flock. We have not taken the time to
study the personality of this senior French officer, but one gains a clear sense of the man
upon reading the reports he dispatched to his ministry. Let us point out only that central
authorities’ declarations, which, to be sure, were made late in the day, quashed these accusa-
tions that had been nothing more than the fruit of rumor. A high-ranking soldier who had
made a career in a colonial France marked by massive prejudices, a conventionality and an

arrogance that we can today measure, Rear-Admiral Pivet had taken the comments of his
Turkish colleagues for good coin. The outrageousness of these comments about the “shadow
cabinet” of “a future Armenian kingdom” can only bring a smile to the face of anyone with
the slightest knowledge of the domestic situation of the Ottoman Empire. One of the most
perceptive observers of the day, Major Doughty-Wylie, the British consul in Adana, univer-
sally praised for his intelligence and devotion, wrote in a report:
I do not at all believe in the existence of an Armenian revolutionary movement bent

on creating an independent kingdom with the help of foreign intervention. If the
Armenians had been pursuing a goal of that sort, they would have withdrawn into
the mountainous regions, where they would have been better able to defend them-
selves. They would never have left thousands upon thousands of scattered, unarmed
peasants ... in the countryside to bring in the harvest. What is more, it is ridiculous
to suppose that even the Armenians who had arms – at best, revolvers and hunting
rifles – could have believed that they were capable of confronting the Ottoman Army.
As for foreign intervention, the least familiarity with the political situation would have
convinced them of the absurdity of such a notion.33
It is, however, the well-meaning circular that the grand vizier sent to all the valis on 11
August 1909 that best describes (a few choice euphemisms notwithstanding) the problem of
“a lack of understanding” that “engendered” the massacre of the Armenians:
Under the old regime, in which the abuses of despotism were common practice, certain
classes of the Armenian community were undoubtedly working toward political ends.
Whatever the forms their activity took, however, it had but one aim: to put an end
to the intolerable misdeeds and harassment of a despotic government. On the other
hand, it has been observed that, in the recent past, the Armenians have done a great
deal to help this nation obtain the Constitution, thereby demonstrating their sincere
attachment to the Ottoman fatherland. Convinced, above all, after the restoration of
the Constitution, that their nation could find neither salvation nor happiness outside
the context of allegiance to the Ottoman Constitution, they concentrated their efforts
on working on a common accord for the nation’s welfare. Hence there is no grounds
for the false opinion that leads those ignorant of the truth to suspect the Armenian
community of nursing blameworthy political aspirations.
As for the origin of the deplorable Adana events, the conclusions reached by the
special commissions investigating them and the circumstances under which these
regrettable events came about have shown that the elation and feelings of joy dis-
played by the Armenians were misinterpreted by naive individuals. These events were
the last, deplorable vestiges of the days of an absolutism that wished to stamp out all
feelings of patriotic fraternity. The populace that, until then, had been unaware of the
name and program of the Committees “Tashnak-Zutiun” and “Hinchak” fell victim to
an illusion when it saw the members of these Committees spontaneously emerging in
broad daylight: it indulged in unfounded assumptions and mistaken interpretations.34
In addition to the charge of “provocations,” whose limits and unlikelihood we have already
pointed out, it is worth pausing over the accusations revolving around a nascent “Armenian
kingdom” – the grand vizier’s circular makes a veiled allusion to it – and the rumors about a
planned insurrection that was supposed to give rise to an independent Armenian state going
beyond the borders of Cilicia. This point is all the more important in that it is the core of the
dialectic elaborated by the Cilician authorities and central government to substantiate the

thesis that the Turks had been defending themselves against Armenians who had organized
an attack on them.
One of the first rumors to this effect was reported by the French vice-consul in Sıvas, H.
Rouland. “It is being whispered,” he wrote to Pichon on 29 January, “that the Armenians
intend, as soon as they are armed, to rise up against the Ottoman government, proclaim
their independence and restore the ancient kingdom of Armenia. They are supposedly only
waiting for a favorable opportunity.”35
Suspicion of the Armenians was not, however, only the stuff of rumor. High-ranking offi-
cials in Cilicia apparently took seriously the idea that the Armenians represented a potential
threat and elaborated policies designed to fend it off. The 16/29 March 1325/1909 telegram
(no. 23)36 that the vali of Adana sent to the interior minister is one of the most revealing in
this connection:
Response to Your Excellency’s encrypted telegram of 13/26 March. Recently, at a

meeting of the provincial general council, the Armenian representative of the kaza
of Kozan proposed – citing the fact that Hacın is surrounded by rugged terrain and
that arable land is in short supply there, a circumstance that deprives the poor popu-
lation of the possibility of tilling the soil – that five hundred of these poor house-
holds be settled in either Kozan, another part of the çiftlik of Çukorova or some
other place to be chosen by the local authorities ... All the Christian members [of
the council] endorsed this proposal. However, given that there are nomadic tribes
to be settled in the province and also that, if we accept this proposal in one area,
populations from other areas that are also complaining about the lack of arable land
will in their turn publicly demand that they be allotted uncultivated land, many
different problems will arise, countless requests will be made and cases of villages
moving from one place to another will multiply ... We [therefore] suggested that the
poor people of Hacın improve their living conditions as best they can by engaging
in trade and the crafts.
This apparently anodyne note betrays the prefect’s desire to limit as sharply as possible
the number of Armenians on the Cilician plain or confine them to their “mountain refuges”
so as to favor the sedentarization of the nomad tribes that the government planned to settle
on the plain. It illustrates the central government’s “demographic” preoccupations and the
reigning suspicion of the Armenians.
These arguments are more explicitly developed in the justifications elaborated by the court-
martial charged with handling the Cilician question. The report it sent to Constantinople
constitutes a sort of distillation of the various rumors that had been making the rounds in
the months preceding the Adana events. The Armenians, the report affirmed, had been
seeking to provoke incidents in the coastal regions through which the Baghdad Railway
passed, regions in which “foreigners had relatively greater interests than elsewhere”:
They chose to focus the planned provocations and disorders on Adana ... Our investi-
gation allows us to affirm that, thereafter, a large number of Armenians from regions
near and far arrived and settled there, in order to reinforce the area’s Armenian
population ... However, the fact that they made such audacious use of the freedom
and equality that they had just obtained was not at all appreciated by the Muslims,
whose suspicions and hostility increased when the Hnchak, Droshak and Dashnak
Committees, hated by the public in the past, opened clubs everywhere, [and] when
Armenians began settling in large numbers in the same place ... Hardly had the consti-
tution been restored ... than they began fomenting coups to obtain their independence,

diffusing imaginary Armenian coats of arms and illustrations representing imaginary

kings and [national] heroes; they stirred up the Armenians’ emotions.37
This discourse, although it was written after the fact to justify the violence unleashed
upon the Cilician Armenians, reflects the mood dominating Muslim public opinion. It can-
not be exclusively ascribed to provocations orchestrated by conservative circles. The Muslims
were steeped in the Hamidian propaganda that had for decades cast the Armenians in the
role of traitors and rebels, and their reactions continued to be informed by the old criteria of
judgment. Thus, they could not understand how political parties that had only recently been
described as terrorist could be suddenly legalized and allowed to create local clubs. We can
sum up the problem by saying that the Ottoman society of the day was hard put to create
even the semblance of a democratic society, and that this proved no easier in Cilicia than in
the other Ottoman provinces. What is more, the leading members of the court-martial were
asked to resign after the release of this report, to which the grand vizier’s public circular, cited
above, responded virtually point by point. This plainly shows that certain Ottoman circles
were perfectly aware of the state of public opinion in the country and sometimes felt the need
to make adjustments in order to calm people down or protect those in the line of fire.
That said, economic development had indeed attracted some Armenian migrants from
the provinces of eastern Anatolia to Cilicia, while others struck out for Constantinople,
Egypt, or even the Caucasus, fleeing chronic poverty and permanent insecurity. Is it, how-
ever, possible to speak of a concerted plan to increase the population of Cilicia? It is unlikely
that there ever was such a plan. For one thing, these migratory movements were primarily
seasonal – people came to Cilicia to work on the big farms on the Cilician plain from spring
to fall – and were thus provisionally and economically motivated. Also, one finds no trace of
a concerted plan in this region far from the Armenian provinces, and it is hard to see how
such a plan could have been put into practice. Finally, from the moment the constitution was
restored, the Armenians had shown, without the least ambiguity, that they wished to par-
ticipate in the edification of a modern state in which they could assume their rightful place.
On the other hand, thousands of Muslim families from Rumelia and the Balkans settled in
Cilicia in 1908 and 1909.38
Provocations on the Eve of the April 1909 Massacres in Cilicia

The governmental commission of inquiry into the Adana massacres was made up of two
judges, one Turkish – Fayk Bey, a member of the Council of State – and the other Armenian –
Artin/Harutiun Mosdichian, a court inspector in the province of Salonika. Its report was
published on 10 July 1909 – that is, three days after publication of the court-martial’s. It
provided an obviously more objective assessment of the situation in Cilicia on the eve of the
massacres.39
After conducting investigations in Adana, Dörtyol, Osmaniye, Bağçe, Hamidye, Tarsus,
Hasanbeyli, and Harnı, the two judges observed that since fall 1908 there had been strong
antagonism between the Young Turk and liberal parties in Adana, led respectively by Ishan
Fikri Bey – who was hostile to the vali, Cevad Bey – and Ali Gergerli, backed up by the
Hnchak lawyer Garabed Geukderelian, both of whom supported the vali. The judges also
noted the rather minor role played by the conservative current of Islamicist inspiration, made
up of people who longed to restore the old regime, although this current did help spread
rumors of massacre that poisoned the atmosphere. This conservative group was led by a
powerful local notable, Abdülkadır Bağdadizâde,40 the founder of Adana’s Ziraat club and its
weekly organ, Rehber-i Ittidal. This circle made no secret of its opposition to the constitution
and to the equality before the law officially granted to Christians.

According to Armenian sources partially confirmed by the Constantinople press, it was

in the context of this internal struggle that a number of events presaging what was to come
occurred in Cilicia. The threats of massacre in October 1908 during the Bayram, mentioned
above, triggered a chain of events – some of them apparently the result of deliberate provo-
cations, others exploited by one or another party – that contributed to increasing the ten-
sion in Adana. Early in February 1909, Kör Ahmed, the son of the mufti of Hacın, wired
the vali to tell him that the Armenians of Hacın were preparing a revolt.41 The related
rumor that these Armenians were going to march on Adana made the local Muslims jittery.
Early in March, another provocation took place in the Grand Mosque, Ulu Cami: the door
of the mosque was smeared with excrement at night, angering the population and leading
to accusations that Christians had desecrated the mosque. The following night, a handful
of guards surprised the two culprits as they were about to repeat their act, but since they
were clergymen the authorities decided not to prosecute them. Almost immediately there-
after, a rumor began making the rounds in Adana’s Turkish neighborhoods: the Armenians
were supposedly getting ready to attack the city’s arsenal the following night, using a secret
underground passage. Many Turks thus concluded that they had to make preparations to
defend themselves. In the early hours of the morning, the Armenians of Adana who read the
local Young Turk organ, Ittidal, were stupefied to learn what had transpired that night. The
Armenian bishop protested against these rumors, demanding in vain that an investigation
be conducted to find out who was responsible for spreading them. It should be added that,
in winter 1908–9, several Armenians had been murdered on the province’s roads, creating
an unhealthy atmosphere of insecurity. When the culprits behind the murder of three mule-
drivers in the vicinity of Sis were apprehended, they contended that they had been acting
“on the orders of a secret organization for massacring Christians,” who deserved punishment
because, by way of support for the constitution, they intended to abolish the sharia.42 By the
beginning of spring, serious incidents had been occurring almost daily in the immediate
vicinity of Adana: several Armenian women and girls were abducted, and men were attacked
and beaten.
All sources confirm, however, that the “April 1909 events” were touched off by the mur-
der of two Turks by a young Armenian carpenter, Hovhannes, on the outskirts of Adana on
9 April, Easter Monday. On 4 April, as Hovhannes was on his way home, he encountered
a group of bandits led by one Isfendiar, who surrounded him and demanded that he fulfill
their pleasures. When he refused, he was bastinadoed and then abandoned. The following
morning, the young man went first to the prefecture and then to the courthouse to swear
out a complaint against the criminals, but he was unceremoniously shown the door. He
decided to buy a pistol with which to defend himself. On the evening of Easter Monday, the
group of bandits ambushed Hovhannes on the way home and stabbed him several times. The
young man defended himself, killing the leader of the band and wounding two of the others.
Hardly had the news become known than Isfendiar’s body was recovered and exhibited in
Adana’s Turkish neighborhoods before being buried in a particularly oppressive atmosphere.
After the burial, a large crowd set out in search of the homicide, who had fled. They looted
his house and brutalized his family. Vali Cevad, who was informed of the situation, did not
intervene. Four days later, one of the two wounded bandits also died. The burial led this time
to a veritable riot. The mob made its way to the suburb of Tosbaghı Kalesi, where Hovhannes
was living, and demanded that he be handed over to them. They threatened, if he was not,
to put the whole quarter to fire and the sword.43
That very evening, the Young Turks of Adana held a meeting under the leadership of
Ihasan Fikri, who made a fiery speech hostile to the gâvurs. On the night of 12 April, a
handful of people, led by one Karakösehoğlu Mahmud, fired their guns in the air and then
went to the police station to declare that two Turks had been killed by “the” Armenians.

It quickly appeared that this was false information. The American missionary Chambers,
the minister Hampartsum Ashjian, and Dr. Hampartsumian went to see the vali in order
to draw the tense situation in the city to his attention. On 13 April, market day, peasants
from the surrounding villages poured into Adana as they did every Tuesday, but did not go
back home when evening fell. A rumor had been making the rounds that day: four Muslims,
two men and two women, had supposedly been murdered by the Armenians. An investiga-
tion showed that this information was wrong. The rumor naturally alarmed the Christian
communities, whose representatives went to see the vali the same day in order to make the
gravity of the situation clear to him. He answered only that he had “issued all the necessary
orders.”
On this Tuesday, observers noticed that certain Turks had put on white turbans so as
to pass for softas. They killed an Armenian and then sounded the alarm, saying every-
where that another Muslim had been killed. The city’s expert in forensic medicine, who
was alerted and asked to confirm the causes of the victim’s death, saw that it was one
of his Armenian patients, who, moreover, had a tattoo in the form of a cross. Around
nine o’clock that evening, a mob led by hojas went to the prefecture and demanded that
the vali give them permission to go punish the Armenians, but Cevad sent them away. A
first meeting was then organized in front of the offices of İhsan Fikri’s newspaper, Ittidal,
located in the medrese of Demircilar and the adjacent streets. That night, a rally was held
in front of the prefecture. It was presided over by Cevad Bey. Also present were the ferik
(major general, military governor) and judge, Mustafa Remzi Pasha, Adana’s mufti, two of
the most eminent men of the region, Abdülkadır Bağdadizâde and Gergerlizäde Ali, and
the police chief Kadri Bey, among others. A spirited discussion began. Over the objec-
tions of a judge and the director of the post office, who were also on hand, the people at
this assembly decided that the time had come to teach the Armenians a lesson. The mufti
assured them that the massacre of Christians was in conformity with Islamic law and
issued a fatwa confirming what he had said.44
However, in spite of the provocations and the rising tension, no Turk in Adana actually
engaged in violence on 13 April. In the course of the day, vali Cevad sent four wires to the
minister of the interior, informing him in very general terms of the chaos reigning in the
city, in particular of the fact that he had had “to mobilize reserves throughout the vilayet to
maintain order.” The only answer he received was a 1/14 April telegram from the undersec-
retary of state in the Interior Ministry, Haci Adıl Bey (Arda),45 instructing him “to take great
care that foreign subjects, their religious establishments and their consulates suffered no
damage.”46 Although these recommendations did not have the expected effect – most of the
buildings belonging to foreigners, whether religious or not, were later burned down and two
American missionaries were killed – they indicate the way in which this affair was handled
at the Interior Ministry by a leading member of the CUP.
The First Phase of the Massacres of

Cilicia: 14–16 April 1909
The outpouring of violence that engulfed all of Cilicia on 14 April cannot be characterized
as spontaneous for the above reasons. Moreover, these events were not unlike the massacres
that had been organized in 1895–6 in the Armenian provinces and elsewhere, both in the
way they unfolded and by virtue of the methods employed: in both cases, false rumors were
spread; the rural population of the surrounding area took part in the violence; the Muslim
clergy spurred the mob on; and notables, the gendarmerie, and, of course, high-ranking offi-
cials – beginning with the vali and the sub-prefects – assumed the role of organizers and
ringleaders.

The report of the father superior of the Catholic missions, Rigal, confirms this
impression:
On Easter Wednesday, 14 April, around eleven o’clock in the morning, rifles and
revolvers were fired throughout the city. People were firing from roofs, windows and
minarets: the bullets fell thick as hail on roofs, streets and houses. It was a cross-fire
that began all at once, as if a flash of electricity had armed all the inhabitants of Adana
at the same time. For several days, people had been saying that there would probably
be massacres: the Turks were threatening and the Christians were afraid. The alarm
had already been given once or twice. In the morning, at market, people had noticed
men with the faces of bandits wielding huge, iron-tipped clubs, of the sort with which
so many Armenians had been beaten to death during the 1895 massacres. Leaving the
mosque, Muslims who usually did not wear turbans were seen wearing mullahs’ head-
gear, so that they would not be mistaken for Christians. Finally, there was something
like the smell of blood in the air and the shops in the market were closed.
At the sound of the fusillade, people’s first impulse was to save their lives. They
came pouring through all the doorways, while the surrounding rooftops sent waves of
people flooding into the mission. The same thing happened at the American mission,
in the churches and wherever else people thought they would be safer.47
Plainly, the order to attack the Armenian neighborhoods had just been given, although
it was still not known who had given it. To get out of harm’s way, the Armenian craftsmen
and merchants wanted to close their stands and go home. The leading Christian notables,
however, Ottoman subjects and foreigners alike, immediately convened a meeting at the
Armenian bishopric and then sent a delegation to see the vali and ask him to organize pro-
tection for their neighborhoods and institutions. David Urfalian, the president of Adana’s
Armenian National Council and a magistrate at the audit office, represented his community.
The vali told the delegation that he had the situation under control, that it was nothing very
serious and that “it was very important to keep calm”; he ordered the delegation to go to the
market around 3 p.m. to calm people down and invite them to resume their usual activities.
At the market, Urfalian insisted that the pharmacy and shops in particular reopen for busi-
ness. He was shot to death shortly thereafter, becoming the first victim of the events and,
as such, a symbol. Meanwhile, the market was overrun by a quickly growing crowd and the
Christians decided to lower the iron shutters before their shops. At this point, the handful of
policemen and mounted troops at the market suddenly disappeared. The crowd, comprising
men and women alike, began systematically plundering the shops.
In the interim, the dragomans from the British, French, German, and Russian consulates
had in their turn formed a delegation and gone to see the vali. They told him how wrought
up the populace was, adding that a hoja had been preaching from atop the minaret of the
mosque of Tosbaği that it was time to liquidate the gâvurs. They accordingly asked him to
authorize them to use firearms if necessary. After this meeting, the vali went to the konak.
There, in his presence, Artin Shadakian, an Armenian member of the municipal council
who had come to ask that the police and gendarmes be ordered to intervene, was shot to
death by an official. Massacres had already begun in the city’s outlying neighborhoods, where
Armenian minorities lived among the Muslim population.
In fact, the first day of the violence, 14 April, was mainly devoted to destroying Armenian
shops at the market – signs had been carefully nailed up on those belonging to Muslims – and
to massacring the Armenians who lived dispersed throughout the quarters on the outskirts
of the city or in inns such as Acem Han, Düz Han, Haydaroğlu Han, Deli Mehmed Han,
Yeni Han, Pamuk Bazar Küpeli, and Vezir Han, which were visited one by one by the mob.

Around 300 people were killed in these Hans, mostly seasonal workers or mule-drivers from
Haın, Kayseri, Dyarbekir, and other places, who had been on their way through the city.
According to the rare witnesses, the mob consisted, at this time, of between 20,000
and 30,000 people made up of some five to ten groups of assailants: Turks, Kurds, Fellahs,
Çerkez, Avshars, nomads, and Muslims from Crete. They were led by local notables such
as Abdülkadır Bağdadizâde and Boşnak Salih. These groups finally attacked the Armenian
quarter of Şabanieh. After a moment of panic, the Armenians organized their defense: they
set up barricades and, after arming themselves, fought off the assaults of their Muslim fel-
low citizens. The commander of the gendarmerie, Kadri Bey, who witnessed these disorders,
resigned and was immediately replaced by Zor Ali, the former police chief of Adana who had
been dismissed for earlier abuses and had returned from Istanbul on 10 March, at just the
right moment.48
After retreating before the resistance put up by the Armenian quarter, this mob, led by
men of second rank – Katib Effendi, Muzteba Effendi, and Dabbağzâde Ali – demanded that
the authorities distribute weapons to them. The ammunitions dump was put at the assailants’
disposal. They then made their way to the Sultane-Valide mosque near the Karalar neighbor-
hood. Here the hojas preached the jihad and made all those present promise not to leave a
single Armenian alive.49
Under the lead of Zor Ali, the mob now attacked the Şabanieh neighborhood. It was sup-
ported by soldiers under the command of Resim Selim Bey. The mob, however, was unable
to make its way into the heart of the Armenian neighborhood, which was defended, accord-
ing to internal Armenian sources, by 73 young Armenian men – those who had managed
to arm themselves properly – posted at various points of access to the neighborhood. They
had the backing of the entire population.50 In the face of this vigorous resistance, the attack-
ers decided to set fires all around the Armenian quarter and then launched a new assault.
On 15 April, at around two o’clock in the morning, the exchange of gunfire became much
more intense: the Armenian defenders were saluting the arrival of Major Doughty-Wylie,
the British consul in Mersin and Adana. He had arrived in Adana shortly before in a special
train that had been chartered in Mersin and immediately gone to see the vali to ask him to
take the measures required to bring the disorder to an end. He then left on horseback, pro-
tected by a mounted escort, to make a tour of the Armenian quarter, where his arrival was
taken as a hopeful sign.
In the morning, the vali told Doughty-Wylie that he no longer controlled the situation
and was incapable of halting the violence, going so far as to propose that the consul him-
self step in and offering to put officers and soldiers at his disposal. The consul’s voyage to
Adana, however, only briefly interrupted the assault in places. In the course of the day, he
abandoned the idea of intervening personally – he had been wounded by a stray Armenian
bullet – and took the train back to Mersin. Meanwhile, a number of Armenians sought
refuge in the churches of the Holy Virgin and St. Stepanos as well as in foreign institutions,
especially the buildings of the French Jesuits and the nuns of St. Joseph, where some 8,000
people had been given refuge. The American mission, directed by Reverand Chambers, also
granted haven to the refugees.51 The middle school for girls that abutted the American mis-
sion was attacked that evening, though the girls who lived there managed to flee through
a hole they had made in the party wall. However, Reverend Hovagim Kayayan and two
missionaries, Roger and Maurer, were shot to death while trying to put out the fire that was
destroying the school.
On the night of 15–16 April, most of the men had withdrawn to the courtyard of the
cathedral and the immediate perimeter of the new Armenian middle school, which had
been partly destroyed by a fire that the young men had managed to extinguish. A battle
without mercy now began in the neighborhood. The defenders were hard put to recognize

one another in the dark and used a password. In the first hours of the morning, the whistle
of a train coming from Mersin nourished hopes that outsiders would step in and put an end
to the violence. It was, however, only the British consul returning to Adana. The besieged
Armenians thought that they had seen young “Greeks” coming to save them, but it quite
soon appeared that these were Muslim attackers in disguise, and they opened fire on the
young men who came out to greet them.
On the morning of 16 April, a good part of the Armenian quarter had come under the
control of the attackers, but one last block was still resisting, although it was running low
on ammunition. One of the rare Turkish notables who lived in the quarter, a certain Osman
Bey Tekelizâde, decided to visit the vali and ask that he intervene. He found him at a meet-
ing with the mob’s main ringleaders, who accepted the principle of a cease-fire on condition
that the Armenian notables sign a declaration in which they acknowledged that they were
to blame for the outbreak of violence. After returning to the Armenian quarter, Osman Bey
convinced the Armenians to send a delegation to negotiate an end to the hostilities with the
vali. Agreement was rapidly reached, with one crucial additional proviso: the Armenians had
to surrender their arms.
The approximately 200 regular soldiers and reserve troops, who had remained passive to
this point now swung into action to bring the fighting to an end, accompanied by Turkish
and Armenian notables. Around 10 p.m., in less than half an hour, calm was restored as the
troops took up positions in front of the Jesuit middle school and the Armenian churches
where the immense majority of the city’s Armenians had taken refuge. The mob launched
one last assault toward midnight, apparently without much conviction. By the morning of
17 April, Adana was once again calm. The witnesses who now emerged from their hideouts
discovered an apocalyptic scene: houses had been burned down and the streets were strewn
with countless corpses. More than 10,000 people were famished and without shelter.
The Armenian population of Adana had suffered relatively limited loss of life in these
three days of deadly, uncontrolled violence. The Armenian villagers of the environs, how-
ever, as well as those living on the farms of the plain, had for the most part been killed in
their fields, victims of a veritable manhunt. On 18 April, the authorities demanded that
the Armenians hand in their weapons as agreed. With the encouragement of the British
consul, who guaranteed their security in the name of his government, as well as that of
the Armenian Patriarchate in Constantinople, the Armenians ultimately gave up their
arms.52
The 17–24 April Interlude in Adana and

the First Official Reactions in Istanbul
On 18 April, the first French battleships put down anchor in the harbor of Mersin. They
were followed by British, Russian, German, American, and Italian ships. Aware of the irri-
tation that their presence was causing not only to the local Muslim population but also
to the authorities, the foreigners prudently limited their intervention to landing groups of
observers, paying courtesy visits to high-ranking local officials and providing the victims
with ad hoc relief funneled through the religious institutions. According to certain wit-
nesses, the local authorities took the Westerners’ relative reserve as encouragement to carry
out a second massacre in Adana.
In the city, people were busy clearing the streets of corpses, which were thrown into the
Sihun River – sailors reported seeing hundreds of corpses floating in the Bay of Mersina.
Furthermore, the vali had just declared a state of emergency. Gradually, the Armenians
returned to their homes, if they had not been burned down, while improvised hospitals were
set up for the ill and wounded in the compounds of the missionaries or diplomatic missions,

as well as in the Armenian schools that had been left standing, such as the St. Stepanos
middle school for girls.
Despite the material and human losses that the first massacres had caused throughout
Cilicia, local Turkish circles, far from being preoccupied by the consequences of their acts,
rather seemed frustrated by the fact that it had proved impossible to kill many Armenians
from Adana. This spirit made itself felt particularly in the incendiary articles published in
the famous 20 April issue (no. 33) of the daily Ittidal, the Young Turk organ in the city.53
Distributed free of charge both to the local Muslim population and throughout the empire,
this “special” issue was a sort of compendium of all the criticisms that had been directed at
the Armenian population, as well as an extraordinary barometer of the psychology of the
local Turkish elite and its working methods. It is therefore worth our while to reproduce
extracts from it here and comment on them.
It is easy to imagine the stupefying effect that the tone of the articles by İhsan Fikri and
İsmail Safâ had on Armenians. Fikri was the director of the newspaper and president of
Adana’s Young Turk club; Safâ was the paper’s editor-in-chief. As yet unaware of the part that
Fikri had played in organizing the first massacres, the Armenians no doubt imagined that
this “democrat” and partisan of the constitution would expose the role of certain “conserva-
tive or reactionary” circles in the region and demand that the guilty be tried and punished.
They were instead surprised to find an indictment of the Armenians – the cynicism, incoher-
ence, and implausibility of which revolted more than one observer. Indeed, the objective of
this issue can be summed up as trying to “prove” that the Armenians alone were responsible
for what had happened and to refute in advance accusations against the civilian and military
authorities in the area, as well as the leading Turkish notables, by reversing the roles of victim
and victimizer.
In an article entitled “A Terrible Insurrection,” Safâ wrote:
How sad that the upsurge of anger and the [desire] for independence that had stirred
and then put down roots in the depths of the Armenians’ hearts should have led to
the ruin of the region ... ! Let us have a look at this insurrection that has condemned
the inhabitants of Adana to dire poverty. Like the Turks, the Armenians were, dur-
ing the thirty-three years of a tyrannical rule, crushed under tyranny’s hellish bur-
den; they raised their voices in protest. When the Ottomans entered a magnificent
period of happiness and peace, the Armenians ceased to protest [literally: they shut
their mouths] and cry out for revenge and, as equals with us, applauded our sacred
revolution. But that was soon over, and they began preparing their own project.
Sometimes, they created tensions by putting on dissatisfied expressions and making
it understood that they could not possibly live alongside Muslims ... Our demand for
unity and mutual understanding was not enough to stem their dangerous inclina-
tions and this led to a difference in the Turks’ and the Armenians’ ways of looking at
things ... The Armenians worked virtually without pause to acquire what they lacked,
and devoted a great deal of effort to arming themselves. At market or in the public
squares, the Armenians even outdid each other in purchasing Martinis, Mausers and
other weapons of battle. After they had stockpiled such weapons, they lost their tra-
ditional restraint ... They brazenly made threats of this sort: “one of these days, we
shall massacre the Turks; we are no longer afraid; the old wounds are still bleeding.”
Thus they provoked the Turks as a way of casting off their own responsibility. The
Turks, however, accepting and obeying the advice of their great men, who preached
appeasement, sought to avoid incidents of all kinds. The Armenians, observing the
unbearable silence and patience displayed by the Muslims, planned to commit various
crimes in defiance of the law ... The fact that the state was not sufficiently powerful

engendered fear and alarm among the Turks; among the Armenians, it was a source
of strength and courage.54
One rarely finds articles in the press in which a Young Turk politician expresses himself as
clearly as this. In the present case, to be sure, we can see a minor provincial leader straining,
above all, to justify the acts committed by his group. In the process, he exposes the main
springs of his logic and echoes the Adana Muslims’ interpretation of what the Armenians
said and wrote in the new context of freedom created by the July 1908 Constitutional revolu-
tion. He calls our attention to a key point that is occasionally emphasized by well-informed
observers – namely, that every attempt to demand equality and justice was interpreted as
“insurrection.” In June 1909, the reporter dispatched to Adana by the French daily Le Temps,
Edouard Barfoglio, wrote, after declaring that it would be a mistake to see “Yıldız’s hand”
behind the Adana events:
The Turks, who have always been the dominant group, have the feeling that they
are the losers in the newly established order. As a result of the Constitution, they
have, in some way, ceded the predominance that was once theirs, and they feel that,
in these conditions, the future can only visit destruction on them; in this context,
they have risen up to defend their privileges by means of bloodshed and pillage. The
Turks sensed this in the changes in the Armenians’ behavior at the level of their daily
relations.55
Seen from this standpoint, the underlying reasons for the killing in Adana and the com-
ments in Ittidal become almost comprehensible. We understand better why the local popu-
lation, generally speaking, heeded the watchwords of its local ringleaders, convinced that
ultimately its predominance was in jeopardy. On the other hand, the retrospective accusa-
tion that the Armenians were preparing for war and wished to restore “an Armenian king-
dom of Cilicia” could hardly have been taken seriously in Turkish political circles, which
were perfectly familiar with the positions of the Armenian parties and well aware of the
absurdity of such aspirations in a region where the Armenians were in a minority and had
begun to benefit, or so they thought, from the advantages of freedom.
The rest of Safâ’s article is cast in a more classic vein. It reviews the story of the killing of
a bandit by a young Armenian attacked by a gang, identifying it as the point of departure for
the “events,” and making sure to note that “the Armenians firmly avowed that they would
never turn in the murderer.” We are also told that “until Wednesday, the police and the
Muslims went about their business amid fear and trembling, on their guard lest they fire the
first shot.”56 By Safâ’s logic, insurgents barricaded themselves in fortified buildings in their
neighborhood in order to launch a general assault. The fact that the Armenian shops were
closed, the consequence of a justifiable fear rooted in Ottoman tradition (in the Ottoman
Empire, massacres always began in the market, since the attackers were tempted by the goods
that they could loot there), is cast in his article as an act of aggression presaging an insur-
rection. In other words, to continue to follow Safâ’s logic, the Armenian shopkeepers, in
anticipation of an Armenian offensive, closed their shops, leaving them at the mercy of
the looters. Safâ’s article also affirms that Turks and Armenians were engaged in unequal
combat. As he tells it, “the Armenians, entrenched in their houses, fired without let-up
through gun-holes and from the roofs, whereas we poor Turks were in the streets, armed only
with sticks.” Decoded, this means that civilian insurgents who had been surrounded in their
neighborhoods and were armed to the teeth opened fire on unarmed Turks who happened to
be walking through the streets of the Armenian quarter. Concluding this plea for peace, the
Young Turk “journalist” affirms that, “besides all this, the fires set almost everywhere by the

Armenians have destroyed the whole city and left it in ruins.”57 This interpretation does not
deviate from the official position of the local authorities. Father Rigal, who went to see the
vali several times, remarks with considerable lucidity that “he never heard any other refrain
from [the Muslims’] mouths” than:
It is the Armenians who massacre the Muslims, the Armenians who fire on our sol-
diers, the Armenians who loot and burn and, finally, the Armenians who have ruined
this country and are the source of all our woes. This means, in French: the Armenians
are murderers because they do not go quietly to slaughter, but have the gall to defend
themselves. It means, again: the Armenians loot their homes and stores and set fire to
their buildings, for, after all, one has only to open one’s eyes to see that hardly anything
besides the Christian stores, homes, churches and schools have been destroyed by the
flames; that the Muslim mosques have been spared and rise up proudly amid the ruins
of the Christian quarter.58
Fikri’s article appeared in the same issue of Ittidal, entitled “Signs of Anarchy.” Written in a
more political vein, it elaborated on the thesis of a plot against the unity of the Constitutional
state and the gradual colonization of Cilicia by Armenian settlers. Above all, it threatened
the survivors. In short, the accusations proffered in the Adana Young Turks’ official organ by
İsmail Safâ and İhsan Fikri and the interpretation of the events they put forward there raised
a chorus of protests from Armenian circles in both Adana and Istanbul. For the Armenians,
these methods of disinformation were only too reminiscent of the techniques of the old
regime. This was all the harder to bear in that until then they had had the feeling that the
period of tyranny was now behind them.
Two days before these articles appeared, on 18 April, the undersecretary of state in the
Interior Ministry, Adıl Bey, who was serving as interim minister during the vacuum of power
due to the “reaction,” presented a report on the Adana affair to the grand vizier, Tevfik
Pasha, who had been appointed the same day. The content of the report was interpreted in
different ways. The Constantinople press declared the following day that Adıl had affirmed
that the Armenians were the aggressors. “They are armed,” he wrote,
and are massacring defenseless Turks; they have surrounded the prefecture. Armenians
from distant villages are attacking Turkish settlements – they are armed, whereas the
Turks have only sticks ... Armed Armenians have gone so far as to besiege the sub-
prefecture of the sancak of Jebelbereket, whose terrified mutesarif has made repeated
requests for assistance.59
This declaration, apparently inspired by telegrams sent by the vali and the local mute-
sarifs, does not seem to have convinced everyone, because vali Cevad was dismissed from his
post on 18 April – although he continued to exercise his function for another two weeks.
In these conditions, the 19 April session of the Ottoman parliament was supposed to clarify
the situation, despite the anarchy that had reigned in the capital for the previous few days.
The Armenian members of parliament, supported by the Turkish deputies Ali Münîf and
Ali Hikmet, submitted a motion demanding that an immediate end be put to the massacres.
At the same session, the deputy Vartkes Seringiulian exclaimed to his colleagues, “if we do
not punish the people responsible for such acts, which breed hatred among the different
Ottoman groups, regrettable events of this sort are likely to occur elsewhere as well.”60 Under
threat from the troops from Macedonia who had pitched camp nearby in Çatalca, Tevfik
Pasha’s government was living on borrowed time. The day before, a parliamentary delega-
tion had gone to see Mahmud Şevket Pasha in Çatalca. It was probably during their 18 April

discussions, in which Zohrab and Vartkes took part,61 that the decision was reached to send
850 from the second and third army regiments to Cilicia. According to the Times of 25 April,
Mahmud Şevket decided to personally dispatch this battalion, stationed in Dede Ağac on
the shores of the sea of Marmara, to Mersin, with instructions to restore order there.62 These
troops, part of the “Action Army,” were commanded by Young Turk officers.
This battalion, after resolving problems connected with finding a transport ship, arrived
in Adana around noon on 25 April. It was an official representative of Constitutional legality
and, as such, its arrival was a source of great relief to the Armenian population. While it is
true that a fragile calm reigned in Adana from 17 to 24 April, many areas in Cilicia were still
in the hands of the başibuzuk and certain towns were still under siege – the siege of Hacın
came to an end only on 28 April. In many different localities, tens of thousands of survivors
were living out in the open in sanitary conditions that were little short of catastrophic. In
Adana, the vali who, although he had already resigned, was still in office (his successor did
not arrive until the end of the month) reacted pro forma to the provocations of Ittidal’s
editors, shutting the paper down for three days. However, as soon as the Young Turk daily
was able to reappear, it resumed its campaign of denigration, encouraging Adana’s Muslim
population to carry through its “mission.” The French foreign minister, Pichon, in a note
addressed to his Ottoman counterpart, complained that
the director of the newspaper Ittidal, who took an active personal part in the mas-
sacre and, since then, has been publishing dangerously libelous articles against the
Armenians, has not been deranged in any way and is pursuing his campaign. On the
other hand, two Armenian newspapers in Constantinople, Piuzantion and Manzume
[Efkiar], have just been suspended. The director of Piuzantion, Mr. Piuzant Kechian,
was recently arrested and is being held in the Ministry of War.63
In the afternoon of 25 April, as the “soldiers of freedom” were pitching their tents on the
leveled field known as Kışla Meydan, located on the banks of the Seyhan, they were fired
on. No one was wounded, but it set the already nervous troops on edge. Somewhat further
off, on the square near the clock tower, a crowd of considerable size was attending a rally.
An Armenian who had heard the gunfire immediately went to the bishopric to inform the
notables of what was afoot. They remained skeptical, convinced that the butchery could
not begin again now that soldiers had arrived to ensure order. It was, however, already being
rumored that the Armenians had fired on the soldiers. (Several weeks later, the report of
the parliamentary commission of inquiry would show that this was a physical impossibility,
given the location of the military camp and the fact that, for good reason, there had not
been a single Armenian in this spot since the first massacres.) Another, even more far-
fetched rumor had it that 15,000 Armenians, under the command of the lawyer Garabed
Geukderelian, were marching on the city from the river – a rumor that was shown to be
false by the crowd itself, which found nothing where the attack was supposedly taking place.
Conditions were, nevertheless, ripe for a second massacre. A handful of provocateurs had
only to go to the soldiers’ encampment and declare that the Armenians were attacking the
Turkish quarters to convince these soldiers to interrupt their meal and “go to the rescue of”
their fellow Muslims.
The Second Adana Massacres (25–27 April)

and the “Action Army”
On Sunday, 25 April, at six o’clock in the evening, although nothing had occurred to
provoke new atrocities, the fusillade began again, as violent as it had been on the first

day, with the difference that, this time, the Christians did not defend themselves and
that, this time, the regular army was at the sides of the bashi-buzuk. Since the city was
in a state of siege, people could not, on pain of being shot, leave it after sunset. All the
streets were under guard; those who were in their homes could, therefore, escape only
by fleeing from rooftop to adjacent rooftop, although the rooftops, too, were under
surveillance. At the same time as the shots rang out, fires broke out again.64
This is how Father Rigal describes the onset of the second Adana massacres. The Armenians,
who were now disarmed, were no longer in a position to defend themselves and sought refuge
in the public buildings, schools, Armenian churches and, above all, the mission. The same
French clergyman reports:
One of the first buildings to go up in flames was the Armenian school building, where
a large number of refugees had found shelter. Fleeing the flames, these unfortunates
ran toward our compound. When groups of them made their way into the street, the
soldiers fired at them point-blank. I shouted at them to give the refugees free passage.
The next day, Father Rigal interceded with the vali. His commentary on their conversa-
tion plainly shows that there was a certain consistency to the behavior of this high-ranking
official:
The next day, when the vali sang me his usual refrain – “it is the Armenians who are firing
on our soldiers, looting houses and stores and setting fires” – I took the liberty of saying,
not without a touch of humor: “Your Excellency, it is not the Armenians who are shooting
at me in my own house, but the same soldiers who are shedding the Armenians’ blood.”
Threatened by the fire, the St. Paul middle school was likely to go up in flames at any
moment. The monk again went to see the vali. “On the way,” he writes, “I met municipal
firemen who were laboriously dragging a pump in our direction.” Later, both Father Rigal and
the commission of inquiry reported that this pump was used, not to put out fires, but to feed
the flames devouring the buildings in the neighborhood with paraffin. This time, the middle
school – where 6,000 refuges had found shelter – the Marists’ establishment, and the school
of the Sisters of Saint Joseph were set on fire. Thanks to the British consul’s intervention,
their occupants were transferred to the gardens of the prefecture.
“Sunday night,” Father Rigal goes on,
the next day and the following night as well, the fire continued to rage. It devoured a
church and two immense Armenian schools, the boys’ and the girls’ school, the little
chapel, the Catholic Syriacs’ residence, the Protestant church, all our buildings, the
free dormitory, middle and elementary schools, the Armenian Catholic church, the
bishop’s residence, the big Terzian middle school and the girls’ school – in sum, sev-
enty-five percent of the big Armenian quarter. I had almost forgotten the Orthodox
Syriacs’ buildings, which had only just been constructed: the dormitory, church and
school ... Tuesday, 27 April might be called the last day in this horrible series, the likes
of which has, perhaps, not been seen in modern history.
Rigal concludes:
No one who has not lived through these days can imagine what they were like. The
crackling of gunfire mixed with the crackling of the fire, incessantly, for days and

nights on end, and the hell of a city in flames; the thunder of the crumbling walls,
heaving clouds of fire heavenward; the piercing cries of the unfortunates felled by the
bullets and, still louder, the savage cries of the men busy slitting people’s throats; the
wrenching appeals of a throng of people in a circle of flames, as their tormentors pre-
pare to burn them alive; this frenzied, despairing population that stretches its arms out
toward you and begs to be saved; the emotion that chokes you the more powerfully the
closer the fire comes and the more helpless you feel, delivered up to a pack of arsonists
and throat-cutters; the sinister gangs running past, laden down with booty; the arson-
ists who slip under doors, clamber over walls, break down everything that stands in
their way and, sneering, contemplate the malignant flames; and these hordes of butch-
ers who trample corpses underfoot, stab them full of holes, smash in skulls with their
gun butts and then, the supreme insult, spit on their victims; the gaping wounds and
quivering limbs; the head of a woman perforated by seven blows of a butcher’s knife; a
skull split in two; six men strung together like beads by a grave mullah doing an experi-
ment to see how many bodies one bullet can pierce; the unfortunates daubed with
oil and transformed into living torches; a mother whose belly has been cut open and
made over into a cradle for her new-born baby; all these atrocities, all these horrors, all
these ruins, and the disgust and emotions that they call forth; the pen is powerless to
translate all that into words.
The report of the commission of inquiry called into being by the Ottoman parliament
provides a rather similar description of the facts:
There are no words strong enough to describe the horror and ferocity of the second
massacre, which went on for two days. It was in the course of this carnage that the sick
and wounded who had arrived from the surrounding villages and found refuge in the
school building were burned alive. Cevad Bey has deemed it superfluous to speak, in
his report, of the terrible death that these wretched people met in the flames; he says
not a word about the pregnant women whose bellies were cut open, the little children
whose throats were slit and a hundred other unspeakable atrocities. He does, how-
ever, take pains to note that a large quantity of bombs and dynamite exploded as the
Armenian quarter was consumed by the flames. The best refutation of this slander is
the fact that the Armenians never made use of bombs or dynamite in their attempt to
defend themselves. Since they used ordinary weapons in their self-defense, it is plain
that, had they had arms of this sort at their disposal, they would have used them as
well, with very easily recognizable effects. Since we do not have the least indication
that they used such explosives, it is only natural to suppose that this is sheer slander,
designed to pin the blame for what happened on the Armenians.65
The same report concludes:
All these details clearly show one thing: in Adana, the government officials and country
squires took pains to create in advance conditions likely, as they saw it, to minimize their
responsibility for massacres that they had premeditated and then decided to commit and
to throw that responsibility – at least officially – on the Armenians. To attain that goal
and somehow legitimize the Muslims’ savage fury, all sorts of lies were put into circulation
and someone hit upon the odious trick of firing on the soldiers’ encampment.
This time, the direct participation of the president of Adana’s Young Turk club, İhsan
Fikri, was attested to by the official investigations. Like the others, Fikri had worn the white

turban that was the mark of the aggressors. The final act was played out in the yard of the
prefecture, before the vali’s residence, where several thousand refugees from the Jesuit mis-
sion and Armenian church of St. Stepanos had been gathered together (those in the church
owed their lives to the courage of Brother Antoine, a French Jesuit who had plunged into
the fire to save them). After several hours of doubt – some contend that the vali was waiting
for an order from Constantinople or somewhere else that would settle the fate of this popu-
lation – the throng was sent away. Since there were no buildings left in the city capable of
sheltering them – the Armenian quarter had been largely demolished and what was left of it
was in flames – they were led out of Adana toward the railway station by the British consul,
who invited them to take up temporary quarters in the Tripani factory and on the premises
of a German establishment nearby. It was there that these survivors learned that Sultan
Abdülhamid had just given up his throne and been succeeded by Mehmed Reşad. It was also
from there that they watched for several days as their neighborhood burned to the ground.
The Official Gazette published, in its 18 May 1909 issue, a telegram that was devastating
to the Ottoman authorities. Addressed to Denys Cochin (a French catholic leader), it read:
All the information we have, which converges with that published by the European
press, confirms the complicity of the troops in the appalling massacres that took place
in Adana and the rest of the province. The second, 25 April massacre was carried
out by the very troops sent from Dede Aghach to put an end to the disorders. There
occurred scenes at which indescribable atrocities were committed. All Cilicia is in
ruins, prey to famine and poverty.
Human and Material Losses

As will be readily imagined, the attempt to assess the human losses due to the “troubles” in
Cilicia led, in this context, to an interminable battle of figures, with variations that were as
much as 20 times higher in some cases than others, depending on the sources. The first sta-
tistics published by the local authorities – that is, under the supervision of Cevad Bey – in the
daily La Turquie, indicated that a total of 1,000 people had been killed, 250 of them Muslims.
In a cable to the minister of the interior, Cevad’s successor, Mustafa Zihni Babanzâde, put
the number of Muslim casualties at 1,980 dead and 553 wounded, and estimated the number
of Armenian dead and wounded at 1,455 and 383, respectively.66 At the 2 May session of
parliament, the figures presented by the Armenian deputies on the basis of the information
they had received indicated that 20,000 to 30,000 had died.67
The regime’s new strongman, General Mahmud Şevket Pasha, also accepted the official
statistics. In an interview with the newspaper La Tribune on 13 May, he declared:
Things have been exaggerated. The official statistics on the number of victims show
that not more than three thousand Armenians and Muslims were killed. Thus it is
clear that remarks to the effect that thirty thousand people were killed are way off the
mark.68
Obvious underestimations, these statistics, which deflate the number of Armenian and
inflate the number of Muslim casualties, were plainly designed to substantiate the thesis that
Muslims were victims of an Armenian attack. Mushrooming accounts in the independent
Istanbul press and European newspapers, however, provided a very different picture of the
situation that the authorities had to take into account in order to maintain a semblance
of credibility. Thus, they felt obliged to take their distance from the conclusions of high-
ranking Cilician officials and give a higher estimate of both the total number of casualties

and the proportion of Armenian victims. By now, it had become grotesque to contend that
there had been more Muslim casualities than Armenian ones.
The author of the report of the parliamentary commission of inquiry, Hagop Babikian,
said the following on this subject:
I have observed an enormous disparity between the official figures and common assess-
ments of the number of victims. The Armenians and foreign newspaper correspond-
ents concur on a figure that varies between twenty-five thousand and thirty thousand.
As for the government, after initially hewing to the official figure of one thousand five
hundred non-Muslims and one thousand nine hundred Muslims, it now admits, on
the basis of new investigations, to a total of six thousand casualties. The government’s
statistics are based on information from the local registry office and lists provided by
the muhtars and priests of certain localities. It goes without saying that local registries
of births and deaths do not constitute reliable documents and it is only too clear that
the authorities of Adana have made use of all sorts of methods to hide the real number
of Christian victims.69
The government’s commission of inquiry, which comprised two senior magistrates – Fayk
Bey and Mosdichian Effendi – who were assisted by the mutesarif of Mersin, Esad Rauf Bey,
affirms in its 10 July 1909 report to the interior minister:
The total number of people killed during the regrettable events in the vilayet of Adana
is, according to the registries of births and deaths, 5,623, including gendarmes and
soldiers: 1,487 Muslims and 4,196 non-Muslims. However, as it is probable that many
people who were only temporarily in the area and were therefore not listed in the reg-
istries were also killed, and as it is not possible at present to establish how many such
individuals there were, we believe that the total number of those killed – Muslims and
non-Muslims – is around fifteen thousand.70
Their official character notwithstanding, these figures were not publicly recognized by the
government. Early in August, however, the government made yet another estimate of the
number of those killed in Cilicia, raising it this time to 6,429 for the vilayet of Adana and 484
for the vilayet of Aleppo.71 In the wake of publication of the two magistrates’ report, the new
vali, Mustafa Zihni Pasha Babanzâde, was forced to prolong local inquiries, which ultimately
arrived at a figure, for the vilayet of Adana alone, of 20,200 (19,400 Christians, including 418
Orthodox Syriacs, 163 Catholic Syriacs, 99 Greeks, 210 Catholic Armenians, 655 Protestant
Armenians and 620 Muslims). This is closer to the truth.72
According to the English journalist Ferriman, the most precise account of the casual-
ties was produced by the commission of inquiry set up by the Armenian Patriarchate of
Constantinople. It arrived at results quite similar to the vali’s. Of course, it did not dare to
evaluate Muslim losses. It found that the total number of Christians killed in the vilayet of
Adana was 21,361, including 18,839 Armenians, 1,250 Greeks, 850 Orthodox Syriacs, and
422 Catholic Syriacs.73 It emphasized that it had been unable to make a proper estimate of
the number of casualties among seasonal workers, but noted that 2,500 people were missing
from the Hacın area alone, which accounted for a by no means negligible proportion of the
seasonal workers of the Cilician plain, so that a total figure of 25,000 victims seemed to be
closer to the truth. Let us add that in the following months, a few thousand more victims
of the massacres succumbed to their wounds or to epidemics. Thus, 2,000 children died of
dysentery in summer 1909.74

Material Losses and Social Consequences

Like the human losses, the material losses too gave rise to a frenzied give and take between
the authorities and the victims. To accept the government’s initial estimates would have
been to admit that the Muslim populations sustained, in addition to their many human
casualties, considerable material losses. But the reality on the ground left little room for
doubt about the facts of the matter. Hilmi Pasha’s government charged Cevad Bey’s succes-
sor, Zihni Pasha, specifically with estimating the damages caused by the “disorders.” For the
city of Adana, he arrived at a figure of 96,000 Turkish pounds, rounded up to 100,000 in the
semi-official government organ, Tasviri Efkiar.
As in the case of the number of victims, here too the government’s official commission
of inquiry proved more reliable than the local investigators. It concluded that, in the vilayet
of Adana alone, a total of 4,823 houses, farms, agricultural complexes, schools, churches,
factories, caravansarais, mills, shops, or stands had been wholly destroyed, including 386
that belonged to Muslims.75 Measured against information collected for each of the locali-
ties involved, this figure probably still falls short of the truth, but has the merit of providing
some sense of the magnitude of the economic catastrophe precipitated by the massacres and
the series of fires and acts of plunder that accompanied them. The same sources evaluate the
material losses at 5,600,000 Turkish pounds.
An international commission was created to aid the survivors. Considerable sums were
allocated for the purpose but, given the extent of the damage, the money sufficed at best to
ensure the bare subsistence of tens of thousands – approximately 90,00076 – homeless people.
The big problem was that because these people’s work tools had been destroyed, they were
not yet in a position to assure their own needs.
Another problem – that of the thousands of orphans created by the massacres – led to
interminable debates among Armenians. To grasp the importance of this issue, we have to
review the precedents, the 1895–6 massacres, which left around 60,000 children orphans, as
well as the scandal caused by the admission of a certain number of these orphans to institu-
tions founded by American, German, Swiss, French, and other missionaries. The Armenian
nation, which had sustained considerable human losses (in addition to the massacres, many
women and children had been abducted and forcibly converted to Islam), was dealt a blow
that jeopardized its very survival. As a result, it withdrew into itself, in order, as it were, to
reconstitute itself. Under these conditions, every child educated in a foreign culture by a
non-Armenian institution appeared as one more member of the group destined to swell the
ranks of other peoples and undermine the historical Armenian collectivity a bit further. Far
from constituting a rejection of all things foreign, this reaction was rather the fruit of a new
national impulse, a collective will to survive as a group. When the Cilician massacres hap-
pened, these painful memories were still very active, and were all the more easily revived in
that they recalled all too well the tragedies that the Armenians had experienced under the
Hamidian regime.
Another element to be taken into account is the Armenians’ feeling of humiliation over
the fact that they were not themselves in a position to educate “their” orphans. Again,
although the Armenians were culturally fairly similar to Europeans, they found the colonial-
ist mindset of most of the foreigners who intervened on their behalf – whether they were
missionaries, merchants, or diplomats – very hard to bear, despite the undeniably positive
aspects of their presence. This held especially for the best educated Armenians, who found
it intolerable to be treated as natives and did not understand why their religious convic-
tions earned them the label of sectarians. The religious aspect of this problem should not be
underestimated. The Armenian Church, its numbers already reduced by the Catholic and

Protestant missionaries who had been carrying off members of its flock, considered a child
educated in this environment to be a lost soul. A number of laypeople were thinking the
same thing.
Thus, the Armenian Patriarchate of Constantinople and its Chamber of Representatives
made the future of the orphans of Adana a national priority.77 It set up a commission and
then took the initiative of creating an International Relief Committee comprising not
just Armenians, but also Greeks, Turks, and foreigners such as the director of the Banque
Ottomane. The commission, chaired by Said Pasha, the president of the Ottoman Senate,
met for the first time on 22 May 1909 in Constantinople.
It was the national commission that was responsible for the first relief efforts, sending a
Committee to Cilicia on a preliminary fact-finding mission, followed by a medical team. It
also organized the distribution of food and financial aid to the families who had been the
hardest hit, at a total cost of 1,943,162 aspres.78
On 20 August 1909, the Armenian Chamber decided to create a Central Commission
responsible for the orphans of Cilicia. The commission founded six orphanages: the first
in Adana, in August 1909, with accommodation for 233 children; the second in Maraş, in
September 1909, with places for 178; a third, the same month, in Hacın, for 350; the fourth in
Ayntab, in October 1909, with room for 185; the fifth, also in October, in Hasanbeyli, for 207;
and, again in October, a sixth in Dört Yöl, designed to accommodate 273 children. Thus, by
mid-autumn 1909, the Armenian National Commission was running six institutions with
accommodations for 1,426 orphans.
Five more institutions were created to care for orphans. American missionaries opened
one in Hacın (350 wards), English missionaries opened another in Ayntab (100 wards), and
German missionaries established one in Marash (727 wards). Two state-run orphanages took
charge of another 216 children in Marash and Dörtyöl. Thus we obtain a total of 3,164
orphans who had lost both their parents. To this figure, we must add 3,977 children who
had lost their fathers in the vilayet of Adana, and 762 in the vilayet of Aleppo, making a
grand total of 7,903 orphans who were either placed in institutions or raised by their mothers
alone.79

Chapter 3
The Ottoman Government’s

and the Armenian Authorities’
Political Responses to the
Massacres in Cilicia
W
e have already discussed the circumstances that led to the Cilician catastrophe,
showing how the Ottoman government first tried to downplay the casualty fig-
ures, only to put forward statistics that in the end were close to those announced
by Armenian and international circles. It is easy to see that the reason the government did
not wish to reveal how heavy the human losses had been was its obvious desire to maintain
the official thesis: that uncontrolled rioting had created a limited number of casualties in
both camps. Its official statements, echoed by a good part of the Ottoman press, had, moreo-
ver, convinced a public used to seeing the Armenians cast in the role of troublemakers that
the Armenians bore the main blame for these “disorders” as well. Very few Ottoman politi-
cians, consequently, demanded that the whole truth about the Cilician affair be brought to
light, apart from the ten or so Armenian parliamentary deputies and a handful of Greek and
Turkish deputies who, as we shall see, displayed a fair degree of courage in an openly hostile
environment.
In the preceding pages, by following the events in Cilicia step by step, we were able to
show with considerable precision how the local civilian and military authorities were impli-
cated in the massacres. We must now try to decrypt the real role of the government – or the
political groups connected to it, such as the Committee of Union and Progress – in order to
establish whether this violence was instigated locally or inspired by orders handed down by
the national authorities. This comes down to asking the key question of the national gov-
ernment’s responsibility for these events and, by extension, the question as to who ordered
these crimes.
The Ottoman parliament provided the Armenian deputies, veritable representatives
of their millet vis-à-vis the authorities, with a tribune from which to express their people’s
indignation over this new wave of violence and to demand explanations for the accusations
identifying them as responsible for their own massacre. The charges that had been leveled
at the Armenians in the period preceding the massacres – that they had been guilty of
provocations and had been making secret preparations to resuscitate an “Armenian kingdom
of Cilicia” – may have originated in a skewed interpretation of the attitude of the Cilician
Armenians after the restoration of the constitution. With equal plausibility, the aggressive-
ness and violence toward the Armenians manifested at the time may be traced back to the
Hamidian legacy. Finally, it may be supposed that the changing tribal world represented
by the Cilicia of the day was shot through with antagonistic currents led by men eager to

establish a local power base. While all these explanations are well grounded, none can solely
account for the sudden explosion that occurred in Cilicia on 14 April 1909. At the turn of
the twentieth century, no event of such proportions could have taken place without an order
that came, or was supposed to have come, from the highest state authorities or, at the very
least, one of the centers of state power.
The most paradoxical aspect of the matter is the fact that, even as it minimized the import
of the events and pinned the blame for them on the Armenians, the Turkish political estab-
lishment and initially even the Armenian political establishment attributed the Cilician
massacres, like the counter-revolution of 31 March, to a conspiracy hatched by Abdülhamid
and those nostalgic for his reign. This thesis was, however, contradicted by the sultan’s actual
situation: the Young Turks had gradually isolated him in his palace of Yıldız by dismissing a
good many of his collaborators and transferring his Albanian guard elsewhere, thus reducing
his capacity to maintain his networks intact and exert an influence over the domestic politi-
cal situation. Even that pragmatic Jesuit, Father Rigal, declared that
the author of these massacres is the same individual who, thirteen years ago, sent one
hundred thousand victims to their deaths and, in our time, sensing that the throne was
collapsing, sought, as he fell, to wipe this excessively dynamic people, whose very name
he found hateful, off the face of the earth.1
This explanation had the advantage of exonerating the new political establishment that
had emerged from the July 1908 revolution while maintaining the credibility of its desire for
reforms.
The First Reactions of the National Authorities

Given the brief tenure of Tevfik Pasha’s cabinet, which was formed on 18 April and resigned
on 26 April, it is clear that it did not have the time to take the government in hand, let alone
follow events in Cilicia. As has already been pointed out, it was to all intents and purposes the
undersecretary of state in the Interior Ministry, Adıl Bey, who handled the Cilician issue and
reported on the events to the grand vizier and Ottoman parliament. The decision to send troops
to Cilicia was, however, made by Şevket Pasha. Hence, we cannot pass judgment on Tevfik
Pasha’s cabinet and cannot assign it the least responsibility for what happened in Cilicia.
Furthermore, parliament did not concern itself with the affair in any real sense until its
session on 2 May 1909. Ahmed Rıza, who was again presiding over the Ottoman chamber
that day, had no choice but to read the report that had been sent to him on 26 April by the
vali of Adana, who had been recalled but was still serving as vali. In terms hardly more meas-
ured than those used in his initial reports, Cevad Bey wrote: “We have learned from unim-
peachable sources that a few Armenian fedayis bear the responsibility for the most recent
events.”2 The Armenian deputies, who had the support of a few of their Turkish and Greek
colleagues, reacted immediately: they firmly declared, to begin with, that the vali’s report was
a tissue of lies, and then attacked undersecretary of state Haci Adıl Bey (Arda), reminding
him of the notorious cable he had sent to Cevad Bey in which he had limited himself to rec-
ommending that the vali see to it that “foreign subjects were protected” and that he “restore
calm,” formulas that under the old regime had meant “massacre the Armenians, but leave
foreigners alone.”3 The newly appointed minister of the interior, Rauf Bey, who was also a
member of the Young Turk Central Committee, allowed Adıl to speak on behalf of the min-
istry. Adıl confined himself to the cautious statement that the grand vizier, Hilmi Pasha, and
General Mahmud Şevket had conferred and decided to send a special commission to Cilicia
to conduct an investigation.

The leader of the Armenian deputies in parliament, Zohrab, thereupon made the follow-
ing declaration:
There are two ways of ascertaining the truth – either by means of words or by means
of testimony and circumstantial evidence. The counselor [Adıl] has read us telegrams
from the prefect of Adana and the governor of Cebelbereket, as if these were trustwor-
thy documents. He was asked approximately how many people were massacred; this
all-powerful counselor,4 who is in contact with this region ten times a day, was not able
to provide us with that information.
In an article published in Le Temps, the Parisian daily’s correspondent made the following
comment on the parliamentary debates:
At yesterday’s session [of parliament], there was a spirited discussion of the Adana
massacres. Several deputies, notably the Armenians, attacked the government and
demanded that the ex-vali be brought to justice. The undersecretary of state at the
Interior Ministry defended the government: he read out cables from the authorities
ascribing the disorders to Armenian revolutionaries and everywhere presenting the
Armenians as the aggressors.5
Thus, it is clear that, early in May, Hilmi Pasha’s government was still defending the
thesis put forward by ranking officials of the administration. However, a shift in its position,
doubtless inspired by the information published in the international press and oral notes
from the powers, could be perceived at the 13 May session of parliament, when the govern-
ment announced to the deputies that it had decided to send a four-member commission
of inquiry to Cilicia under the authority of the interior minister. Two Armenians and two
Muslims were to be named to the commission, of whom two were to be civil servants and
the other two members of parliament. Although the discussion that followed revealed that
part of the Ottoman chamber openly opposed the creation of this commission, for which it
saw no need, the deputies elected to it a militant Armenian Young Turk, Hagop Babikian,
and another deputy from the CUP, Şefik Bey. At the same session, the president of parlia-
ment, Ahmed Rıza, insisted on the fact that “the Adana affair has given rise to a polemic
with the European powers and the foreign minister is holding daily meetings with foreign
ambassadors.”6 Rıza thus gave expression to the preoccupation of the authorities, who were
concerned with preserving a good image in the West and consequently forced to maintain
a degree of transparency. It was probably for this reason, rather than out of respect for the
Armenian victims, that the government set up a commission of inquiry.
Grand Vizier Hilmi finally commented on the Cilician crisis in the 24 May 1909 address
before parliament, in which he outlined his governmental program. Without once touching
on controversial points, he listed the measures that had been taken, such as the declaration
of a state of emergency in the province and the creation of courts martial in Marash and
Ayntab as well as Adana. Hilmi also announced that the fact that ten brigades of soldiers
had been sent to the area had made it possible to restore order and that “the property sto-
len during the events is gradually being recovered and given back to its owners” (witnesses
indicate that this was merely a pious wish). The grand vizier recalled, finally, that in order
to evaluate the number of victims and assess the responsibility of the local authorities, a
commission of inquiry had been formed, made up of two deputies and two ranking magis-
trates. Their conclusions, he said, would serve as the basis for a prompt indictment of those
found guilty.7

From this point on, neither the Ottoman parliament nor the Ottoman government
made the slightest official declaration, pending the commission’s conclusions. Appointing
two Young Turk deputies with solid reputations to the commission, the former magistrate
Hagop Babikian and the lawyer Yusuf Kemal, as well as two credible ranking magistrates,
H. Mosdichian and Fayk Bey, Hilmi’s cabinet was doubtless counting on the fact that these
“responsible” men would provide conclusions exonerating the state and the pro-Constitu-
tional Turkish political establishment, thus allowing them to emerge from this affair cleared
of all guilt in the eyes of international public opinion. It is not known whether Hilmi issued
instructions to the members of the commission to this end, but their work in the field and
the conclusions reached in the two reports that were released (that of the two magistrates,
officially handed in on 10 July, and the other, drawn up by Babikian and kept secret until
1911) allow us to judge how far the government was then prepared to go toward challenging
the Turkish political establishment.
The members of the commission arrived in Cilicia in early June and for more than a month
conducted a rather scrupulous investigation. The two magistrates, Fayk and Mosdichian,
worked in tandem and produced a common report. This was not so for the two deputies,
even though they were members of the same party. Babikian, who it is universally agreed was
a fervent partisan of Ottomanism and its rejection of dividing walls between communities,
clearly seems to have been in disagreement with his Turkish colleague. The French vice-
consul in Mersin and Adana, Barré de Lancy, reports in a dispatch to the chargé d’affaires in
Constantinople that Babikian “is said to have had rather sharp altercations with his Muslim
colleague Yusuf Kemal, who is still in Adana.”8 Returning from Mersin on 4 July with the
other members of the commission – the notable exception being Kemal9 – Babikian con-
firmed in interviews he gave to two Young Turk journals during his stop in Smyrna that he
and his colleague had had a few misunderstandings. In reply to a question from a journalist
at the Izmir daily Ittihad10 about the results of his investigation and the reasons for the mas-
sacre, he said:
In view of the information I gathered during my inquiry, [it can be said] that, since the
proclamation of the Constitution, the partisans of tyranny had given signs that they
were discontent and planned massacres of Christians: this is obvious and has been
proved by official court documents.
To another question from the same journalist on the local and national authorities’ par-
ticipation in the massacres, the deputy from Tekirdağ answered:
The national government did not take part in them, but was the reason for them. The
local authorities, for their part, were implicated in them. In particular, the vali, Cevad
Bey, the military commander Mustafa Remzi Pasha, the mutesarif of Cebelbereket,
Asaf Bey, Abdülkadır Bağdadizâde, Salih Effendi Boşnak and the owner of the news-
paper Ittidal, Ihsan Fikri, are fully complicit in the massacres.
In the same interview, Babikian also alluded to the court-martial’s lack of objectivity.
The remarks that Babikian made to the reporter from Tasviri Efkiar11 were still more can-
did, offering a glimpse of the report to come. Babikian dodged a question about the rumors
of his disagreements with his colleague Kemal, who was supposed to have precipitated his
premature return, pointing out that he had accomplished his mission and that his colleague
would be returning soon. About the situation in Cilicia, however, he was more forthcom-
ing. After making a few rhetorical reservations, he declared, emphasizing from the outset
that his comments should be interpreted as those of a loyal Ottoman concerned about the

happiness and development of the fatherland, that “the details published in the articles in
the European press about the Adana events [were] by no means exaggerated and even [fell]
short of the truth when [he] compared them with what [he him]self saw.” He thus pointed
to an abiding characteristic of Turkish society, which found it hard to acknowledge its own
acts and often perceived observations made by foreigners as attacks. By far the most pertinent
part of Babikian’s analysis, however, bore on the origin of the Adana events:
The Adana affair has two major causes: the reaction and the tyranny ... The former mufti
of Bağçe began going here and there and saying that freedom and the Constitution
were inventions of the Christians, who are opposed to the sharia; in this fashion,
he began to stir up the population and turn them against the Christians and the
Constitution.
As to the possibility that Sultan Abdülhamid was involved, Babikian emphasized that,
although that opinion was often heard, nothing proved it. There followed three questions
that together constituted the grounds for the accusations that the Cilician authorities had
laid before Ottoman public opinion:
1) It is said that the Armenians caused the disorders: is that right?

The official documents that I have brought with me prove that this hypothesis is alto-
gether mistaken.
2) They say that the Armenians wanted to proclaim their independence in Cilicia: is that
true?
Our investigation has shown that that charge is completely baseless.
3) Is the primate of Adana, Bishop Mushegh, implicated in this business?
The results of our inquiry prove that the primate is not implicated. Quite the contrary:
as early as January [1909], Bishop Mushegh had sent memoranda to the prefecture, the
content of which has been established by our inquiry. At the time, the bishop declared
orally to the vali that there was a risk that disorders would break out and suggested
that he take the necessary measures; the prelate’s remarks were, however, deemed to be
exaggerations and it was judged pointless to mobilize the means required.
These initial observations form a sort of practical illustration of the problems engendered
at the heart of Ottoman society by Young Turk modernity. They leave one with the feeling
that the local members of the opposition attacked the Armenian population because they
regarded it as a symbol of a modernity that they found alarming.
Babikian’s response to the next question, about the number of victims and the proportions
of “Muslims and non-Muslims,” is the more interesting in that it refers for the first time to
the statistics that were established by the new vali, Zihni, but carefully concealed by the cen-
tral government. They put the number of those killed at a little over 20,000, including 620
Muslims. The last question bears on another controversial point that was amply exploited to
portray the victims as villains: the fact that the British consul in Adana was wounded in the
arm. The authorities presented this as an example of the Armenians’ criminal attitude. Here
is what Babikian had to say about the matter:
I personally interrogated the consul about this. His response ran as follows: “The dis-
orders had just begun. Terror held sway everywhere. I went out into the street; I saw
someone whose look, behavior, acts and gestures gave the impression that he had gone
completely mad. He was running towards me. He was fleeing. I wanted to approach

him to ask what was going on. The fugitive interpreted my move as the sign of my evil
intentions, pointed his revolver at me, emptied it and then ran off. ” 12
Shortly afterwards, Tasviri Efkiar interviewed Fayk Bey. He contended that these events
could not be imputed to reactionary circles. They were rather due to “the ignorance of the
local Muslim and Christian populations.”13
Even before the investigators’ reports were made public, all this had already provided
unmistakable indications as to the tone they would strike. These interviews also give us a
sense of the role played by the Young Turk press in Constantinople, which had until then
by and large published articles reflecting the theses of Vali Cevad and the undersecretary of
state at the Interior Ministry, Adıl Bey. It is true that the conclusions of the commission of
inquiry’s two reports, Fayk’s and Mosdichian’s included, challenged the line of defense that
Turkish circles in Cilicia and Constantinople had maintained until July: neither report ever
suggests that the Armenians were responsible for the events in Cilicia. Quite the contrary:
both treat the Armenians as victims. However, for the Turkish circles in question, there was
a yawning gulf between, on the one hand, the very general remarks that, sparing the political
establishment, attributed the upsurge of violence to an ignorant populace and incompetent
local officials in high places, and on the other, the kind of statements that Babikian made.
Babikian, it seems, violated an unspoken rule against openly affirming that the local Muslim
populations had received orders to massacre the Armenians, that the soldiers of the army
sent from Macedonia to Cilicia had themselves staged the second massacre of Adana, that
Cilicia’s Young Turk leaders had taken a direct hand in organizing the atrocities, and so on.
Had there not been such a rule, it would be hard to explain why only the Fayk-Mosdichian
report, submitted on 10 July, was published after only a 20-day delay, while the manuscript
of Babikian’s report remained in a drawer at the Armenian Patriarchate for more than three
years. Moreover, several convergent indices suggest that pressure was exerted in parliamen-
tary circles, and probably at the level of the government and CUP leadership as well, to
prevent Babikian’s report from being made public.
To begin with, Yusuf Kemal tried to discredit Babikian and have him excluded from the
commission of inquiry. He sent a wire to the Ottoman parliament on 3 July to inform the
deputies that Babikian had left Cilicia prematurely before completing his mission (as we
have seen, this was not Babikian’s view of the matter). Kemal even suggested that the Jewish
deputy from Salonika, Emmanuel Carasso, be sent to Adana as quickly as possible to replace
him.14 Parliament apparently did indeed consider replacing Babikian. Thus, the French vice-
consul in Mersin and Adana pointed out, in a 9 July dispatch to the chargé d’affaires in
Constantinople,15 that
Mersin is awaiting the arrival of a member of parliament, Carasso. His Muslim col-
league is still in Adana. He has declared that he is opposed to paying indemnities of
any sort, on the grounds that a revolution has taken place and that the government
cannot be held responsible. The vali says the same thing about the [French] nuns who
are rebuilding.
Beginning in late June, Kemal would for his part contend that the disorders organized by
the Armenians and a few Cilician Muslims were designed to benefit the Ahrar party and
harm the Young Turk Committee – a statement that speaks volumes about the state of mind
prevailing among Ittihadist militants.16 Babikian’s interviews, however, had a certain impact.
All things considered, it is probable that the Young Turk committee of Salonika preferred
not to alienate one of its militants, even if he was Armenian, by not coming out too openly
in favor of the thesis that the Armenians were the culprits.

The Evolution of the Hilmi Cabinet’s

Position on the Adana events
The shift began in early July. To be sure, the Young Turk daily Tasviri Efkiar published, in its
1 July and 19 July issues, an article by the parliamentary deputy from Konya, Ebuzzia Tevfik
Bey, which confirmed his party’s position that “the Armenians alone were to blame.” Indeed,
Tevfik did not hesitate to congratulate the court-martial for the work it had accomplished in
the field.17 (We shall see that this first court-martial, basing itself on Cevad’s reports, found
that the Armenians were responsible for their own massacre.) Hakkı Bey, an eminent mem-
ber of the Young Turk leadership, made a similar declaration in the 28 May issue of Le Temps
in Paris. Doubtlessly feeling the pressure of Western public opinion during his stay in Europe,
he had not hesitated to state, in order to exonerate his party: “People exaggerate. Your press is
not always very favorably disposed. In fact, it is known today that the disorders in Adana were
fomented in Constantinople. We have intercepted dispatches proving that the Armenian
Committee was seeking to bring about a European intervention.”18 This declaration, in the
most classic Hamidian style, naturally provoked a reaction from the ARF leadership, whose
party was officially allied with the CUP: the Armenian party demanded that the Central
Committee of Salonika disavow the statement made by this Ittihadist leader.
It would appear, however, that these declarations represented the Young Turk militants’
last stand. After an anti-Armenian campaign that had lasted two months, the members of
the commission of inquiry returned to Constantinople to present their reports. Yusuf Kemal,
who left Mersin on 14 July, was among them.19 Kemal took part in the 20 July session of par-
liament, announcing that he was going to present it with his conclusions in a few days.20 At
the 26 July session, at which Babikian was present, the Fayk-Mosdichian report had its first
effects. It attributed the main responsibility for the massacres to, notably, the vali of Adana,
Cevad, the military commander Mustafa Remzi Pasha, Abdülkadır Bağadizâde, and İhsan
Fikri. Yet all four of these men had been exonerated by a court-martial created in May that
was composed mainly of Young Turk officers.21 The two magistrates’ revelations were doubt-
less related to the fact that certain Young Turks, who had so far been rather conciliatory,
now took more uncompromising positions. Speaking from the podium, İsmail Hakkı, the
deputy from Gümülcina, criticized the government for meddling in the affairs of the Adana
court-martial: the presiding judge and an eminent member of the court had resigned after
the government had ordered those responsible for the massacres arrested. Half of the dep-
uties, following Hakkı’s lead, voted in favor of a motion against the Hilmi cabinet, which had
simply acted on the recommendations put forward in the Fayk-Mosdichian report. It thus
became clear that half the members of parliament rejected the idea that those responsible
for the slaughter in Adana should be judged. Babikian rose and said, “Twenty-one thousand
people have been killed in Adana and you are rising to the defense of two individuals.” There
followed a rather heated exchange, which showed that certain Turkish deputies contested
even the number of victims and, more generally, the idea that “the” Armenians were not to
blame for the carnage. To put an end to this tense moment, which revealed major differences
of opinion, the assembly agreed to postpone the debate on the Adana events until after the
parliamentary commission of inquiry had filed its reports. Thus, on 26 July 1909, the begin-
ning of the debate on the events in Cilicia came to a close.22
However, damning documents were published in the Istanbul press the very next day.
Among them were two encrypted telegrams from Vali Cevad to the mutesarifs and kay-
makams of his province, and also to the Interior Ministry. The second stated, for example:
“the Armenians have attacked; the government palace [that is, the prefecture] has been
encircled; the Armenians are armed and are massacring unarmed Turks. Help us.”23 Such
affirmations leave little doubt about the fact that the massacres were premeditated; they

expose the manipulations in which the authorities engaged in order to justify crimes in
which they seem to have had a hand. At this point, the last week of July, tensions were
at their height. Everything goes to show that there could be no question of a debate in
this country, in which virtually the entire political establishment, and an overwhelming
share of public opinion, held that the massacre of non-Muslims was not a crime. The French
ambassador, Bompard, reported specifically to the French foreign minister, Pichon, that the
government had had to “follow the advice of the Committee of Union and Progress, which
wanted to appease public opinion and spare the Chamber a dangerous debate over the report
submitted by the commission of inquiry.”24
The debate did not, in fact, take place, notably because Babikian died on 1 August, the
day before his report was to have been presented.25 His brother announced on the morning of
1 August that Babikian had sat down at his desk to put the finishing touches to his text and
had then begun to complain about pains in his stomach and chest. He quickly fell into a deep
coma and then died. In view of the circumstances, the 53-year-old deputy’s sudden death was
grist for rumors. Nothing, however, indicates that he died of non-natural causes. The most
that can be said is that this death prevented his report from being made public at a time when
(thanks to the interviews he had given) only its broad outlines were known.26
At the 5 August session of parliament, the president of the assembly informed the depu-
ties that Yusuf Kemal had submitted the report on his inquiry and that the deputy Vartkes
had requested that Babikian’s report also be read. The parliament decided, however, to hear
the conclusions of the two deputies on the following Saturday, 7 August. The next day, when
the question was again put on the agenda, the president suggested to the assembly that these
reports be submitted to a special parliamentary commission for examination before being
read to the assembly.27 This was the last time the Adana events were ever mentioned in the
Ottoman parliament, for the two reports were never made public. We still do not know what
was contained in Kemal’s, although we do know, thanks to its author’s public statements,
that it was far from drawing conclusions similar to Babikian’s.
As the French ambassador points out, it seems that, in the interim, behind-the-scenes
negotiations took place with a view to preventing this extremely embarrassing affair from
being fully aired in public. The CUP and its government apparently feared a popular reac-
tion – at least that is what they said in private – and, above all, too broad an exposure of the
patent complicity of the local Young Turk militants in the massacres.
These negotiations, which were secret by their very nature, seem to have gone on between
the Young Turk leaders and their Armenian allies in the ARF, who were then drawing up the
cooperation agreement that we have already discussed.28 The Armenian deputies probably
consented to non-publication of the reports and agreed that the parliamentary debate should
not take place. Accepting the arguments of their Young Turk colleagues to the effect that a
debate would not resolve anything and, indeed, was more likely to poison the atmosphere,
they implicitly admitted that a majority of the members of parliament did not want to hear
so unflattering a truth. In exchange, the Armenians were probably promised that a public
declaration would be made that would clear them of all the accusations leveled at them since
the events occurred, that a genuine climate of security would be created in Cilicia, that those
who had lived through the massacres would receive help in recovering part of their looted
property, and, above all, that justice would be meted out to the real culprits.
There are several indications that a turnabout in official government policy took place in
the first days of August 1909:
1) A new prefect was appointed in Adana, Colonel Ahmed Cemal Bey, the future min-
ister of the navy. Cemal was a very influential member of the Central Committee of
the CUP and had a reputation for being energetic and liberal minded.29

2) A budget worthy of the name was set up to aid the tens of thousands of Armenians
who had been left homeless.30
3) The courts martial created in Cilicia at last arrested those who bore the main
responsibility for the massacres, even if they hanged only people who had played
subaltern roles.
4) On 11 August, the grand vizier, Hilmi Pasha, published an official circular that
cleared the Armenians of all the charges against them.31 One sentence sums up the
general tenor of this text: “There can be no doubt that in the days of the old regime,
when despotic abuses were common practice, certain classes of the Armenian com-
munity were working toward political goals. Whatever form this work took, how-
ever, its sole aim was to achieve emancipation from the unbearable harassment and
misdeeds of a despotic government.” These words amounted to a confession. They
implied that the Armenians had been massacred because, in 1909, people continued
to regard Armenians generally as fedayis – that is, “terrorists” and revolutionaries.
5) On 12 August, the minister of justice, Nail Bey, publicly declared: “The Armenians
are in no way responsible for these events.”32 This sentence closed the rehabilita-
tion campaign.
The Work of the First Courts Martial Established in Cilicia

Nothing testifies more clearly to the existence of a political will than the establishment by
a state of a system of justice capable of punishing those guilty of crimes and thus restoring
civil peace and the rule of law. However, after the Cilician events, the work of the first local
courts martial gave rise to “abuses” that more than one observer found shocking, to say noth-
ing of the victims. “It is unfortunately only too certain,” said a diplomat, “that the country’s
new rulers spend more time leveling charges at the Armenians than trying to find the real
culprits. Armenians are being arrested by the hundreds, while those who instigated the mas-
sacres go unpunished and are even in charge of the work of the courts.”33 These courts mar-
tial had another unusual feature: they were composed of the main organizers of the massacres
and all of them proceeded on the basis of reports provided by local commissions of inquiry
whose members had themselves been involved in the massacres.34 Thus, they had the power
to decide who was “guilty.” The reports by Babikian and Fayk-Mosdichian pointed out these
anomalies, as well as the frequent recourse to perjury and the practice of extorting forced
confessions from the victims. It was in the wake of diplomatic protests and a sharp reac-
tion from the Armenian circles of Constantinople that Grand Vizier Hüseyin Hilmi finally
announced to parliament, on 24 May 1909, the creation of a court-martial to be made up of
five judges, all recruited from the Young Turks’ ranks, with Yussuf Kenan named the presid-
ing judge. It should be noted, however, that this court lacked the means it needed to conduct
pretrial investigations, and so simply relied on the results of investigations carried out by its
predecessors. It also set up three branch courts in Tarsus, Erzin, and Marash.
This court-martial’s general line of conduct had probably been dictated to it by the
national authorities. It consisted initially of dealing blows to both victims and executioners
without distinction, so as to give the impression of even-handed justice or, more precisely, to
preserve the fiction of Armenian responsibility. The best proof is the report – which no one
had commissioned – that it published a few days before Fayk’s and Mosdichian’s. A sentence
from this report (which we have already evoked to illustrate the nature of the indictment)
aimed at the Cilician Armenians sums up the military judges’ attitude: “Muslims did not
much appreciate the fact that [the Armenians] made such bold use of the freedom and equal-
ity that they had only just acquired.”35 In other words, unidentified propagandists “explained”

to an already exasperated population that the Armenians’ behavior was the first sign of a
plan to win independence and massacre Muslims. In this connection, the oral note that the
French minister Pichon delivered to the Ottoman foreign minister offers valuable insight
into the methods used by the Adana court:
Six Armenians were just hanged in Adana by order of the court-martial, together with
nine Muslims, for provoking massacres. Thus the court-martial has largely adopted
the version of events put forward by the Adana authorities, who wanted to pin the
blame for the catastrophe on the Armenians. We protest against this injustice, as a
result of which six representatives of the cruelly mistreated Armenian population were
punished along with representatives of the Muslim authors of the massacres. We know,
moreover, that the Muslims who were punished were merely tools of no real import-
ance and that those who are truly guilty have gone unpunished. The vali of Adana
has not even been brought before the court-martial. The director of Adana’s Turkish
newspaper Ittidal, who personally participated in the massacre and, since then, has
published dangerously slanderous articles against the Armenians, has not been dis-
turbed in any way and is pursuing his campaign.36
Pichon’s observations received concrete confirmation when the court-martial acquitted all
the local authors of the massacres.
The execution of these six Armenians, like the submission of the Fayk-Mosdichian report,
forced the government to adopt a new strategy, as we have seen. Hilmi’s cabinet issued orders
for the arrest of the individuals incriminated in the report – the vali, Cevad Bey, the mili-
tary commander Mustafa Remzi, the president of Adana’s Young Turk club İhsan Fikri, the
influential notable Abdülkadır Bağdadizâde, the mutesarif of Cebelbereket, Adıl Asaf Bey,
the police chief Kadri Bey, and their accomplices. Two weeks passed, however, before the
former vali, Cevad, was arrested on 27 July, because the new vali, Zihni Pasha, and the judges
on the court-martial refused to execute the orders they had received. The grand vizier con-
sequently had no choice but simultaneously to replace, on 29 July, Vali Zihni37 with Ahmed
Cemal, and the presiding judge of the court-martial, Yusuf Kenan, with İsmail Fazlı Pasha,
until then the military commander of Smyrna. The same day, Cevad, Zihni, and Kenan were
taken into custody.
In August, the newly formed court-martial finally proceeded to try the authors of the mas-
sacres. Obviously, nothing more was said about the Armenians’ guilt, yet the old reflexes
apparently continued to hold sway. The Armenian Patriarchate of Constantinople pointed
out bitterly to the grand vizier that, despite everything, many Armenians were still languish-
ing in Cilician prisons under appalling conditions, subject to the whims and brutality of their
guards. The Patriarchate also protested the light sentences handed down by the court. Let
the reader judge. Cevad was condemned to six years of ineligibility for any and all govern-
ment posts; he was, however, granted a monthly salary. Mustafa Remzi was sentenced to three
months in prison, but the sentence was not executed. Asaf Bey was declared ineligible for
any civil service job for a period of four years. İhsan Fikri was banned from Adana. Fikri’s
colleague at Ittidal, İsmail Safâ, had to spend one month in prison. Osman Bey, the com-
mander of the garrison in Adana, received a prison sentence of three months. Abdülkadır
Bağdadizâde was exiled to Hejaz for two years, but he was granted amnesty on the first anni-
versary of the constitution.38 The French vice-consul in Mersin and Adana explained, in his
reports to foreign minister Pichon, the workings of the court-martial: it was virtually impos-
sible for an Armenian to testify, and some of the judges on the court were swayed by gifts from
the accused. İhsan Fikri’s Young Turk colleagues even summoned him to Constantinople after
he had spent a brief period in Cairo, to make an official report there on what had happened.

No one, however, publicly disavowed him for his acts. Simultaneously, in Cilicia, the new vali,
Cemal Bey, had more than one hundred people hanged in short order for participating in the
massacre – yet, as the diplomats indicated, those punished had merely been second fiddles.
The limited nature of this justice is illustrated by a conversation that the patriarch held
with the presiding judge of the court-martial, İsmail Fazıl Pasha, on 4 September, at a moment
when Fazıl had just condemned 40 Turks and 3 Armenians to death. In response to a ques-
tion from the Armenian prelate, the Turkish general said, “Of course, it has been established
beyond a doubt that the Armenians were innocent; there were, however, Armenians who
committed acts that the Turks themselves would not dare commit.”39
In sum, by replacing the presiding judge of the court, the government had corrected the
most blatant excesses while ensuring that its appointee would impose symbolic sentences
rather revelatory of its preoccupations.
The Hilmi cabinet’s ostensible good intentions notwithstanding, a witness comments:
The military courts continued to consider the Armenians rebels, without, be it added,
giving them the opportunity to prove the contrary; to appeal to the most notoriously
compromised officials in conducting investigations; to let themselves be guided by peo-
ple who had provoked and organized massacres; and, finally, to base their judgments
on false accusations.
Another American witness remarks:
Many people were held in prison on the basis of false accusations. Apparently anyone
could be arrested and imprisoned as the result of a remark made by a Muslim. I know
of no case in which the evidence of an Armenian called to the bar was accepted. In its
haste to indict Armenians, the court went so far as to serve writs on people who had
died several months before the disorders.40
The Hilmi Cabinet and the judges on the court-martial were incontestably more concerned
with Western reactions than with the complaints lodged by their Armenian allies.
The Treatment of the Cilician Crisis in Armenian Circles

The Cilician massacres initially puzzled the Armenian authorities. Some Armenians, such
as Krikor Zohrab, thought that they were yet another “Hamidian provocation,” while others,
more skeptical, questioned the role played by the Turkish authorities. The skeptics pointed
out that the arrival in Cilicia of “liberation” troops commanded by Young Turk officers had
not brought the carnage to a halt and, indeed, that these forces had helped perpetrate the
second wave of violence, that many of those who were known to have been responsible for
these acts had not been jailed, that many survivors of the massacres were arrested or even
executed for no reason, that the Armenian delegates who had been sent to Cilicia had not
been allowed to enter Adana, that sums of money which the Patriarchate had wired to the
city’s archbishopric had never arrived, and, finally, that the Turkish government and press
generally put the blame for the “events” on the Armenians, whom they accused of having
staged a rebellion.41 The Armenian parliamentary deputies noted that this violence was
accompanied by other forms of harassment: notables were arrested, schools were destroyed,
churches and homes were burned down, houses that had been spared during the massacres
were searched and plundered, women and children were abducted, taxes were levied imme-
diately after the events, survivors were denied food and, in certain villages, Armenians were
forced to assimilate. All this was reminiscent of the methods used in Abdülhamid’s day.42

The Armenian deputies also observed that even the presence of several British, American,
French, Russian, and Italian battleships near Mersin, two hours from Adana, had not pre-
vented the army from perpetrating a second wave of massacres – they had even made it
possible to provide food relief to the survivors who roamed the streets in a daze.43 For the
Armenian representatives, the priority clearly consisted in coming to the aid of the survivors
with all possible speed. The Armenian Chamber of Deputies immediately sent medical teams
and a relief column to Cilicia. Their mission was to distribute food and clothing to the area’s
inhabitants and care for the many orphans, whose numbers were put at 7,000 in June 1909,
two months after the slaughter.44 The chamber intended, above all else, to demand an expla-
nation from the government, even while conducting its own investigation in the area.45 In the
memorandum it submitted to the Sublime Porte, it demanded that 1) imprisoned Armenians
be released; 2) people who had been Islamicized by force be sent home; 3) young girls “mar-
ried” to Muslims be returned to their families; 4) homeless survivors receive compensation and
be given back property stolen from them; 5) the new vali, Mustafa Zihni, be recalled; 6) the
guilty be arrested; 7) food relief be organized for the survivors; and so on.46
Early in June, Patriarch Yeghishe Turian, who had succeeded Izmirlian (elected as Catholicos
of Armenia), was very courteously received by the sultan, grand vizier, and interior minister.
The Armenian delegation stated a number of grievances: the courts set up in Cilicia in order
to pronounce judgment on the rioters and other killers were made up of the main organizers
of the massacres and had condemned and hanged six Armenians; several archbishops, includ-
ing the archbishop of Marash, who had resisted the attacks, were currently being prosecuted
by the courts; and the government and Turkish press continued to depict the massacres as an
Armenian revolt.47 The patriarch accordingly proposed that a mixed parliamentary commis-
sion of inquiry be given executive powers and dispatched to Cilicia, and also demanded that
military courts based in Constantinople be charged with bringing the guilty to justice.
In the course of the 21 August 1909 debates in the Armenian Chamber, it was revealed
that although Babikian’s report had not been read before the Ottoman parliament, the hand-
ful of extracts from it published in the press had put the government in an embarrassing posi-
tion. The government had told the Armenian representatives in private that it was hard for
it to punish those responsible for the massacres because this might stir up the Muslims, who
would not tolerate the least decision “favorable” to the Armenians.48 In fact, all indications
are that the Armenian Political Council and the Armenian parliamentary deputies were
directly handling the issue in collaboration with the government and the CUP, although the
chamber was probably not systematically informed of the course of their discussions.
Of course, the Armenian press was less prudent, taking advantage of the relative freedom
it still obtained in this period. An editorialist at Piuzantion, Suren Bartevian, was one of the
first Armenian journalists to give forthright expression to the indignation felt by most of
his community. Referring to the second Adana massacres, which had targeted an unarmed
population, he exclaimed:
After this bloody trick, how can anyone accuse the supine corpses of people who, this
time, could not make the least attempt at self-defense, fire a single shot or even throw
a stone? How are we to describe these deceitful accusations? How are we to understand
them? Tell us ... if you no longer want us to live in this country or exist on the face of
the earth ... How long must our blood and tears flow because of a fanciful, half-cocked
story about an “Armenian kingdom” that you do not believe yourselves, because you
cannot imagine that the Armenians are stupid enough to believe it in their turn.49
These words reflect not only the indignation but also the despair that came over many
Armenians who were discovering in the wake of these events how little the situation had

changed. Others, such as the editorialist of the daily Azadamard, who evoked the activities
of the parliamentary commission of inquiry, were instead cynically pessimistic. “It would
be naive,” wrote this editorialist, “to expect that justice will be done. The whole process
underway at the moment is not designed to let justice triumph, but to throw a veil over this
catastrophe, which has devastated the Armenian population of Cilicia.”50
Besides these general declarations, however, accusations aimed directly at the government
were beginning to make themselves heard. Zohrab, obviously beside himself, exploded at the
podium of the Ottoman parliament: “The government remains faithful to the long-standing
tradition of denying the facts, as in the case of the Adana events; for a long time, it refused
to acknowledge the number of victims, although official information later confirmed it.”51
The reaction of many Young Turk deputies, who were in principle open to democratic prac-
tices, reflected the Ottoman reality of the day: Zohrab was quite simply interrupted, pulled
from the podium, and roughed up. Another revealing fact could be observed at the following
parliamentary session, held on 3 July. Zohrab and Vartkes Seringiulian tried to defend a bill
to establish trade unions in the Ottoman Empire. A majority of the deputies were hostile to
it, although it had been introduced by the Young Turk fraction.52 The contrast between the
arguments put forward by the two Armenian deputies and the reactions – conservative, to
say the least, of some of their Turkish colleagues – illustrates the cultural abyss between the
Armenians and their counterparts, not excluding deputies reputed to be modernists.
Despite the modest progress that had been made in the Cilician affair – we have seen
how the Ottoman parliament and government handled it – Armenian circles continued to
demand, as the autumn began, that the victims receive compensation for the damages they
had suffered and that their property be restored to them. Given the political and social con-
text, which these circles knew better than anyone else, their stubborn insistence that justice
be done in a country that until recently had a restrictive interpretation of the word may seem
surprising. The Armenians, however, had plainly decided to pursue the matter to the end
without making concessions. After showing a certain flexibility in negotiating directly with
the government or the Young Turk leaders throughout the summer, they now refused to settle
for mere promises, for the affair seemed to them to represent too great a threat for the future
and too blatantly to contradict the principles that the Young Turks officially espoused.
On 25 September, at a public session of the Armenian chamber, N. Jivanian, who was also
a member of the Ottoman parliament and an Ittihadist, defended the Young Turk government.
He took up the thesis that after the “Adana affair” the authorities had only just managed to
avoid excesses and massacres in the eastern provinces. Interrupted in the midst of his plea by
loud protests from all sides, he yielded the floor to the Dashnak leader H. Shahrigian, who
spoke on behalf of the Armenian Political Council. After analyzing the situation, Shahrigian
revealed that the members of the Council, acting in concert with their Armenian colleagues
from the Ottoman parliament, had preferred to avoid discussion of the parliamentary commis-
sion’s report (written by Babikian) at a session of the Ottoman chamber. The reason was that
a majority of the Ottoman deputies were manifestly opposed to any public declaration openly
impugning the Turkish authorities. The members of the council and the Armenian delegates
had concluded that sidestepping a discussion would make it easier for the government to work
toward what they considered desirable ends.53 As soon as Shahrigian had finished speaking,
the leader of the Hnchaks, Hmayag Aramiants, took the floor. He argued that there was conti-
nuity between the Hamidian and Young Turk regimes, although the policies of the latter, while
they did not diverge from Abdülhamid’s, were much more skillfully “packaged” and carried out
behind a legal facade. This had been the case at the Adana trials, Aramiants said. It seems that
the government could not legally overturn the verdicts they had rendered.
A few dissenting voices notwithstanding, a large majority of the Armenian deputies
had tried to maintain relations with the Sublime Porte in seeking a resolution to the crisis.

However, to make it clearer that it was not inclined to give way before the authorities’ argu-
ments or threats, the Armenian Political Council suggested to Patriarch Yeghishe Turian
that he resign. Turian did so on 4 September, as a sign of protest against the government’s
inertia.54 Yet, parallel to these discussions, liberals and Dashnaks continued to maintain
relations with the Ittihad’s leadership, which they knew was influential. The lack of con-
crete results and – according to those opposed to the Armenian Political Council – the
inadequacy of its policies, brought on the downfall of the liberal and Dashnak leadership
of the chamber. It proceeded to elect a new council with a conservative majority, the unre-
constructed Minas Cheraz.55 Thus, the chamber’s “soft underbelly” seems to have taken the
government’s threats seriously after all.
In the course of the debates that followed this change in the chamber’s leadership,
Aramiants, backed up by Zohrab, pointed out to the assembly that electing people from the
old school was not the way to obtain the best results. Moreover, he said, such people were
altogether ignorant of what daily life in the provinces was really like; it was no longer pos-
sible, he added, to exclude the political parties from the conduct of affairs. Zohrab, who was
more conciliatory, recalled that, upon returning from exile the year before, he had tried to
unite the intelligentsia and the parties in a single bloc, so as to bring them to participate in
national political life in the framework intended for that purpose. After all, he said, electing
party activists to the council did not imply turning it into an appendage of the parties, but
was rather a means of channeling the parties’ energies in a consensual direction.56
In fact, the crisis into which the Cilician affair plunged the Armenian institutions was
an expression of profound unrest within the Armenian political establishment. Piuzantion
reported Zohrab’s revealing remarks before the chamber:
There is no denying that the present government is well disposed towards us, for we
know very well that, five months ago, there was a real danger that the Adana massacres
would spread to all of Armenia, as telegrams and letters that have fallen into the hands
of the national leadership show.57
Information relayed by the European consular network in Anatolia confirmed that this dan-
ger had indeed existed:
For some time now, a sort of pessimism has been spreading among us: it has it that the
Ottoman Committee [the CUP], if it did not organize the Adana massacres, was at the
very least not opposed to them and took great satisfaction in them. It is crucial that
this question be clarified, for it is undeniable that the Ottoman Committee controls
the current leadership of the country and that its orientations and decisions are of vital
significance for the Armenian people. If, in future, the Ottoman Committee wants to
destroy the Armenians materially and morally, it is desirable that we be informed of
this right now, so that we can take thought for our future, that is, get up and leave this
country. For our part, we have been examining this question for six months. We have
been informed of the telegrams and reports that the Patriarch has received and we
ourselves constantly receive correspondence from very different groups in the regions
with an Armenian population. We have not, however, drawn the conclusion that the
Ottoman Committee wanted to massacre the Armenians.58
Kechian’s editorial does not pronounce on the key question preoccupying everyone at the
time – namely, whether or not the CUP was implicated in the massacres. It does, however,
give expression to oppressive doubts and a vague sentiment that the Armenians’ very pres-
ence in the empire was already a matter of controversy.

In December of the same year, on behalf of the council’s new leadership, H. Khosrovian
presented a report on the government’s response to its requests and its demands for repara-
tions. Khosrovian announced that five Armenians who had been condemned to death had
been amnestied and that 42 people who had participated in the massacres had been hanged,
that some of the prisoners had been released, but that basically the organizers of the carnage
had not been bothered and that nothing had been done to help kidnapped children return to
their families.59 Despite everything, the Catholicos of Cilicia, Sahag II Khabayan, who had
resigned in protest at the same time as the patriarch, had changed his mind and asked his
counterpart in Istanbul, Yeghishe Turian, to do the same. Thus, the crucial question inform-
ing the chamber’s debates in the 1908–9 period was posed: how far could it go in demanding
that reparations be made and the security of the Armenians’ life and property be ensured
without provoking new massacres?
This was precisely the subject of a new, hour-long address by Zohrab, who asked that he
be allowed to speak at a closed, off-the-record session.60 This is understandable, because the
execution of 42 killers in Cilicia was a very emotional issue for Turkish public opinion. To
be sure, those who bore the main responsibility for the massacres had not been punished;
the execution of the second fiddles, however, had sufficed to bring about the fall of the
prime minister, Hilmi Pasha, who was replaced by Hakkı, the author of the famous declara-
tion blaming the Armenians for the massacres.61 Certain deputies believed that the Cilician
affair constituted a precedent and that if the chamber did not wage its struggle to obtain
reparations to the bitter end, there could be no counting on an improvement in the lot of
the Armenian population in the provinces, whether what was involved was the restoration
of confiscated lands or control of the Kurdish tribes. In the end, the chamber charged the
Armenian deputies in the Ottoman parliament – especially Zohrab, Hampartsum Boyajian,
and Vartkes Seringiulian – with approaching their Turkish colleagues again. Significantly,
the Armenian Political Council simultaneously asked the patriarch to resume his functions.62
The Armenians had obviously decided not to persist in their demand for amends for fear of
provoking further violence.
The Role of the Committee of Union and

Progress in the Cilician Massacres
On 11 March 1909, the Constantinople Independent reported the confidences of an Armenian
parliamentary delegation leaving a meeting with the president of parliament, Ahmed Rıza.
Rıza had told them, without beating around the bush: “Watch out; if you don’t stop mak-
ing trouble, all of you are going to be massacred.” Very obviously, a declaration of this sort,
which Rıza might have made because he had momentarily lost his temper, can in no way be
taken as proof of the party’s desire to settle a political issue with a massacre. Rıza’s remark
does, however, give us an idea of the state of mind of the second-most-important man in the
state and make us wonder about the role that the CUP actually played in the Cilician affair.
To be sure, apart from accusations like those leveled by Zeki Bey, an inspector at the Office
of the Ottoman Debt and the editor-in-chief of the review Şerah – Zeki openly impugned
the Young Turk Central Committee63 – we have no proof that the Ittihad’s leadership was
directly responsible for the Adana massacres. Also at the time, people sought to identify the
underlying causes of the carnage. An attentive observer who had been in Adana during the
April 1909 massacres, Father Rigal, also tried to understand them:
It has often been asked what could have caused an explosion of such ferocious fanati-
cism among the Muslim population. I was obliged to maintain fairly frequent contact
with various authorities during those unforgettable days. I can say that I never heard

them utter any refrain other than “the Armenians are massacring the Muslims; the
Armenians are firing on our soldiers; the Armenians are looting and burning ...” This
means, in a word, “the Armenians are the aggressors” – the exact opposite of the
truth – or, again, “the Armenians are rebels and we are simply putting down a revolt,”
to cite, verbatim, something the vali once said to me.64
Like many other contemporary observers of the events, this missionary only raised the
crucial question, throwing the authorities’ description of the events into relief, without him-
self answering it. Indeed, this affair remains inexplicable if we do not look beyond the local
context, at the level of the leadership of the Young Turk movement.
Given the lack of compelling evidence, in order to measure the extent of the CUP’s
involvement, we must closely observe the way the leadership or local organs of the party
behaved during and after the massacres, the positions it officially took, the reaction of the
Young Turk faction in parliament when the Cilician affair was put on the parliamentary
agenda, and the way its press judged the events. Such circumstantial evidence will allow us,
at a minimum, to detect signs of complicity or at least solidarity with the authors of these
crimes.
As far as the local organs of the party are concerned, the Fayk-Mosdichian report, like
Babikian’s parliamentary document, shows without the least ambiguity that, in addition to
the vali and the military commander of the vilayet, the presidents and members of the Union
and Progress clubs of Tarsus and Adana took a direct hand in organizing massacres in those
two towns. Yet, not only did the CUP deny this fact, it refused to condemn an individual as
dubious as İhsan Fikri65 – although it was known that he had stirred up local public opinion
by publishing articles that accused the Armenians, notably of separatism and of preparing a
massacre of the Turkish population.
Also troubling are the orders that the undersecretary of state in the Interior Ministry,
Adıl Bey, issued the vali of Adana, demanding that he “protect the foreigners,” which, in the
Hamidian idiom, meant, “massacre the Armenians, but leave the citizens of foreign coun-
tries alone, for, if you do not, Europe is going to ask us to give an account of ourselves.” Far
from being sanctioned for what he said, Adıl was allowed to remain in his post and was later
promoted to the rank of counselor to the grand vizier.66 No less troubling was the behavior
of the “Action Army” led by Young Turk officers, which proceeded to perpetrate the second
Adana massacres on 25 April, the day it arrived in the area. What, finally, should we say
of the reactions of the Young Turk faction in parliament, which roughed up an Armenian
deputy who demanded that the truth be revealed and protested vigorously against the arrest
of vali Cevad and the military commander, Remzi Pasha (although both had been explicitly
found responsible for the Adana massacres)?
We can continue this list of the CUP’s interventions by inquiring into the conduct of
the Young Turk officers on the first court-martial established in Adana: sparing Cevad,
Remzi, İhsan Fikri and consorts, they inflicted the death sentence on ordinary Muslim
participants in the massacres and Armenians who had taken part in the resistance in
their neighborhoods. Did the Central Committee of Salonika, which kept an eye on
everything, fold its hands and watch as the sentences were meted out? It is more likely
that it chose the members of the court-martial from the ranks of its militants and gave
them instructions before sending them to Cilicia. İhsan Fikri’s case is one of the most
edifying: condemned to exile by the first court-martial after the general hue and cry pro-
voked by his initial acquittal, he was summoned to Constantinople to meet with Grand
Vizier Hilmi Pasha, whom he sought to intimidate by more or less openly threatening to
make revelations. He was consequently exiled to Beirut, where he died soon after under
mysterious circumstances.

It should also be pointed out that the Young Turks’ press organs had a direct hand in the
campaign, lasting from April to July, which consisted in depicting the Armenians as wholly
to blame for their own massacre. When this position became untenable, they fell silent.
Nothing, in any case, seems to have been left up to chance. Yusuf Kemal himself, one of
the two members of the parliamentary commission of inquiry, seems to have seen and said
things that did not please the committee, his divergences with his colleague Babikian not-
withstanding. Not only was his text not made public, but he was generously rewarded with
the post of supervisor of Turkish students in Paris – he was already a middle-aged lawyer at
the time – in order to remove him far from Istanbul. The committee’s most significant act,
however, was the promotion of the principal officers who had participated in the Cilician
massacres and the demotion or dismissal of those who had succeeded in maintaining order
in their military districts. Haci Muhammed, a major in the Albanian gendarmerie in Sis who
had protected the local Armenian population, was relieved of his command; Lieutenant-
Colonel Hursid Bey, who saved Hacın, was transferred to Rumelia. In contrast, the former
icra memur of Marash, Hüseyin Effendi, whom the court-martial had earlier sentenced to a
few months in prison for having helped organize the attack on the Armenians of his city, was
appointed examining magistrate in Dyarbekir.67
All these factors, which we have discussed in the preceding chapters, suggest at the very
least that the committee “provided accompaniment” for the massacres and handled the situ-
ation that resulted from them in accordance with Hamidian rules of conduct. Morever, there
are reasons for presuming that it organized them.
Because Constantinople’s “reaction” to the events was contemporaneous with the events
themselves, contemporaries initially thought that those responsible for carrying out the mas-
sacres were the same people as those who had organized them. They also thought, in light
of appearances and the Hamidian precedents, that these events could probably be chalked
up to reactionary circles or circles regarded as such. The people who planned the massacres
no doubt reasoned along similar lines. In any event, those who derived the greatest benefit
from the Constantinople affair were the Young Turks, who, capitalizing on the occasion,
simultaneously rid themselves of Abdülhamid (who was dethroned by parliament on 27 April
1909)68 and the entire liberal opposition.
The thesis that the Cilician affair resulted from a spontaneous upsurge of violence is
untenable. Only an order from the government that guaranteed the perpetrators impunity
could have convinced the populace to plunder and kill its neighbors. Moreover, one is hard
put to see how a governor, backed up by the region’s military commander, could have taken
the initiative to provoke a human and economic catastrophe of these proportions on their
own (it was later proved that the two of them coordinated the massacres at the local level).
In our view, there can be no doubt that these experienced men – General Remzi Pasha had
helped organize the 1895–6 Hamidian massacres in Marash – were given the order to launch
these massacres by their superiors. They were able to create the impression that they had
been overwhelmed by an uncontrollable situation. They also succeeded in “managing” the
flow of information the way it had been managed under Abdülhamid, on the basic principle
that the victims should be portrayed as the aggressors and the aggressors as the victims.
Who gave the order? Who told high-ranking civilian and military officials, as well as the
local notables, to organize these “spontaneous riots”? Was it the authorities, the state, the
government, the CUP? Everything suggests that it was only the sole institution that control-
led the army, the government, and the main state organs – namely, the Ittihadist Central
Committee – that could have issued these orders and made sure that they were respected.
In view of the usual practices of this party, the orders must have been communicated, in the
first instance, by means of the famous itinerant delegates sent out by Salonika, whom no vali
would have dared contradict.

What was the point of committing these massacres? Without giving a definite response
to this question, we can hazard a few plausible explanations. The economic dynamism of
the regions and its exceptional geographical situation, in which – Turkish circles frequently
underscored this point – the Armenian population, although it was a minority, had acquired
considerable influence in agriculture and commerce, could have incited the Young Turk
party, obsessed with the Turkification of the country, to strike a blow at the development of
a region that had been partially spared by the Hamidian massacres of 1895–6.
The Armenians Facing Young Turk Realities in

the Wake of the Cilician Massacres
The Adana massacres necessarily led the ARF to do more than just question its strategy of
alliance with the CUP and the plans of the Young Turks, whose assimilationist ambitions
were, it seems, no longer a secret from anyone. In this connection, Droschak’s editorialist
observed:
“Union,” as conceived by Rıza, simply means assimilation. [The Young Turks] wish to
do what great nations with a high level of civilization have not succeeded in doing
with ethnic minorities down to the present day. They think it has suddenly become
possible – the curiosity and political absurdity of the matter lies here – for the Ottoman
Empire to assimilate, at last, the other ethnic groups, although these groups have a cen-
turies-old cultural heritage and are, collectively, at an incomparably higher intellectual
level; they think the Empire will at last dissolve them in the predominant Turkism. En
attendant, the fraction that dominates Young Turkey is attempting to build up, by any
and all means, legal or illegal, a totally centralized system under the hegemony of the
Turkish element, a system in which the Ittihadist party will be able to say, like Louis
XIV, “l’État, c’est moi.”69
It seems that, by late April 1909, the ARF had taken the measure of its partner. However,
it must have said to itself that it had no choice but to maintain a dialogue with it. The only
other alternative was to take up arms again and go back underground.
The same editorialist, drawing up a balance sheet of the Young Turk committee’s work,
affirmed that
eight or nine months of the committee’s rule illustrate its profound, revolting indiffer-
ence to the other nations’ most vital demands. The Armenian element was the main
victim of the old regime; yet we have not observed, in the dictatorial committee’s
policy, the least plan or any serious, just attempt to help it survive, to bind up its bleed-
ing wounds. The land of the Armenians remains a breeding ground for the crimes of
the old regime; it is teeming with all the well-known hyenas of days past, the organizers
of plunder and massacres, decked out in official uniforms.70
Thus, the ARF’s criticisms of the Ittihadists had become more precise: the CUP was
designated for the first time as the “dictatorial committee.” Published in the ARF’s official
journal, this indictment, the first made by the ARF in the July 1908 revolution, also included
the charge that well-known criminals had become deputies thanks to the support of the
Young Turk “majority,” which had decreed that “all those favorable to decentralization” were
“traitors to the fatherland.”71
The fall of the Hilmi cabinet, brought on by the execution of the Cilician criminals, obvi-
ously constituted a warning for the Armenian deputies, who now understood that the limits

of the possible had been reached in their relationship with their Turkish colleagues. The
Armenian leadership, even while it held a firm position on the Cilician question, continued
to maintain that Armenia was an integral part of the Ottoman Empire and that the unity
of the empire was important to it. This is why all Armenian leaders endorsed the bill that
proposed to make military service obligatory for non-Muslims, too, and worked actively for its
adoption (in August 1909). They supported this reform because they believed that it would
help accelerate their integration and make them full-fledged Ottomans. It was their wish,
however, that the conscription of young Armenians coincide with abolition of the military
exemption tax, which had replaced the poll tax for non-Muslims, a levy that brought out the
difference in status between Turks and Christians too starkly. Fearful that religious pressures
would be brought to bear in the barracks, they also demanded that “mixed” battalions – the
formula that the government finally chose – be assigned chaplains enjoying the same status
as imams.72
Conscription, however, turned out to be a veritable nightmare for the young Armenian
recruits. Simon Zavarian, who spent the years 1909–10 on the plain of Mush, told his com-
rades in Istanbul about the bastinados, the acts of violence of all descriptions, the cata-
strophic sanitary conditions (there were no barracks in Mush), and the cases of desertion
that resulted. He observed that, in the past three months, there had been 30 deaths in a
group of fewer than 800 draftees. He added, however, that “the most terrible situation was
that of the Albanian [soldiers], half of whom had already disappeared.” The Dashnak chief
also reported Dr. Zavriev’s account of the recruits in Erzerum, where the previous year over
2,000 soldiers had died. “That is a rate,” he pointed out, “ten times higher than in foreign
countries.”73
During a brief stay in Sıvas, Sapah-Giulian encountered 500 Armenian conscripts from
throughout the area who had been assigned to a barracks in the city in which there were
only 60 to 70 Turks. Fearing a rebellion, the commander of the garrison had decided to
disarm the Armenian soldiers. The tensions between Armenian draftees and their Turkish
junior officers made themselves felt when the officers demanded that the draftees call them-
selves Osmanlıs, not Armenians. They made the Armenians do all the obligatory chores and
meted severe punishments out to them on the slightest pretext.74
Other political issues were only allusively mentioned at sessions of the chamber or, when
a party’s interests required it, were cautiously revealed in newspapers with the help of leaks.
There were, however, exceptional cases, as when on 25 November 1911, in a departure from
the rules, Zohrab held an almost two-hour-long speech before the deputies on the subject of
Turkish-Armenian relations.75 Zohrab made a rather pessimistic, but pragmatic, assessment
of the three years of the Constitutional regime. “It would be somewhat naive,” he said, “to
believe that, in this country, simply proclaiming the constitution could change the general
attitude of the Ottoman population [in whose eyes] Christians can never be the equals of
Muslims, the only ones who have rights.” Evoking the security of the populations of the prov-
inces, Zohrab recalled that the Armenian deputies in the Ottoman parliament had always
collaborated to carry out unspectacular joint activities; he felt that the time had now explain
things. The Armenians, he maintained, had to take the Turks’ immaturity into account
and to act with circumspection, since, as everyone knew, the constitution was an empty
shell, like the proclamation of the equality of all citizens before the law. In this regard, it was
significant that the Christian one-third of the empire’s population was represented by only
one-seventh of the parliamentary deputies, and that vice-presidencies or the chairmanships
of committees were altogether beyond the reach of non-Turks. If parliament itself did not
respect the rule of equality, it was not hard to imagine the mood of the Turkish population
as a whole. Taking Adana as an example, Zohrab also observed that the parliament and gov-
ernment had been unwilling to condemn these infamies and, at best, had eventually brought

only ordinary participants in the massacres to justice, while continuing to provide cover for
the main organizers of these atrocities. He himself, he said, had made a public declaration
before parliament, and everyone knew that he had been interrupted by his furious Turkish
colleagues. The same day, the government had been loudly applauded when it blamed the
Armenians for the violence. In these circumstances, Zohrab declared, he had been able
to gauge the depth of the Turkish political establishment’s blindness and, with the other
Armenian deputies, had contented himself with bringing the government to admit, after
several months of intense discussion, that “the Armenians bore no part of the blame” for
their own massacre, as parliament itself had ultimately acknowledged. As for the Armenians
who had been condemned to death in Hacın, he recalled it had been necessary to provoke
the resignation of Patriarch Turian to keep them from being executed. Turian had returned
to the patriarch’s throne only after Cavid and Talât had provided formal assurances that the
Young Turks would do what was necessary to restore calm in Cilicia and Armenia. All this
had been obtained, Zohrab maintained, thanks to a prudent political line without public
speechifying of the sort that could touch off violent reactions from the Turkish population.
To improve the lot of the Armenians of the high plateau, he added, “we have succeeded in
bringing about the appointment of honest valis in certain regions – Celal Bey in Erzerum,
Bekir Sâmi in Van, İsmail Hakkı Bey in Bitlis, and Cemal Bey in Adana.” It was all the more
significant for him that, when the valis prevented the Kurds from looting or extorting money
and tried to defend the Armenians’ rights, the same Kurds threatened to emigrate or revolt.
Moreover, Zohrab went on, there was a powerful pro-Kurdish “lobby” in Constantinople,
with Young Turks in its ranks, that approved of the policy of harassment practiced by the
nomads. Together with his colleagues, he had, he said, asked the government to propose a
law that would make it possible to appoint inspectors with executive powers to avoid intermi-
nable judicial proceedings and, at the very least, put an end to land theft. At their insistence,
the authorities had agreed to draw up a bill and had submitted it to parliament. However, it
had been vehemently rejected by a large majority of the deputies. After this setback, Zohrab
reported, the Armenians and certain Ittihadist deputies had considered proposing other for-
mulas that might lead to a legal resolution of the problems. These efforts, however, had not
yet borne fruit.
More broadly, Zohrab was of the view that the enfeeblement of the Young Turk party,
overwhelmed by ultra-nationalist circles, was an alarming development and that a general
massacre of the Armenians could erupt at any moment. To justify the government’s con-
duct, he added that it feared it would provoke a Kurdish revolt in the east if it improved the
Armenians’ lot at the Kurds’ expense, at the very moment when the situation in Thrace was
explosive and war was imminent.
This balance sheet shows that the Armenian authorities had continued to cultivate rela-
tions with the Young Turks. Some of Zohrab’s remarks indicated that their discussions had
brought the Armenians to the conclusion that it would be preferable to make no further
public mention of the Cilician question, to stop trying to bring about a discussion of it in par-
liament, and to resolve it discreetly with the Young Turks. In other words, Armenian circles
had come round to the view of the heads of the CUP that the insistent Armenian demands
for reparations and punishment for the criminals risked touching off new massacres.
We still have a trace of one of these meetings. It had been sought by a CUP delegate,
who had been sent to Constantinople in August 1909 to suggest to the ARF that it send
representatives to Salonika for a “friendly meeting.” Harutiun Shahrigian and Armen Garo
had several meetings with Midhat Şükrü and Dr. Nâzım there.76 As in every major crisis, the
CUP had made contact with the ARF in order, as it were, to assess its mood and renew its
alliance with the Armenian party. Despite the negative balance sheet cited above, which
the Dashnaktsutiun had published in its official organ shortly after the Cilician massacres, it

had not broken off its dialogue with the CUP; indeed, ARF militants even saved Talât, Halil
and Nâzım from the fury of the insurgents and answered the Ittihadists’ call for volunteers to
“save the constitution.” It remained convinced that the CUP was the only partner capable
of reforming the empire. After three long meetings, the representatives of the two commit-
tees finally drew up an agreement with the fundamental aims of carrying out a joint struggle
against conservative circles “for the defense of the fatherland and its territorial integrity”
and of reforming the administration “on the principle of decentralization.” The Dashnak
delegates had insisted that the last formula be included; the Young Turks had probably made
the concession to convince their allies of their good will. It is, however, doubtful that the
CUP had really taken a new tack on this question.

Chapter 4
The CUP’s First Deviations: The 1909,

1910, and 1911 Congresses
A
lthough the Armenian authorities dealt rather pragmatically with the events in
Cilicia, the violence in Adana nevertheless had a lasting negative impact on rela-
tions between Young Turks and Armenians. It dashed the hopes of the Dashnaks
and certain other circles in Istanbul that the new regime would reform the empire. Yet, as
we have already suggested, there was no real alternative: once the CUP had again secured
its hold on power and crushed the opposition in the wake of the events of 31 March, the
Ittihadists were obligatory negotiating partners.
The second CUP congress was convened on Ottoman soil, in Salonika, from 13 to 25
October 1909. It afforded the committee an opportunity to make a first assessment of its
work at the head of the country, but also to discuss questions basic to the party’s future.
We do not have much information on this congress, but it is an established fact that it was
marked by bitter debates between those for and against keeping the Central Committee a
secret organization and maintaining the armed forces’ supremacy over politics. Among the
newcomers to the CUP was Mehmed Ziya Gökalp,1 a delegate from Dyarbekir; his vision of
the future of the Turks’ empire and his conception of Ottoman society attracted attention in
Salonika.2 The congress offered him an ideal platform from which to expose the ideological
synthesis that would gradually gain sway over the movement in the following years. Another
personality distinguished himself at this congress thanks to the positions he took – Mustafa
Kemal, a delegate from Tripolitania. Against the advice of many, but in line with a recent
imperial decree, he defended the principle that the armed forces and political power should
be kept separate and that the former should be subordinated to the political authorities. He
thereby effectively condemned the existing situation – that is to say, the presence of a large
number of officers in the Merkez-i Umumî (the CUP’s Central Committee), such as Enver
Bey, who was a member of both the Ottoman general staff and the Central Committee.3
This congress also assessed the effects of the events of 31 March, and probably made deci-
sions bearing on the events in Cilicia, in which the Hilmi government had become bogged
down, as we have seen. Everything suggests that it was at this congress that the CUP first
seriously considered replacing Hilmi Pasha, who had been criticized for making too many
concessions and, among other things, publishing the famous circular of 11 August 19094 in
which all ambiguity as to the Armenians’ role – the “misunderstanding” of which they had
been the victims – had been swept aside and emphasis placed on their loyalty.
The French ambassador, Bompard, who was, as it were, an eyewitness to the 28 December
1909 resignation of the Hilmi cabinet and the appointment of Hakkı Bey, notes that grand
viziers were not CUP members, but
accorded total freedom of action to the cabinet members representing the CUP ... They
[the CUP] had eventually come to ignore the authority of the grand vizier ... If he

was not an obstacle, he remained a censor ... Hence they decided to rid themselves
of him.
This very diplomatic formulation reminds us that it had become risky to exercise the func-
tions of a grand vizier under the Young Turks. Pleasing or satisfying the CUP was no easy
task: “the whole problem consisted in finding a successor who was to the Committee’s taste
while ensuring that the grand vizier was not replaced by one of the ‘old hands.’ ”
One of the few members of the committee already able to take on the role of grand vizier,
Talât, either felt that he was not up to the task or had already taken the measure of the risks
the position entailed, given that an omnipotent Committee monitored, from behind the
scenes, the slightest move a government made. Hakkı Bey, a former law professor, had an
advantage, as many Young Turks had been students of his.5
While we have some idea of the nature of the relations between the CUP and the cabi-
net of ministers, we are much less well informed about the internal practices of the Central
Committee, which was secret by its very nature. Only the revelations of erstwhile Committee
members who later joined the opposition allow us to form some notion of the Committee’s
methods and secret objectives. One member, General Şerif Pasha, who quit the CUP on
25 March 1909 and went into exile in Paris, is among the principle commentators on the
party’s Turkist projects and its desire to mobilize all available means to assimilate or Turkify
the empire’s non-Turkish elements.6 In the CUP’s first ten months in power, down to the
“incidents of 31 March,” its obsession, Şerif affirms, was with the Albanians. Examination
of the Committee’s Albanian policy in this period, particularly the propaganda campaign
waged in the Young Turk press in Constantinople, reveals that the bloody repression that the
Ottoman army carried out in Albania was legitimized by charges of separatism. An attentive
contemporary observer remarked that “the slightest matter that happens to involve one or
another Albanian is immediately ascribed to the whole race, which the Committee ada-
mantly insists on casting in the role of an enemy of the new regime.”7 Notwithstanding the
Albanians’ decisive role in crushing the reaction of 31 March, to say nothing of their crucial
contribution to the July 1908 revolution, in early June 1909 the CUP used its newspapers to
launch a campaign of denigration against the Albanians. They were accused of having built
up a reactionary movement opposed to the constitution. This, in turn, seems to have been
sufficient grounds to launch a vast military operation in Albania, in which the country was
put to fire and the sword. The Albanians, the most faithful of the faithful, and a majority of
them Muslims, had until then been considered one of the pillars of the Ottoman Empire –
Abdülhamid’s personal guard, for example, was made up of Albanians. But, from the Young
Turks’ point of view, they had one major defect. Although they should have been the easiest
group to “Turkify,” they resisted Turkification, proving to be profoundly attached to their lan-
guage and national traditions. Measured by the CUP’s yardstick, the very modest demands
that flowed from this attachment were regarded as manifestations of separatism.
The confessions of Dr. Nâzım, one of the main ideologues on the Ittihad’s Central
Committee, shed light on this matter:
The pretensions of the various nationalities are a capital source of annoyance for
us. We hold linguistic, historical and ethnic aspirations in abhorrence. This and
that group will have to disappear. There should be only one nation on our soil, the
Ottoman nation, and only one language, Turkish. It will not be easy for the Greeks
and Bulgarians to accept this, although it is a vital necessity for us. To bring them to
swallow the pill, we shall start with the Albanians. Once we have gotten the better
of these mountaineers, who think they are invincible, the rest will take care of itself.
After we have turned our cannons on the Albanians, shedding Muslim blood, let the

The CUP’s First Deviations 121
gâvurs beware. The first Christian to move a muscle will see his family, house and vil-
lage smashed to smithereens. Europe will not dare raise its voice in protest or accuse
us of torturing the Christians because our first bullets will have been expended on
Muslim Albanians.8
The whole future strategy and ambition of the CUP is summed up here. This declaration
also distills the main elements of the party’s developing ideology. Social Darwinism plainly
informs these remarks. Violence is legitimized in the name of the higher interests of Turkism,
even if that violence is at this point envisaged only as a means of intimidation designed to
foster assimilation.
The period was also marked by the entry of two members of the Ittihad into the govern-
ment: Mehmed Cavid became minister of the economy in June 1909, while Mehmed Talât
was appointed interior minister in August of the same year. This justifies the supposition
that the CUP had decided to take a more direct role in running public affairs so that it
could translate its plans into action and secure its influence over the cabinet. However, the
Committee’s first experience of government was catastrophic. The two new Ittihadist min-
isters engaged in financial misdealing that was exposed in public, permanently besmirching
the party’s reputation. The trial of the murderers of Zeki Bey, an inspector in the Ottoman
Debt Administration and the editor-in-chief of the review Şerah, led to public revelations
about the methods of the Committee and its ministers. The fact that two CUP fedayis,
Mustafa Nâzım and Çerkez Ahmed, were taken to court meant that part of the Young Turk
system had been put on public display.9 The pretrial investigation had in fact revealed that
the murdered man, Zeki Bey, a specialist in economic matters, had in the course of his duties
been led to make a painstaking examination of the financial operations conducted by vari-
ous ministries. Thus, he had come to work, at the request of certain members of the Ittihad’s
Central Committee, on the “Maimon Affair,” the big loans taken out abroad by the minister
of finance, Cavid Bey, and also on the circumstances surrounding the concession for the
exploitation of bromine. In the course of this inquiry, however, Zeki Bey also discovered
“proof of political crimes committed by the Committee” that would enable him, he said, to
establish the guilt of Talât Bey, Cavid Bey, and “their friends.” After reading Zeki’s initial
report, the Ittihad Central Committee is supposed to have decided to force both Talât and
Cavid to resign (respectively, on 10 February and around 10 May 1911). The scandal, which
was still limited to the inner circle of the Young Turk leadership, apparently bred severe
internal tensions, as well as some bitterness toward Zeki. It was probably at this time that
Talât and Cavid or, more probably, their clan within the Central Committee decided to have
Zeki murdered.10
The two murderers have been irrefutably identified as fedayis of the Ittihad’s branch in
Serez, which was headed by Derviş Bey – by way of reward, he was “elected” to parliament
after the murder. The investigation also revealed that the April 1909 murder of the liberal
journalist Hasan Fehmi,11 as well as many other politically motivated homicides, such as that
of Ahmed Samin, had been the work of the same group of fedayis, which took its orders from
an inspector of the Central Committee in Salonika, Dr. Tevfik Rüştü (1873–1926),12 and the
deputy from Serez, Midhat Şükrü (Bleda), the party’s future secretary general and a close
collaborator of the two ministers. These revelations, made at the 7 November 1911 session of
the trial, momentarily shook the Committee.13 The court, however, doubtless concluded that
it was preferable to leave matters at that and refused “to subpoena the witnesses” capable of
explaining the internal workings of the CUP. All that one learns, in passing, from evidence
gathered at the court’s request by the Ottoman ambassador in Paris, is that Zeki was on the
point of publishing “important revelations about the Committee’s intrigues, the revolution-
ary movement of 31 March and the Adana incidents,” and that he knew that he “had been

condemned to death by the Committee” as a result.14 Despite the gravity of the charges
against them, Talât and Cavid did not turn against the witnesses and lawyer who denounced
them for ordering Zeki Bey’s murder.
At any event, the murder allowed the finance minister, Cavid Bey, to avoid trial for the
embezzlement that he had committed when the agreements on the foreign loans to
the Ottoman Empire were signed.15 It remains to be asked whether these “indelicacies” were
the fruit of a personal initiative of the minister’s or an order from the Central Committee. It
is probable that the Committee or, more exactly, one of its factions, fell back on expedients of
this sort to finance its own secret activities. Were this not the case, it is by no means certain
that it would have dispatched two of its best fedayis to assassinate a high-ranking official with
a reputation for integrity. In any case, even if very few of the facts were made public, this
scandal led to a crisis at the ministerial level, radicalized the opposition, and sowed serious
dissension in the CUP’s ranks:
Many officers who had risen up against the Hamidian regime, but not against the inal-
terable principles that had informed Turkish politics for centuries, sided with the dissi-
dents, with the result that these dissidents attained a majority not only in the Chamber
of Deputies, but even in the Party of Union and Progress.16
Between April and September 1911, this affair contributed to a split in the CUP. Zeki’s
investigation had been ordered by the faction of the party led by Colonel Mehmed Sadık,17
either because this faction had doubts about Talât’s and Cavid’s integrity or because it
was looking for a way to expel party members whose projects ran counter to its own. But
Sadık and his partisans did not succeed in destabilizing Talât’s faction, which kept control
of the Central Committee despite the charges with which it was faced. The pressure of
public opinion did, however, lead to Cavid’s indictment for financial misdealing in October
1911.18 The factional struggles were obviously older, but this affair had intensified existing
antagonisms.
The CUP congress that had convened in November 1910 in Salonika had already her-
alded the tensions to come, especially the seditious tendencies of certain military party cad-
res. A speech that Talât held at a preliminary “secret meeting” of the CUP, before 27 of its
members,19 provides valuable insights into the problems then confronting the Committee
and the questions that would be broached by the November congress. “According to the
constitution,” Talât said,
there is to be perfect equality between Muslims and non-believers. You know and
feel yourselves that that is absolutely impossible: both the sharia and our history
stand in the way of such equality. Hundreds of thousands of believers rebel at the
thought; however – this is the interesting point – it also runs counter to the feel-
ings of the unbelievers. They do not want to become Osmanlis; all the means set
in motion to develop a sentiment of Osmanliism have proved unsuccessful and will
remain so for a long time to come ... There can be no question of equality until the
day when the Ottomanization of all groups is an accomplished fact. That is a long,
arduous task.
Speaking of the administration of the state, Talât emphatically declared that, “there are still
many things that we ought to do in the country outside a governmental framework.”20 In
other words, general Turkification was a necessary condition for the adoption of the principle
of equality for all Ottoman subjects. While waiting for it to come about, the Committee had
to operate in secret.

The CUP’s First Deviations 123
The congress opened on 1 November 1910. Forty representatives were in attendance: 30

delegates from the vilayets and the seven members of the Central Committee of Salonika,
as well as Halil Bey (Menteşe),21 in his capacity as the party’s parliamentary leader, Ahmed
Nesimi (Sayman),22 the deputy from Constantinople, and Şeyh Safet, the deputy from Urfa.23
One of the first to take the floor was the secretary general of the congress, İhsan Bey. His
speech presaged the CUP’s radicalization. “The Committee of Adrianople,” he said,
demands that we take steps to diminish the weight of the Bulgarian population, either
by settling a large number of Muslim muhacirs in the vilayet of Adrianople or by liqui-
dating all the Christians hostile to Young Turkey ... The Central Committee, while it
is aware that these measures could prove useful, is unable to approve of them, because
of their rather impractical nature.24
We thus can thus see how the local Committee envisaged regulating the demographic “unbal-
ances” persisting in the vilayet of Edirne, their constant preoccupation being to ensure by
whatever means necessary that the region remain a part of the empire.
The occasional resistance that the Committee encountered in the state administration
also seemed to have interfered with its plans more than once. In order to realize its plans, the
Committee intended to utilize all the mechanisms of power and to mobilize all the means
available to the state. The congress consequently decided that “upper-level administrative
posts should be reserved for Committee members and the authorities should consult the
Central Committee before appointing anyone to them.”25 For the CUP, taking control of key
positions and placing men from its ranks in the state apparatus was much more than a means
of action; it was a crucial stake and an inevitable step on the way to harnessing the empire
to its ends. It was a sort of practical realization of its elitist ideology.
Another aspect of this ideology, Turkish nationalism, was evoked at the congress when the
conflict between the Central Committee and the Committee of Damascus was discussed. The
CUP found itself torn between its desire, which had been confirmed at the 1909 congress, “to
allow only Turks to serve on the Central Committee” and its hegemonic ambitions in the
Arab vilayets. The Committee of Damascus, a majority of whose members were Arabs, “had
expressed a desire to send Arab delegates to the Central Committee of Salonika” but had met
with a firm refusal from the Ittihad’s congress.26 In the inner circles, Turkism obviously took
priority over the immediate interests of the empire and the development of the movement.
“Defense of the fatherland” and the affirmation that Anatolia – especially its eastern
provinces – was “Turkish” were at the center of the discussions. The Committee decided to
ask the relevant ministers to increase the budget for settling muhacirs in the regions in ques-
tion: “A new commission will be set up in Erzerum to help Muslim émigrés from the Caucasus
and Turkestan who have already manifested a desire to come to Turkey to settle there.”27 The
provinces with heavy Armenian populations already had the Committee’s entire attention.
The aim here was to reinforce, by means of this voluntarist policy, the “Turkish” presence in
these areas and to implant culturally correct populations in the heart of the territory inhab-
ited by Armenians – populations on which the movement could count in the future.
The “non-Muslim nationalities,” for their part, were to see to it that they behaved – that
is, that they consented to renounce their identity and language and melt into the Turkish
element. To that end, it was necessary to convince them of the Committee’s good will,
even while enfeebling them.28 One of the rare delegates to affirm that this position was
hard to maintain was the delegate from Istanbul, Ahmed Nesimi (Sayman). “The number
of Christian deputies in parliament,” he observed, “is far from proportional to the number of
Christians in the Empire ... If we exclude them everywhere, we will be very hard put to bring
them over to our side.”29

The Central Committee elected by the congress comprised30 Haci Adıl (Arda), the new
secretary general,31 Dr. Nâzım, Eyüb Sabri (Akgöl),32 Ömer Naci,33 Mehmed Ziya (Gökalp),
Abdüllah Sabri34, and Midhat Şükrü Bey.35
This congress’s decisions were, of course, not all translated into acts in the following
months, which saw above all a recrudescence of repressive policies directed at the Albanians.
The CUP’s response to the local problems in Albania was violence. No fewer than 50,000
troops were sent to Albania in 1910 to “disarm” the population, leading to a veritable slaugh-
ter that was naturally followed by revolts in 1911 and 1912. The expenditures made necessary
by these military operations caused, moreover, a serious economic crisis in the country. At
the parliamentary session on 22 November 1910, one of the secretaries of the finance com-
mittee, Zohrab, announced that, to his regret, the military operations conducted that year
had resulted in the loss of 5,000 men and had cost the budget 69 million franks.36
The French ambassador in Istanbul observed in a 3 September 1911 letter to his minister
that
increasingly, the Committee is turning toward Asia. The reason is that its activity
in Macedonia is well and truly finished: Albanians, Epiriots, Bulgarians and Greek-
speaking populations are openly opposed to the CUP ... The Committee has no illusions
about the collapse of its prestige in the European provinces but it now seems inclined
resolutely to counterbalance the always dubious sentiments of the Macedonians with
the weight of its Asiatic loyalties.37
This observation illustrates the effects of the Young Turk government’s repressive pol-
icies in the Balkans: a concrete translation, as it were, of the plans envisaged earlier by
Dr. Nâzım.38
The disastrous consequences of the party’s previous choices notwithstanding, the next
CUP congress, inaugurated in late September 1911 in Salonika, did not consider modifying
previous policy, reaffirming the party’s position vis-à-vis non-Turks in general and Albanians
in particular.39 It was still a question of “teaching the rebels a lesson.” Although tensions
materialized in the course of the congress, they were due above all to the repercussions of
the indictment of Mehmed Cavid, also known as the “Maimon affair,” which occurred as
the congress was underway, as well as the growing influence of the opposition led by former
Ittihadists such as Colonel Sadık.
The stability of the Committee’s positions doubtless explains why its make-up hardly
changed. The seven members of the previous leadership body – Haci Adıl Bey (secretary gen-
eral), Mehmed Ziya (Gökalp), Eyub Sabri, Dr. Nâzım, Abdüllah Sabri, Ahmed Midhat Şükrü,
and Ömer Naci – were joined by Mehmed Talât, Ahmed Nesimi, Halil Bey (Menteşe), Ali
Fethi (Okyar),40 and Dr. Hüseyinzâde Ali (Turan).41 It should be noted that the arrival in the
CUP’s upper echelons of Hüseyinzâde Ali, one of the two surviving members (along with
Mehmed Reşid) of the original CUP, seems to have reinforced the hard-line Turkists’ camp
led by Ziya (Gökalp).

Chapter 5
Armenian Revolutionaries and Young

Turks: The Anatolian Provinces and
Istanbul, 1910–12
D
espite the threats of massacre hanging over the Anatolian provinces after the vio-
lence in Cilicia, observers concur that the socio-economic situation there improved
somewhat after the July 1908 revolution. One of the three founders of the ARF noted
in a letter that “this devastated country is on the way to recovery. In the space of a year, the
population’s living standard has risen by at least twenty-five percent.”1 He also emphasized,
rather optimistically, that the tribalism that had paralyzed the region for centuries was in
decline, for, “among the Kurds as well, the level of consciousness has begun to rise. In many
places, the Kurdish peasants are protesting side-by-side with the Armenians against the prac-
tices of the ağas.”2 He observed, finally, that even the openly Islamist discourse of tribal
chiefs such as Musabeg and the sheikhs, who called for “unity around the sharia,” “met with
resistance from the Kurds in certain regions.”3
The basic question preoccupying not only the local authorities but also the sedentary
populations and the local Dashnak and Ittihadist Committees was the Kurdish tribal chief-
tains’ attitude toward the new government and its policies. Thus, the Committee of Union
and Progress found itself confronted with a complex equation: it wished to develop in the
area, but could do so only if it successfully wooed local tribal forces, even while cultivating
“privileged” relations with the Armenian Committees. These local constraints no doubt
explain why the CUP was unable to apply a uniform policy of collaboration with the ARF.
Hence, it is not surprising that the Dashnak Committees of the eastern provinces did not
have close relations with the local Young Turk clubs, “whose members were all ağas.”4 It is no
more surprising that whenever a high-ranking official tried to resolve problems such as restor-
ing property seized by the Kurdish begs, as did Tahir Pasha, the vali of the vilayet of Bitlis,5
which included Mush, the local CUP club put pressure on Salonika to have him recalled. It
is probable that the resolution of land disputes, constantly postponed by the authorities, was
thwarted by the political influence or barely veiled threats of the tribal chieftains. The con-
trol commissions that Istanbul dispatched to study the land question accordingly returned to
the capital without having accomplished serious work.6
As far as security went, the situation was not the same everywhere. Generally speaking,
the areas on the plains were less exposed to danger than the mountain districts. Thus, the
Sasun district, especially the kaza of Khut, was almost constantly threatened by attacks
from Kurdish tribes, who committed a number of murders there in summer 1911 and stole
hundreds of sheep.7 These were anything but isolated cases. Before the July 1908 revolu-
tion, one of the activities of the Armenian fedayis had consisted precisely in struggling
against nomadic tribes who attacked villagers. Once the fedayi commandos were disarmed,

however, this task devolved, in theory, on the gendarmerie or even the army, both of which
were sometimes hard put to control the nomads and usually arrived too late. After discuss-
ing these problems, Zavarian concluded that the only way to put an end to these exactions
would be to disarm the Kurdish tribes, such as the Şeko tribe, “since it is impossible to arm
the Armenians.”8
Indeed, the question of self-defense and the disparity between the situations of the
armed Kurds and the defenseless sedentary population recurred again and again. A year
never went by in which the Armenians, and particularly the ARF, did not raise the problem
with the government or the Committee of Union and Progress. They did so, for example, in
November 1812, when the Western Bureau demanded that the Council of Ministers agree
to the stationing of guards in the villages, although they hardly had illusions about the kind
of answer they would receive: “I doubt that they will accept,” Zavarian wrote.9 The ARF
knew only too well that its activities under the Hamidian regime had left a lasting mark on
the minds of the Young Turks, who did not want to hear about the legalization of village
militias, over which the Dashnaks would inevitably gain control. The Dashnaks, for their
part, had no other choice than to continue to work legally for the progress of the empire,
from which a good part of the Armenian population was already profiting, especially in
urban areas.
The social progress and the development of intellectual life and the educational system
toward which many reconverted ex-revolutionaries were working did not go unnoticed by
the Central Committee of Salonika. According to the parliamentary deputy from Van,
Vartkes Seringiulian, the Committee found this alarming, and after its October 1911 con-
gress adopted a more radical policy.10 Seringiulian detected proof of this change in the fact
that, after the congress, the Young Turk clubs in the provinces were more overtly hostile
to Armenian circles.11 He mentions a confidential circular sent to these local clubs by the
Ittihad’s Central Committee late in 1911, which asked them to work discreetly toward lim-
iting Armenian activity in the educational, cultural, and economic fields.12 Papazian also
observed an unmistakable rapprochement with Kurdish circles that had until then main-
tained a sullen opposition to the CUP: the party drew closer even to notorious bandits, who
now began persecuting the sedentary populations even more intensely than before, without
intervention by the authorities. Moreover, alarming information from the provinces impelled
the Armenian deputies to demand that the grand vizier, Ferid Pasha, send a commission of
inquiry there. The proposition was, however, rejected by a majority of parliament.13
Still other signs pointed to the shift in CUP strategy for the provinces. Two important
ARF cadres, Carmen14 in Mush and Marzbed15 in Bitlis, were subjected to outright admin-
istrative harassment, which prevented them from engaging in political activity of any kind
in their respective regions. Further to the east, to the south of Lake Van, the young school
inspector of Moks was murdered under atrocious circumstances: the party’s press condemned
the act, complaining above all about the fact that there was no real investigation of the
crime.16 Seringiulian was even imprisoned for two days in his capacity as director of the
Istanbul daily Azadamard, which the authorities attacked for its critical tone. The CUP did
not react in any way, ignoring the interventions of its official allies.17
The situation in the western Anatolian provinces, which had a more varied ethnic
make-up and a large Turkish-speaking majority, seems to have been quite different. The
interpenetration of the various historical groups there endowed these regions with a cultural
cohesion that was clearly superior to that of the tribal zones in the east. Thanks to the
account of the Hnchak leader Stepanos Sapah-Giulian,18 who traveled through the regions
of Samsun, Merzifun/Marzevan, Amasi, and Sıvas from May to August 1911, we understand
better how the local Committees of the SDHP and the Ittihad clubs worked, and how the
Turkish, Greek, and Armenian populations perceived both the changes that had taken place

Armenian Revolutionaries and Young Turks 127
in the country since 1908 and also the activity of the “gentlemen” who came from the capital
to preach the good word.
Hardly had he got off the boat on 10 May 1911 when Sapah-Giulian was invited to visit
Samsun’s Ittihadist club. He and the parliamentary deputy Murad (Hampartsum Boyajian)
were welcomed to Samsun by the local Unionist leadership, made up of Muslim clergymen,
a few military men, and above all the CUP inspector for the regions of Samsun, Sıvas, and
Canik, Mustafa Necib. Necib “decided everything” there, and he was particularly concerned
with replacing government officials with Ittihadists.19 That very evening, the city’s Hnchak
club organized a meeting in a room in the elementary school where not long before the
Young Turk propagandist Ömer Naci – a member of the Central Committee – had given a
talk that had had some influence on Armenian circles, especially among Armenian mer-
chants. Among the audience, Sapah-Giulian noticed many Turks, often civil servants and
Ittihadists, sitting in the first rows, as well as Armenian-speaking Greeks. On the lecturer’s
own account of his talk, he unsparingly denounced the nationalism that was developing in
the empire and conducing to its ruin. The Ittihadists listened in silence, taking notes.20
On Sunday, 11 May, in the same room, Sapah-Giulian gave a second lecture on “eco-
nomic questions.” There were again Young Turks in the audience, accompanied by interpret-
ers. Faithful to his habits, the Hnchak leader condemned the Young Turks’ policies in his
lecture: they were calculated, he said, to bring about the economic ruin of non-Turks and
put the economy in the hands of the dominant nation.21 Obviously, these virulent attacks
did not leave the Young Turk circles indifferent; they were worried about the impact that
Sapah-Giulian’s words would have on the local population. The occasion for an exchange
on these questions arose naturally because it was the custom in these societies to pay a visit
to one’s “guests.” An Ittihadist delegation, with Mustafa Necib at its head, went to Samsun’s
Hnchak club and began a conversation on the subject of Armenian-Turkish relations, “which
are no longer as warm as they were in the first months of the Constitutional revolution.” The
reason, Sapah-Giulian writes, was that the Adana massacres had dampened the ardor of the
most enthusiastic, as had the government’s and the CUP’s policy, especially its “narrowly
nationalistic” position. There was no lack of arguments in defense of the Committee’s cen-
tralizing policies, which according to Mustafa Necib were the sole means of maintaining the
country’s unity. Necib even contended that “the least step toward decentralization [would]
spell the destruction of this country.”22 Even while criticizing the Hnchaks for their decen-
tralization plan, the Ittihadist inspector conceded that the Hnchak clubs were carrying out
work of considerable importance for the education of the people, whatever their nationality,
and stimulating them to take initiatives to develop the country.23
On Tuesday, 16 May, Sapah-Giulian arrived in Merzifun, where he was welcomed by a
representative of the kaymakam and a crowd of 3,000 people, including Turks, before receiv-
ing, that evening, a courtesy visit from the local Ittihadists, both Turkish and Armenian. On
the morning of Wednesday, 17 May, he took part in a meeting of the city’s Hnchaks; the local
branch of the party had 450 male and 30 female members.24 All the problems of daily exist-
ence were discussed there. Thus, we learn that, in setting local tax rates, Armenian houses
were systematically over-evaluated and Turkish houses under-evaluated. In passing, Sapah-
Giulian mentions that after the constitution was restored, mayoral elections were organized
in Merzifun. An Armenian won the election against another candidate, but his victory was
contested in a complaint lodged with the mutesarif of Amasia, on the pretext that people
who were ineligible to vote had participated in the balloting. A commission of inquiry con-
firmed the Armenian’s election, yet the vali of Sıvas invalidated it. According to information
obtained locally, the vali had acted on instructions from the Central Committee of Salonika,
which is supposed to have said that “posts of this kind should not be given to Armenians for
the time being, since the Muslim population might find that somewhat irritating.”25

Let us note, finally, that a boycott of Armenian companies and stores had been launched
in Merzifun in 1911 and that Armenian tailors and shoemakers had been obliged to take
on Turkish apprentices.26 This indicates that the groundwork for the Young Turk project to
“nationalize” the economy was already being laid in this period.
The theme of the meeting held in Samsun on 17 May 1911 in a room in the Sahagian
school was “the national question and the social-democracy,” one of the Hnchaks’ favorite
subjects. No fewer than 1,500 people were in attendance, including the local Turkish and
Armenian Ittihadists. To buttress his attack on the CUP’s Turkism, Sapah-Giulian pointed
out in his talk that the empire was made up of several nations, not just one.27 The Hnchaks’
relations with the leader of Merzifun’s Young Turks, Osman Effendi, were no more than
courteous. Effendi, who supervised everything that went on in the city, followed the instruc-
tions he received from the Ittihadist Central Committee to the effect that all decisions
“involving vital state interests” should be the sole province of members of the club.28 The
Hnchaks’ meeting with the kaymakam, a Greek by the name of Constantine, was distinctly
warmer: the kaymakam did not hesitate to evoke the problems he had been having ever since
he had refused to join the CUP.29 At a second meeting, which was attended by the police
chief, Mahir Effendi, an Armenian from Van who had been kidnapped as a young child and
raised in a Turkish family in Merzifun, people’s tongues were untied: the kaymakam revealed
to Sapah-Giulian that the Ittihadists were secretly striving to whet the Muslim population’s
hostility to non-Turks, adding that the clubs were arming their members. He warned him
that he should be very careful and not be lulled by the Young Turk militants’ demonstrations
of courtesy and respect.30
The Hnchak revolutionary’s next stop was the village of Sim Haciköy, where he was wel-
comed on 25 May 1911 by a large crowd of Greeks, Turks, and Armenians. Shortly thereafter,
Mustafa Necib, who seemed to be keeping tabs on Sapah-Giulian, paid him an impromptu
visit at the village’s Hnchak club, accompanied by the mayor and municipal physician.31 At
the banquet that the Greeks and Armenians of the village gave in honor of their Armenian
guest, the Young Turks and Hnchaks found themselves in a veritable face-off. The local
Young Turk club had been working to create Committee schools in which “everyone was
educated the same way, since all were Ottomans,” whereas the Armenian and Greek social-
democrats ran their own school. In this confrontation over the school system, two different
conceptions of Ottoman society clashed. Apparently, only the mufti, who was also a rich
landowner, was in a position to oppose the Young Turks without fear of reprisals.32 When
Sapah-Giulian met with him, the Muslim clergyman unsparingly criticized the Unionists,
whom he considered to be usurpers “concerned about their personal interests before all else”
and always intent on divesting people of their money on various pretexts: for example, to buy
battleships, open a school, or support the army.33 The mufti also pointed out that the public
schools were being neglected because they had been replaced by Committee schools “where
children are taught to say that they are Turks.” Finally, he reported that Mustafa Necib and
his supporters had come to see him to suggest that he not lease his land to Armenian farmers
but instead to Muslim peasants.34 All this incidental information, gleaned in passing, makes
it possible to paint, touch by touch, a picture of everyday Ittihadism and the way the CUP’s
nationalist ideology was translated into practice in the provinces.
In late May, Sapah-Giulian arrived in Amasia, where he was welcomed by the city’s parlia-
mentary deputy, İsmail Pasha, members of the local Young Turk club and a group of Hnchak
militants (the party had 350 members in the city) headed by Minas Ipekjian and Dr. Haigazun
Tabibian.35 This stay in a city that was reputed to be prosperous made it possible to get a sense
of the climate prevailing in the provinces after the revolution. The traditional meeting that
was held at the Hnchak clubhouse and attended again by many Young Turks had as its subject
“the SDHP and the parliamentary system.” It attracted big crowds and provided an occasion

for sharp debates. But Sapah-Giulian’s 31 May visit to the Ittihadist club was still more instruc-
tive. There he encountered people playing backgammon and smoking water pipes, all of them
Turkish notables from the city.36 Tabibian explained to his guest from Constantinople that
most of the Armenians had joined the CUP at the time of the July 1908 revolution, the better
to forget the horrors of the past. That, however, had lasted a scant two or three months. Their
ardor had cooled when delegates dispatched from Salonika arrived, for the Armenian mili-
tants had not been invited to the meetings and were excluded from the leadership. A circular
is even supposed to have been sent from the Ittihadist Central Committee demanding that
local leadership bodies be limited to Muslims. The upshot was that the Armenians had left
the CUP and since then were “less generous” toward it.
Yet another of Tabibian’s revelations is worth pausing over. He affirmed that, in 1909,
a friend and the president of Amasia’s Young Turk club, Halim Effendi, had reported that
during the Adana massacres the Central Committee of Salonika had sent the club a wire
that it had also sent to other eşrafs, demanding that they attack the Armenians. It was, in
any case, an established fact that the Muslim population had poured into the marketplace
and that Halim and Tabibian had immediately gone to see the mutesarif, Çerkez Bekir Sâmi
Bey37 (who claimed he was of Armenian origin), to ask that he intervene. Sâmi had gone
to the market and made a declaration: “If you want to attack the Armenians, you will have
to pass over my dead body; if you dare to attack the Armenians, I will appeal to my Çerkez
compatriots in Tokat and they will massacre all of you.” After two tension-fraught days, calm
was restored. Halim was relieved of his functions as president of the local CUP. It should also
be noted that the parliamentary deputy İsmail and his entire family opposed the planned
attack. Many suspected Mustafa Necib, who had already brought all the CUP clubs in the
region under his control, of having instigated these “disorders.”38 Among other facts reported
by Sapah-Giulian, one notes that the policy of “nationalizing” the economy was at work here
as well, reinforced by systematic interventions of the Ittihadist club in local industrial and
commercial affairs. Thus, people posted at the entry to the city advised arriving merchants
not to sell their goods to Armenians while others at the market suggested to customers that
they not buy from Armenians. There were also reports that orchards and vegetable gardens
had been subject to repeated attacks.39 While it is not possible to verify all this information,
it nevertheless attests to a certain hostility to the Armenian population and great uneasiness,
apparently warranted, among the Armenians.
Sapah-Giulian’s stay in Tokat, the next stop on his journey, showed that here, as in the
towns he had already visited, the SDHP held the dominant position among the Armenians
and wielded indisputable political influence even if the party was opposed to the conserv-
atism of local society. At the lecture organized in the public meeting room, not a single
woman was present, for “custom still dominated life [in Tokat].”40
Sıvas constituted a crucial stage of Sapah-Giulian’s journey. His arrival had obviously
been announced beforehand: all the government officials and notables welcomed him at the
city gates and escorted him to the Hnchak club, which had no fewer than six hundred mem-
bers in 1911.41 The atmosphere in Sıvas was very tense: a considerable degree of insecurity
reigned in the city, so the Armenians made plans to organize surveillance of the neighbor-
hoods and the market, especially at night.42 In the region, in which the Armenian presence
was much more conspicuous, trade, the crafts and transportation were largely in Armenian
hands. At the market, the Armenians complained about endless shake-downs by Turkish
officers and notables. They were often told that “the Constitution will not suffice to free you
from our clutches; you are our merchandize; we will treat you as our needs dictate.”43 Such
remarks illustrate the particular status each group had.
Upon his arrival in Sıvas on 28 June 1911, Sapah-Giulian learned that Mustafa Necib
had come to town shortly before him and had tried to sow dissent among the two Armenian

political parties. In this city on the borders of the Armenian homeland, the ARF, which
was omnipresent in the eastern provinces, and the SDHP, implanted mainly in the western
regions, coexisted without problems. The two Committees had even decided, the Hnchak
leader writes, to organize a joint self-defense plan. While they had divergent positions –
the Dashnaks remained attached to the idea of cooperating with the Ittihadists, while the
Hnchaks maintained a frankly hostile position that they proclaimed in public – recurrent
provocations and a number of suspicious signs had ultimately alarmed the local Dashnak
Committee, which had moved closer to the SDHP, the dominant party in Sıvas.44
In the months preceding Sapah-Giulian’s visit, the Armenians had noticed that numer-
ous meetings were being held in the homes of the town’s leading Turkish citizens. It had,
however, finally become clear that the participants belonged to Sıvas’s anti-Ittihadist circles;
it followed that the meetings were not aimed directly at the Armenians. Another event had
left its mark: poisoned sweets had been scattered through the streets of the city’s Armenian
neighborhoods and children had unsuspectingly picked them up and eaten them. Two had
died and several others had to be treated for poisoning. People suspected the Ittihad of this
vile act.45 The tensions in Sıvas had not, then, been engendered by the Turkish-Armenian
face-off alone, but were also due to a latent conflict between certain circles of notables and
the Young Turk authorities. It would also appear that rumors had been put in circulation in
order to turn Muslim public opinion against the Armenians. Sapah-Giulian reports that, at
a meeting he held at the Hnchak club with Turkish hojas, the hojas asked, with obvious con-
cern, if it was true that the Armenian patriarch had demanded the right to attend meetings
of the Council of Ministers along with the şeyh ul-İslam. Many people were convinced that
Mustafa Necib had been spreading rumors of this sort, although it was common knowledge
that the SDHP was precisely the only party to advocate the abolition of all traces of religion
from the Council of Ministers.46 Sapah-Giulian, who had firsthand experience of the debate
on the separation of church and state from his student days at the École des sciences poli-
tiques in Paris and, later, his exile in the French capital, knew what was meant by a secular
state. But he was also aware that, in Sıvas, he found himself in a world for which such a
debate was something altogether alien.
In the aggregate, all the details passed in review here provide a much clearer picture of the
policies implemented by the CUP. It was the Ittihad’s activities in the provinces that allowed
the Armenian parties to evaluate the concrete contents of the program elaborated by the
CUP’s Central Committee. Here the Unionists found it harder than in the capital to veil
their ethnic-nationalistic intentions.
However, the spring 1912 decision to call early elections for parliament forced the parties
to find compromises and gloss over their differences. In Van, the authorities announced a
census of the vilayet’s male population. “In view of the care the inhabitants of the city take
to hide, to avoid either military service or taxes, the numbers given below,” the French vice-
consul wrote in a report, “are most certainly underestimates.” The incumbent members of
parliament – Tevfik Bey, Vahan Papazian, and Şeyh Tahir – were hoping to be re-elected
with the support of the Ittihad and the ARF, who had concluded an electoral pact. Their
opponents – the Hnchaks, the Ramgavars, and the Liberal Entente – had likewise joined
forces in support of their candidates.47
In Erzerum, Vartkes Seringiulian and Armen Garo were candidates for re-election
and again had the support of both the ARF and the CUP.48 Both men were re-elected, as
were Murad in Sis-Kozan, Nazareth Daghavarian in Sıvas, and Kegham in Mush. Vahan
Bardizbanian, a Dashnak physician elected in Smyrna on the CUP list, was among the new-
comers to parliament.49 In Siirt, a dark horse by the name of Nâzım Bey won a seat.50 Nâzım
was distinguished by the fact that he had a Muslim father and an Armenian mother, a situa-
tion that was extremely rare at the time. He was something of a symbol for the Ittihad, which

dreamed of making all Ottoman subjects into Turkish citizens. In Van, Vahan Papazian was
replaced by Arshag Vramian,51 who had much greater prestige in his own party and also
the advantage that he was Turkish-speaking and well known in Constantinople Unionist
circles.
Armenians and Young Turks in Istanbul:

A Marriage of Reason (1911–12)
When the Tripolitanian War broke out with the Italian landing on 4 October 1911, tension
in the capital was at its height. This act of colonialist aggression led, as was often the case
in Turkey, to increased hostility toward the empire’s Christian population. Vahan Papazian
notes how badly the non-Turk deputies were treated in parliament. “You would think,” he
writes, “that we were the ones who were fighting them in Tripolitania.”52
The war came at the wrong time, for it upset the CUP’s plans, whose initial effects in
the Anatolian provinces we have just discussed. The creation of the Türk Yurdu Cemiyet
(Association of the Turkish Homeland), founded on 3 July 1911 by Mehmed Emin (Yurdakul),
Ahmed Ağaoğlu and Yusuf Akçura,53 testifies to the nationalists’ growing influence over the
Young Turk movement, gained at the expense of the militants attached to Islam and existing
institutions. Thus, the Committee was riven by antagonistic currents, and it seems reason-
able to suppose that the radical orientation of the nationalists impelled many others to join
the opposition. The conspicuous departure of Colonel Sadık and the young officers in his
movement, who immediately joined the opposition, dealt the Ittihad a severe blow.
The opposition had been almost entirely renewed after its liquidation in April 1909. It was
reorganized with the foundation, on 21 September 1911, of a new liberal party, Hürriyet ve
Ittilâf Fırkasi (Party of Freedom and Understanding). Led by Damad Ferid Pasha (president),
Colonel Sadık Bey (vice-president), Dr. Rıza Nur, Şükrü al-Aseki, and Rıza Tevfik, the new
party brought together virtually all existing oppositional currents, conservative and liberal
alike, and had the support of many different Greek and Armenian circles.54 Sapah-Giulian
notes that the day the Ittilâf and the SDHP signed an agreement to cooperate, “the Ittihadists’
apprehension was palpable.” He adds that his party was able to influence the Ittilâf’s politics
thanks to this collaboration, making it more progressive, and that the SDHP played a role
in organizing and educating its branches in the provinces.55 The CUP had united everyone
against it; the upshot was a triumph for the opposition in the Constantinople by-elections
of November 1911.
The ARF’s sixth congress – the first congress of the party to be convened in Constanti-
nople – was held in the same period, from 17 August to 17 September 1911. The party was
now confronted with an issue it could no longer put off: whether or not it should maintain
its alliance with the Committee of Union and Progress. In the ARF, too, the opposition to
collaborating with a committee whose nationalistic ideology had become common knowl-
edge was growing. Papazian writes in his memoirs that the party had already decided to break
off relations with the CUP.56 But this is highly unlikely. On more neutral accounts, many
young people in the capital made it known that they were unhappy with the sixth congress’s
decision to pursue its dialogue with the CUP; the distinction between that and Papazian’s
statement is worth emphasizing.57 Rostom, one of the ARF’s founders, observed after arriving
in Constantinople in order to take part in the congress that the ARF’s bureau in Pera was
no longer responding to invitations from the branches in the neighborhoods and had lost
touch with its own militants. It was probably in order to deal with the fronde, which jeop-
ardized the party’s credibility, that a meeting was called at the ARF’s club in Pera. At this
meeting, Aknuni, H. Shahrigian, Arshag Vramian, Ruben Ter Minasian, and others finally
agreed to renew the party’s pact with the CUP if the Ittihadists agreed to their conditions

of 1) a struggle against domestic insecurity; 2) tax reduction; 3) abandonment of the policy

of Turkification and Islamicization; 4) creation of genuine equality before the law, a consti-
tutional regime and civil liberties.58 It might well be asked, however, whether this was not
a mere tactic designed to reduce the internal opposition to the prevailing line. Indeed, the
Dashnak leadership in Constantinople cultivated an ambiguous attitude toward the Young
Turks. Its relations with the CUP had certainly cooled after the massacres in Cilicia, but the
break between the two parties had never been consummated.
Isolated in the face of a reinvigorated opposition, the CUP regained the initiative by set-
ting out to negotiate a new agreement with the ARF. The resulting discussions, however,
remained secret: they are not mentioned in any official ARF publication. We have to turn to
an oppositional newspaper to form some idea of them.59 Sapah-Giulian revealed that there
were in fact two agreements. One, signed on 11 November, was for internal use and bore
on the coming legislative elections. The contents of the other, secret agreement, signed in
January 1912, have never been made public. The Hnchak leader, however, describes them in
detail in a series of articles on the relations between the Dashnaks and Ittihadists that was
published 18 months after the agreement was concluded. Here we make the rather surprising
discovery that most of the stipulations of this agreement concern Persia – more precisely, the
activity of the Dashnak military chief Ephrem Khan. Thanks to this document, we see for
the first time that the ARF’s transnational dimension and its activities outside the Ottoman
Empire constituted, in certain circumstances, a bargaining chip in its negotiations with the
CUP. In other words, to win concessions from its Young Turk allies in the Ottoman context,
the Dashnaktsutiun occasionally had to throw its influence in other areas into the scales.
Persia, the case to hand, had become much more than a field of action for Dashnak fedayis
on mission. Ephrem Khan and his commandos were the veritable initiators of the Iranian
constitutional revolution; they comprised a force that put itself at the head of the country’s
progressive groups and familiarized them with revolutionary ideas.60
The January 1912 secret agreement stipulated, notably, that the ARF would curb Ephrem
Khan’s activities in Persia, which had encouraged Russian ambitions. The party agreed not
to conduct armed operations in the country and not to involve Ottoman subjects in its other
activities there. According to Sapah-Giulian, the Western Bureau immediately sent the cor-
responding instructions to its Committee in Persia and also decided to review its pro-Russian
positions, calling a halt to the activity of Ephrem, who was reputed to be following directives
from Moscow.61 Thus, the Western Bureau is supposed to have firmly opposed Ephrem’s
attack on the city of Hamadan. Sapah-Giulian goes so far as to speculate that the ARF might
have been involved in the 6 May 1912 assassination of the leader of the Persian revolution,
which took place under mysterious conditions at the entrance to the city.62
The Committee of Union and Progress, however, apparently did not confine itself to
concluding pacts with the Dashnaks. It is highly probable that it also encouraged the ARF
to engage in a dialogue with the Hnchaks aimed at bringing them into an alliance with it.
The ARF’s way of approaching the SDHP is quite interesting. The maneuvering began at a
time when the Hnchak leader, Sapah-Giulian, whose hostility to this plan was well known,
was touring the provinces.63 Officially, the two Armenian parties were negotiating an elec-
toral agreement. However, the driving force behind this rapprochement was the Marxist
journalist Parvus, a Russian Jew living in Germany. Parvus, a socialist who had entered into
relations with a few Hnchak leaders in Constantinople, was the founder of Millî İktisat (A
Journal National Economy) and also an arms dealer and an informer working for the German
intelligence service.64 He was known at the time for having, at the CUP’s request, taken sev-
eral Georgian socialist refugees under his protection in Istanbul and then dispatched them
to Adjaria to foment an anti-Russian rebellion there. In arguing for his plan to bring the
two Armenian parties to collaborate, he pointed to the need for a union of socialist forces,

in accordance with the decisions of the Amsterdam Congress. A number of militants seem
to have found this splendid demonstration convincing. To resolve the predictable problems
connected with setting the number of Armenian parliamentary deputies, Parvus promised
to serve as an intermediary with the CUP. The initial arrangement seems to have been that
the Armenians would be given twenty seats, of which two or three would go to “neutral”
candidates. Finally, written agreement was reached to the effect that the ARF would receive
nine seats and the SDHP eight; the remaining seats would go to whichever party succeeded
in taking them.65
When Sapah-Giulian returned to Istanbul, the pact had almost been finalized. On his
account, the Ittihad was in a ticklish situation, but had adroitly secured the ARF’s support and
was now trying to rally the Hnchaks to its side by way of a pact between the ARF and SDHP.
Thus Parvus, he writes, “was in the process of doing the CUP a great service.”66 Matters had
advanced so far that the Hnchak leader had a great deal of difficulty in turning the situation
around. At the September 1911 meeting at which the agreement was to have been finalized,
K. Gozigian, who was representing the Hnchaks at the negotiations, as Sapah-Giulian had
suggested, told the two Dashnak representatives, Papazian and A[knuni], that he was pre-
pared to sign if he were shown a document from the CUP’s Central Committee that “bore its
official seal” and declared that it agreed to the establishment of “Armenian autonomy.” The
Dashnaks pointed out that they had obtained an oral promise and that they would vouch for
the CUP. This provided Gozigian the opportunity to turn the offer down.67 The next day,
Parvus, in his capacity as former intermediary, rushed to the Hnchak club and upbraided
his socialist comrades for having made light of his mediation by rejecting the agreement.
He also argued that the presence of two socialist parties in the Ottoman parliament would
have had an excellent effect in Europe, adding that, in rejecting the agreement “for narrowly
nationalistic reasons,” the SDHP was working against socialism.68 Sapah-Giulian’s reply was
in the same vein: it was regrettable that a convinced socialist such as Parvus, he riposted,
could support a nationalistic party “that has the Adana massacres on its conscience [as well
as] murders, kidnappings and confiscations of property carried out to further the objectives
of Turkish nationalism.”69
From these examples, we learn a number of lessons about the political practice of the
Committee of Union and Progress. The CUP, which already had the main mechanisms of
the state apparatus in its hands and could utilize them as it saw fit, while throwing a few
crumbs of power to those who agreed to serve it or collaborate with it, was now seeking
to gain the time it needed to put its plans into effect. To that end, it did not hesitate to
have its opponents who represented a real threat murdered or exiled, while guaranteeing
the criminals impunity. We can thus legitimately ask if the permanent insecurity reigning
in the eastern provinces – plunder, kidnapping, localized massacres – was not the result
of a plan.70 In 1912, in any case, the situation there had deteriorated so badly that a sharp
debate broke out in Armenian circles as to whether an alliance should be concluded with
the Ittihad or the Ittifâl. The SDHP was convinced that it was necessary to harass the CUP
in order to deny it the leisure to translate its program into reality (“To distract its attention
from Armenia,” as Sapah-Giulian put it).71 In provincial Turkish circles, too, the Ittihad had
earned the enmity of groups exasperated by the constant meddling in their internal affairs
of local Young Turks, who were often less than respectable sorts. There were even cases in
which Armenians intervened in these Turkish circles as peacemakers, in order to re-establish
calm: for instance, when the Unionist club in Erba refused to confirm the appointment of a
religious leader who was not a member of the club; or again, after an attack on the Ittihadist
club of Balıkeser.72 Furthermore, certain government officials did not share Young Turkey’s
political vision, as was shown when, in spring 1912, the kaymakam of Niksar, İhsan Bey,
and the commander of the corresponding military district, Sabih Bey, entrusted the SDHP

leadership with “valuable” documents emanating from the Unionist Central Committee on
the one hand and the government on the other.73 According to Sapah-Giulian, these texts
all had to do with the way the Armenians were to be treated and the means to be employed
in order to “rid the country of the Armenians and gain control of all their real estate and
other assets.” Sabih Bey “doubtless thought,” Sapah-Giulian adds, “that we had no informa-
tion on that head.”74 An article in the Hnchaks’ official organ stated even more clearly what
the SDHP believed the Turkists’ intentions to be:
When the least occasion offers ... Turkish nationalism, which, today, has the government
of the country in its grip, will, without hesitation, ruthlessly massacre the Armenians,
as a historical necessity. And, this time, it will massacre them more mercilessly than in
1895–6, more violently than during the Catastrophe of Adana. The psychology that
makes for massacres is an abiding one; it has deep roots ... It is also plain that the old
and new representatives of Turkish nationalism have no desire whatsoever to accept
the idea of the existence, development and vitality of the Armenian people.75
This viewpoint, however, remained that of a minority of Armenians, even if “no great benefits
could be expected from the constitutional regime,” in the words of Gabriel Noradounghian,
who would soon become the first and last non-Muslim Ottoman foreign minister, who
expressed that opinion at a dinner he gave early in 1912 for the four Dashnak deputies and
Krikor Zohrab.76
In these conditions, it is easy to imagine the atmosphere reigning in the Ottoman Empire
during the spring 1912 election campaign. This election, known as the sopalı seçim (“the big-
stick election”), shocked more than one observer because of the violent methods and intimi-
dation to which the CUP resorted to ensure the victory of its candidates.77 The number
one enemy was the Ittilâf, which counted many renegades from Unionist ranks among its
members, notably non-Turks who had been excluded from any and all positions of respon-
sibility in the CUP. In the weeks preceding the second legislative elections, the two par-
ties traded blows with a vengeance. Unsurprisingly, the newly elected parliament had an
Ittihadist majority and, in certain Armenian circles, electoral interests eventually gained the
upper hand over questions of substance. Said Pasha formed the new cabinet; Mehmed Cavid
was put back in charge of the Ministry of Finance.
It seems that, in this regime, power could only change hands by force. In May–June 1912,
Colonel Sadık Bey, the Ittilâf’s vice-president, stepped up his pressure on the cabinet to the
point that this pressure could be described as a coup d’état; he had the support of young offic-
ers known as Halâskâr Zâbitan (Savior Officers), a majority of whom came from the army in
Macedonia.78 On 21 July, the grand vizier stepped down in favor of a liberal cabinet formed
by Ğazi Ahmed Muhtar Pasha, which included Noradounghian as foreign minister. In some
sense, Prince Sabaheddin’s outlook had come to power for the first time (if one ignores the
brief existence of the Tevfik cabinet in April 1909). The object was to restore confidence, in
particular among non-Turkish groups, by applying the prince’s much ballyhooed decentrali-
zation program. Shortly after these events, it was learned that Mehmed Talât and Mustafa
Rahmi had returned to Salonika; they were soon followed by Cavid and Dr. Nâzım.79
To make certain that he could count on the army, Ğazi Muhtar appointed a graduate
of Saint-Cyr, General Nâzım Pasha, as minister of war; Nâzım was a Çerkez from Istanbul
whom Marshal Göltz considered to be the best officer in the Ottoman Army.80 The ARF was
not slow to draw the lessons of these changes. In an 18 July 1912 declaration, the Western
Bureau announced that it had effectively broken with the Young Turks.81 In the same period,
several books were published, the obvious purpose of which was to get at the truth about the
massacres in Cilicia.82

Significantly, the ARF waited until mid-September 1912 to create a special committee
including Rupen Ter Minasian and Sepastatsi Murad. Its first working meeting took place in
Constantinople. The “question of self-defense” was on the agenda, and this was the first time
since the July 1908 revolution that the party discussed the issue. Those at the meeting agreed
that a self-defense project would require “years and years” (of work), and that the party did
not have “enough responsible cadres in the provinces or the necessary funds” to realize it.83
Was the ARF’s suddenly renewed interest in “self-defense” a consequence of the deteriora-
tion of the situation in the eastern provinces? Perhaps. One can, however, also speculate that
the momentary elimination of the ARF from the Istanbul political scene gave it a margin to
maneuver that it had not previously enjoyed.
The Armenians in the Balkan Crisis

The Ottoman Empire, which found itself confronting the threat of war from the moment that
Ğazi Ahmed Muhtar’s cabinet took the reins of government, was not, according to contem-
porary observers, in a position to fight. Its finances were at a low ebb and its army was poorly
organized and demoralized after several years of lack of discipline. For the first time, however,
non-Muslims would be taking part in a war; they were mobilized just as their compatriots
were. The patriotic appeals thus concerned all Ottoman subjects, and the Armenians were
not the last to rise to the “defense of the fatherland.”
The Balkan alliance seems to have surprised even the European diplomats, who were
concerned, to be sure, about the fate of the Ottoman Balkans, but from the standpoint of
the reforms that they hoped to compel the Sublime Porte to carry out. The specialists on the
conflict concur that Greek Prime Minister Venizelos hid his hand with consummate skill
and played a decisive role in forging the unlikely Balkan alliance.
In September 1912 a festive atmosphere, laced with patriotic sentiments, reigned in
Constantinople. The most enthusiastic counted on celebrating their victory in Sofia before
the year was out, Bulgaria having been promoted to the rank of the empire’s main foe. The
liberal cabinets, made up of experienced men who were aware of the weakness of the army
and its lack of modern arms and equipment, were opposed to the war, as was the majority
of the Ottoman parliament. Only the Young Turks, who had lost most of their seats in the
new assembly, actively campaigned in favor of going to war.84 In an article published in
the 21 September 1912 Tanin, a semi-official Ittihad organ, Enis Avni Bey wrote, under the
pseudonym Aka Gündüz: “Every spot on which I tread shall spurt forth blood ... If I leave
one stone upon another, may the home I leave behind me be razed.”85 This longing for a
good fight reflected the Young Turks’ ambition to profit from the opportunity offered by the
war to win back territory lost over the past few decades. The violence that had attended the
interventions of the Ottoman army in Macedonia and Albania in the recent past perhaps
explains the declaration that the foreign minister, Noradounghian, made in the foreign press
to the effect that the Ottoman army would observe the rules of civilized countries in waging
the war and that there would be no massacres in the areas it occupied. On the afternoon
of 21 September, the Ittilâf organized a rally on the square in front of the Sultan Ahmed
Mosque; 100,000 people took part. One of the first to speak was an old acquaintance of ours,
Diran Kelekian, the editor-in-chief of Sabah, who declared that he was in favor of going to
war and made a patriotic speech that ended with the elegantly defensive formula: “Either the
Ottomans will leave 30 million graves behind them or they will show Europe what stuff they
are made of by crushing the Balkan states.”86
On the evening of the same day, in the same square, the Ittihad held its own meeting
under Talât’s lead. Those in attendance were younger. The list of speakers included Talât
himself, Hasan Fehmi, Cemaleddin Arif, Hagop Boyajian, and the ARF’s representative,

Dr. Garabed Pashayan.87 “The ARF,” Pashayan said, “is generally opposed to war, which
produces misery and privation for the people. However, it can only affirm its approval of a
combat the purpose of which is to defend the fatherland against external aggression.” While
Pashayan’s speech, which hewed closely to the Dashnaktsutiun’s line, was not character-
ized by patriotic excess, it nonetheless reaffirmed the ARF’s solidarity with its former allies
in these difficult circumstances (the party had broken with the CUP on 18 July). The last
speaker, Ömer Naci, who was considered one of the best CUP propagandists, appealed to the
“spirit of a race” that had known only victory; Naci exhorted his listeners to “go spit in the
faces of the handful of petty nations that insult the seven hundred years of existence of
the Turkish race.”88 In this atmosphere of patriotic one-upmanship, many Armenians volun-
teered for the army, as did many Çerkez and Kurds. It should be noted, however, that there
was no draft in Syria, Mesopotamia, or the eastern provinces of Anatolia. Despite all this,
the statements that foreign minister Noradounghian made to the reporter from Le Temps
revealed that he was personally opposed to the war.89
Both the Ittilâf and the Ittihad solicited Armenian support for their positions. The
Ittihadist opposition, however, knew much better how to mobilize large crowds. Moreover,
it could, although it was no longer in power, rely on the networks that it had built up in all
classes of society. Turning the first public demonstrations to account, it mobilized university
students in particular in order to pressure and destabilize Ahmed Muhtar’s liberal govern-
ment. It knew better than any of its rivals what issues could bring people together, such as
rejection of Article 23 of the Treaty of Berlin, which provided for reforms in Rumelia, or of the
idea of equality for all the empire’s subjects – a theme symptomatic of the state of Ottoman
society in the period. By far the most impressive demonstration of the day was the students’,
started by one hundred or so Young Turk militants on 24 September 1912. It quickly turned
into a semi-insurrection and put the government, whose hostility to the war was unpopular, in
a delicate situation: the demonstrators accused it of “crawling before the Balkan states.”90
Thus, the government was caught between the hammer of a public opinion burning to
go to war and the anvil of the great powers, who were urging it to ratify the celebrated
23 August 1880 “law of the vilayets,” which would reform the local administration and trans-
late Article 23 of the Treaty of Berlin into practice in the regions that the Balkan states
sought to acquire. Hence, it was forced to publish a declaration that cautiously affirmed that
the reforms were still under examination and that there could be no question of ratifying
an unconstitutional law. At the same time, however, Noradounghian promised the Western
ambassadors that Article 23 would soon be applied; this sparked new demonstrations. In
order to avoid war, the Council had no other choice than to make the concessions that the
Balkan states were demanding, and, in particular, to enact Article 23.91
It will readily be imagined how easy it was for the Ittihad’s networks to turn “Turkish”
public opinion against reforms that were considered to be acts of treachery that profited the
empire’s non-Muslim groups, who were perceived as enemies enjoying the support of the
Christian powers. Torn between hopes sparked by the liberal government’s promises to enact
reforms and alarm engendered by the public’s hostility to the slightest concession, Armenian
circles assumed their responsibilities and summoned their compatriots to do their duty. They
were, however, unsettled by Tanin’s affirmation that, if Article 23 were to be applied in the
vilayets of European Turkey, “Article 61 would follow on its heels” – that is, the Article of the
Treaty of Berlin that concerned the Armenian provinces.92 The cause-and-effect relation-
ship was quite clearly spelled out, as was the parallel between events in the Balkans and the
Armenian provinces in eastern Anatolia. Tanin’s remarks offered a glimpse of the Ittihad’s
vision of the empire’s future and the depth of its determination to preserve its territorial
integrity. It left the Armenians with little hope that even the smallest reform would be
enacted in the east. A few weeks later, after the Ottoman army’s defeat at the hands of the

Balkan Coalition, the CUP again assayed a rapprochement with the ARF, passing in silence
over the positions it had taken in public on the eve of the war. The moving spirit behind this
renewed invitation to collaborate was Mehmed Talât, who extended it to Zohrab as well. The
situation was critical, and Talât accordingly made a number of promises that clearly contra-
dicted the CUP’s long-standing positions: he held out the prospect of enacting the 1880 law
on the vilayets, resolving agrarian questions (land theft) and repressing looters.93
The ARF’s Western Bureau had observed the Balkan Coalition’s initial successes with a
certain alarm, aware that the Armenians could not expect the slightest help from Europe
or Russia if the Turks should turn against them. Caution was in order, in Simon Zavarian’s
estimation: “This is crucial, for, if the Turks are defeated, they will naturally seek to avenge
themselves on the Armenians, who constitute the weakest group and cannot defend
themselves.”94 There were grounds for these apprehensions. During the Balkan War and in
the following months, the situation in the eastern provinces had deteriorated, due in part
to the arrival of Bosnian muhacirs fleeing the fighting; large numbers of them had been sent
pouring into the Armenian vilayets. These refugees, their feelings against Christians in gen-
eral at a fever pitch, worried Vahan Papazian. “We feared,” he wrote, “that, like locusts, they
would devour everything the Armenians possessed and carry out a new massacre of them.
Such was the government’s diabolical plan.”95
In the field, the Armenian soldiers did their duty, particularly in defending Janina.
Observers unanimously declared that they had fought bravely and noted the competence
of the Armenian officers, who were especially effective as artillerymen. Like the rest of the
Ottoman army, they suffered many casualties.96 In a defeated, humiliated country, however,
that did not count for much.
The Ittihad’s leaders in particular perceived these events as a national and personal
tragedy, proof of the total failure of the grandiose plans. Many of them had spontaneously
enlisted in the army, beginning with Talât,97 while others such as Cemal did their duty as
officers. Dr. Nâzım was even subjected to the humiliation of being arrested in the historical
headquarters of the Committee of Union and Progress when the Greeks captured Salonika
in October 1912; arrested with him was the Albanian deputy from Derviş Bey, the leader of
one of the Committee’s most active groups of fedayis. Nâzım and Serez, who were taken under
heavy guard to Greece, had at least been spared the spectacle of the plunder of the Muslim
and Jewish populations, as well as the murders and rapes committed by the Greek soldiers
under the gaze of shocked witnesses.98
All of General Nâzım’s courage and intelligence was required to halt the advance of the
Bulgarian army in Çatalca, a few dozen kilometers to the west of Constantinople, and to
free the other Young Turk leaders who had been apprehended during the battle99 as they
were attempting to flee to the capital. This minister of war, despised by the CUP leaders,
now rescued the very men who would assassinate him a few months later. During these
events, a new Young Turk paramilitary organization was to take its first steps in subversion,
sabotage, and political murder. It would soon take the name Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa (Special
Organization) and would play an important role in preparing the new conquest of Edirne
in July 1913.100
In a declaration published on 25 December 1912, the Ittihad’s bête noire, the Hnchak
Central Committee, summed up the dilemma with which the Armenian authorities were
confronted after this war, which put an end to the Turkish presence in Europe: “In this criti-
cal hour, this appalling, fertile hour, fraught with consequences, the Armenian Question
has also loomed up: it is one of the thorniest questions there is, one of the most difficult to
resolve, caught as it is in the iron ring of the most unfavorable circumstances.” The editors
of the Hnchaks’ official organ went on to point out that Young Turkey had been unable to
carry out the slightest reform, observing that its constitution “was a military ‘constitution,’

one which proved, for that very reason, from the standpoint of the interests of the people
of the state, wretchedly sterile.” Alluding to the remedies the Young Turk leaders had pre-
scribed for the country, they concluded that the Young Turks had “turned out to be, not
doctors, but veterinarians; and not even that, but, rather, butchers killing animals in a
slaughterhouse.”101

PART III
Young Turks and Armenians Face to Face


Chapter 1
Transformations in the Committee

of Union and Progress after the
First Balkan War, 1913
T
he humiliating defeat dealt to the Ottoman Empire by the states that emerged from its
former European possessions led to what the Committee of Union and Progress had
feared the most – the demise of European Turkey and the re-centering of the empire
in Asia. The war had, moreover, set off vast population movements. According to official
sources, 500,000 to 600,000 refugees had been expelled from Rumelia and Macedonia, and
the state was looking for ways and means of settling them in Asia Minor. In an interview
with a French diplomat, the Turkish ambassador to Austria-Hungary and former grand vizier,
Hilmi Pasha, suggested “a project to revitalize Asia Minor” by resettling these refugees there,
at a cost of 250 to 300 million franks. He suggested, as a likely place for the resettlement,
“the district of Adana, [which] is so fertile that it is like a little Egypt,” and expressed hope
that French capital would back the project.1 This geographical choice was probably not for-
tuitous, but rather part of the general Young Turk policy of relocating refugees from the
Balkans in zones that were considered strategically important, even when that ran counter
to the interests of their native inhabitants. Such was the case in vilayets with an Armenian
population.
Kâmil Pasha’s cabinet, after waging a war that it had not wanted, had to confront the
Young Turk opposition, which renounced the terms of the armistice concluded after the rout
of the Ottoman forces. The liberal government was also under pressure from the powers,
which demanded that it accept the Balkan states’ conditions. The coup d’état that brought
down Kâmil’s cabinet on 23 January 1913 thus put an end to a political crisis engendered
by the Ottoman defeat. Once again, power changed hands by force of arms. But the impor-
tance of this particular event should not be downplayed: it marked the Ittihadist Central
Committee’s true assumption of control over the executive and went hand-in-hand with an
unmistakable accentuation of the Committee’s militaristic orientation,2 which saw the armed
forces claiming the role of guardians of the constitution (meşrutiyet) and freedom (hurriyet).
The best proof lies in the methods that the Young Turks used to seize power. The ease with
which Enver Bey and his accomplices were able to cross protective barriers, make their way
into the Sublime Porte, and shoot the minister of war, Nâzım Pasha – they did not encounter
the slightest resistance – is at the very least suspect. There is every reason to think that a
part of the palace guard was in league with the military members of the CUP. The reinforce-
ment of the position of the militarists also doubtless explains the appointment of General
Mahmud Şevket, the strong man of the moment, to the office of grand vizier on the evening
of 23 January 1913, as well as the early March nominations of Colonel Ahmed Cemal to the
newly created post of “guardian [or military governor] of Istanbul” and Lieutenant-Colonel

Halil (Kut) Bey, a young uncle of Enver Bey’s, to the post of commander of the garrison sta-
tioned in the capital.3 However, the new grand vizier was soon recommending that officers
be prevented from interfering in politics. It is quite possible that, in thus opposing the politi-
cization of the army, he was responding to the concerns of a faction of the Ittihadist Central
Committee that was trying to free itself of the intensifying domination of the “young offic-
ers” and diminish their influence. Pursuing his advantage and profiting from the demoraliza-
tion of the officer corps engendered by the defeat in the Balkans, Şevket also proposed to
carry out a thoroughgoing reform of the army if it proved impossible to depoliticize it.4 It is
likely that part of the Unionist Central Committee reacted favorably to this initiative and
also to Şevket’s appeal for German assistance, which it regarded as the natural sequel to the
first experiments carried out by General Göltz.5 The grand vizier and his supporters surely
imagined that calling on someone from outside the Ottoman sphere would make it easier
to limit or even halt the growing politicization of the officers. But in doing so, Şevket was
launching a frontal assault on a faction of the party whose support he needed at a time when
he had to defuse the explosive political situation bequeathed to him by Kâmil’s cabinet. His
overriding task was to bring about a final resolution of the Balkan conflict – that is, to sign a
peace treaty confirming the surrender of Edirne – which is precisely what the young officers
led by Enver were unwilling to accept.6
This question doubtless dominated debate at the Ittihad’s 31 January 1913 Central
Committee meeting. However, the effect of this meeting, to judge from what we know of it,
was above all to confirm Talât’s growing ascendancy over the Committee and force the party
to appeal to religious sentiment to galvanize Muslim public opinion. It is even said that at the
same meeting Ahmed Agayev (Ağaoğlu) argued that Islam was in peril and called for a holy
alliance of all the groups in the empire as well as a declaration of jihad.7 The creation by the
Committee, on the very same day, of the Müdafa-i Milliye Cemiyeti (Committee for Public
Welfare), along with the formation not long thereafter (in June 1913) of Türk Gücü (Turkish
Strength), a paramilitary organization whose anthem was composed by Ziya Gökalp, were
evidence of profound uneasiness and a radicalization of the movement. Talât’s ever tighter
grip on the party leadership doubtless resulted from these tensions. Talât profited from his
increasing dominion over the party to impose on 16 March 1913 Major Ali Fethi (Okyar)8 as
both a member of the Ittihadist Central Committee and its secretary general, in the hope of
counterbalancing the growing weight of the leader of the party’s other major faction, Enver.9
The grand vizier, Mahmud Şevket, who had initially served as a guarantor for the Young
Turk government, was from this point on nothing more than a pawn with no real political
influence, pushed back and forth between the two main factions of the CUP. In his isola-
tion, he shared his preoccupations with his confidant of the day, Ahmed Cemal, the real
master of Istanbul, somewhat naively disclosing to him his planned reform of the Ottoman
army, which consisted in putting one corps of the army in the hands of a German general
and appointing German officers to the general staff. According to Cemal, the grand vizier
believed that this would allow him to control the political activities of the officers associated
with the CUP.10
Şevket, however, manifestly lacked the means to bend the officer corps to his will; not-
withstanding the Kaiser’s 6 June decision to appoint a general to head the German military
mission, he was in no position to pursue his objectives. On the morning of 11 June, while
riding through the streets of Istanbul on his way to the Sublime Porte, he was shot down by
four gunmen.11
A few days earlier, on Friday, 6 June 1913, the principal Unionist leaders had held a meeting
at Fener Yalu, near Haydarpaşa, with an agenda that read: “The political situation of the coun-
try is dangerous.” On 10 June, around 10 p.m., the officers of the army of Çatalca, supporters
of Enver, had made a show of their hostility and ordered Şevket’s cabinet to resign. Should it

Transformations in the Committee of Union and Progress 143
fail to, the officers threatened, “the army will march on Constantinople.” On the testimony
of a well-informed diplomat, “the grand vizier wanted to quit the scene, but the leader of the
party, Talât Bey, had urged Şevket to remain in office to the end, in accordance with his oath.”
The French intelligence service did, however, note that “the secret Committee is in constant
contact with the army of Chatalja.”12 In other words, the Ittihad’s Central Committee had
incited the “young officers” under Enver’s control to call on the cabinet to resign, while Talât,
for his part, demanded that the grand vizier remain in his post. The tensions between the two
factions of the CUP had obviously been set aside, and agreement had been reached within
the Committee to get rid of General Şevket. The Central Committee must have decided that
it would be more productive to have the grand vizier assassinated than to let him resign, an
assumption that appears all the more likely when we recall that this murder, attributed to the
opposition, made it possible for the Committee of Union and Progress to declare a state of
emergency in the country and liquidate all its adversaries once and for all. The Ittihad had
already vainly sought, early in March 1913, to credit the idea that Prince Sabaheddin’s secre-
tary, Safvet Lutfi Bey, had hatched an oppositional “plot.”13 But the affair had not produced
the desired results, making it impossible to suppress the opposition. With the assassination of
General Şevket, as with the “events of 31 March in 1909,” the CUP had acquired the means
it needed to deal a fatal blow to its political foes. On the day of the murder, a French diplomat
noted, Talât and the leading members of the CUP “were, together with Enver Bey, constantly
at the side of the military governor of Istanbul [Cemal Bey].”14 Şevket quite clearly fell victim
to a conspiracy that was squarely within the tradition of the Ittihadists, who took advan-
tage of it to set up a military dictatorship. Events followed in rapid succession thereafter: the
CUP, “which [held] power from the death of Mahmud Şevket Pasha on,” saw to it that Prince
Said Halim was given the post of grand vizier, and then proceeded to arrest several hun-
dred people.15 Three days later, Mehmed Talât was named minister of the interior and Halil
(Menteşe) became president of the Council of State.16 The courts also did their work much
faster than usual: on 24 June, it was announced that 12 defendants had been condemned to
death by court-martial and executed the same day by hanging in Sultan Bayazid square.17
The “authors” of the murder and the leaders of the opposition were condemned and executed
in a single, sweeping operation. The legal opposition was outlawed: Prince Sabaheddin and
Şerif Pasha, accused of instigating the murder, were condemned to death in absentia – that is,
invited to remain in exile in Paris.
The military defeats and recurrent domestic crises had probably convinced the Unionists
of the need to reform the institutions and administration of the empire – or, in a word, to
assume full control of the state and its institutions. The Committee of Union and Progress,
which had until then been reluctant to transform itself into a political party or even to take
the affairs of state directly in hand, now seemed finally to have accepted this option, or even
actively sought it out.
The CUP’s official assumption of power went hand-in-hand with a mutation in the party
itself: the “young officers” led by Enver Bey18 were no longer content simply to do the Central
Committee’s dirty work, but now demanded their share of the pie. The Committee’s leaders,
beginning with Mehmed Talât, had henceforth to reckon with Enver’s faction. If only tem-
porarily, Ahmed Cemal, who held the key post of military governor of Istanbul, also became,
after the murder of the grand vizier, master of the capital and of the Committee’s destiny and,
as a result, another central CUP figure.19 According to Turfan, even the composition of Said
Halim’s cabinet had to be submitted to the “young officers” for approval.20
The CUP general congress of 18 September–11 October 1913 was thus exceptionally
important. Not much has ever been revealed about the decisions it took. It is known, how-
ever, that ideologues such as Ahmed Agayev, the editor-in-chief of Tercuman Hakikat, as
well as Hüseyin Cahid and İsmail Hakkı Babanzâde, the editors of Tanin, enjoyed increasing

ideological influence at this congress.21 According to a French diplomat, the Young Turks
“seemed to have been won over to the idea of administrative decentralization.” He saw evi-
dence of this in the project to give provincial governing councils the right to approve the
local budget.22 Fethi Bey, named the congress’s secretary general, is even supposed to have
recommended “that the government negotiate with the Armenians in order to conclude an
agreement like the one reached with the Arabs.”23
But the congress also came to the conclusion that the parliamentary system was hobbling
its efforts, and accordingly proposed to limit sessions of parliament to four months. It further
suggested giving the Council of Ministers the right to promulgate temporary laws between
sessions “whenever there [was] an urgent necessity” for them24 – we shall see how this decision
was exploited in 1915 to deport and plunder the Armenian population. The most important
decision of this congress, however, had to do with the internal transformation of the CUP,
which now abandoned its status as a “secret” organization and officially became a political
party.25 A set of “by-laws of Union and Progress” was drafted and adopted. It provided for the
creation of three governing bodies: 1) a 50-member General Council, headed by a president,
which was empowered to settle questions involving the general administration of the party;
2) a nine-member Central Bureau, representing the parliamentary faction, which was desig-
nated by the president of the General Council and was supposed to provide a liaison between
the CUP and parliament; and 3) a Central Committee, elected by the congress and headed
by a secretary general, which was composed of nine members who were neither senators nor
deputies to parliament and who were charged with overseeing all the organizations associ-
ated with the party in Constantinople or the provinces.26
The by-laws also provided for a reorganization of the activities of the clubs in the prov-
inces, dissolving them at the level of the kaza and maintaining only the sections in the big-
gest sancaks and the capitals of the vilayets.27 To ensure that its plans would be enacted, the
congress established a “program committee” made up of İsmail Hakkı (Babanzâde); (Eyub)
Sabri Bey; Mehmed Ziya (Gökalp); Emrullah Effendi, a former minister of education; Hüseyin
Kadri Bey; (Kara) Kemal Bey, a parliamentary deputy from Constantinople; Ahmed Nesimi,
a member of the Central Committee; Ahmed Agayev; Ali Bey, the CUP’s representative in
Mamuret ul-Aziz; and (Küçük) Talât Bey, CUP inspector in Smyrna.28
The “by-laws of Union and Progress” stipulated that the local committee in each sancak
was to be headed by a “responsible secretary”29 appointed by the Central Committee. The
responsible secretaries, who were to be assisted by a committee comprising from four to
six members, supervised the organizations in their district, convened committee meetings,
drew up their agendas, organized the meetings, and named corresponding members. The
by-laws further stipulated that local committees “were to follow the Central Committee’s
instructions.”30
The congress elected the following people to the bureau of the general council: Ahmed
Rıza, Cavid Bey, Hüseyin Cahid, İsmail Hakkı, (Bedros) Halajian, and Ahmed Agayev (who
received the fewest votes of all those elected), as well as the secretary general of the Central
Committee and a former parliamentary deputy from Serez, Midhat Şükrü. It also elected
Dr. Bahaeddin Şakir; (Eyub) Sabri Bey; Dr. Rüsûhi Bey; Dr. Nâzım; Mehmed Ziya (Gökalp),
formerly a parliamentary deputy from Dyarbekir; Emrullah Effendi, a former minister of edu-
cation; Mehmed Talât Bey; (Kara) Kemal Bey, the Committee’s inspector in Constantinople;
and Riza Bey, its inspector in Bursa.31
The Ittihadist Central Committee, in creating a General Council by which it was elected
in its turn, doubtless hoped to sideline the “young officers.” Abandoning its status as a secret
organization, it doubtless hoped to acquire a semblance of respectability. But the CUP’s fifth
congress, which concluded that the decision-making center should be transferred from the
clandestine Central Committee to a General Council – “the parliament of the Party for

Union and Progress” – only reinforced the centralism of the system and its impact in the
provinces, inasmuch as the responsible secretaries were appointed by the Committee itself
and placed under its direct control.
These changes notwithstanding, Mehmed Talât and his faction remained dependent on
the Unionist officers, notably when the Bulgarians attacked the Serbs and Greeks during the
night of 29–30 June 1913. To make good on this unhoped-for opportunity to win back lost ter-
ritory, the CUP needed the young officers’ support. Despite the economic crisis, an attack on
Edirne was launched at Talât’s urging. On 17 July, Enver declared that the government would
not yield to the pressure of the powers – they had called for a halt to the offensive – adding
that he himself had ordered the troops to advance. The same day, Ziya Gökalp published an
appeal, entitled “The New Attila,” which urged the army to forge ahead. These statements were
no doubt intended to encourage the cabinet, not all of whose members approved of this opera-
tion, to give unqualified support to this CUP initiative. In the end, it was Talât who obtained
authorization for the Imperial Army’s march on Edirne from the Council of Ministers. Ahmed
İzzet,32 the chief of staff and minister of war, remained hesitant about and even opposed to
a resumption of hostilities, but had to bow to pressure from Enver, who threatened to relieve
him of his post. The capture of the ancient Ottoman capital strengthened the position of the
clan of young officers, which found its symbolic representative in Enver, even if the city fell
almost without a fight.33 But this unexpected success refurbished, above all, the prestige of the
Committee of Union and Progress. It also made the anti-European and, more generally, anti-
Christian current that dominated Ottoman public opinion still more vehement than it had
been. The “victory” did not undo the collective humiliation experienced after the debacle of
the first Balkan War. Rather, it whetted a spirit of revenge that found a target in the Christian
groups in the empire, which were identified with the Balkan states and Christian Europe. The
massacres perpetrated by the soldiers in Tekirdağ/Rodosto from 1 July to 3 July 1913 can per-
haps be attributed to these reactions. As often occurred when persecutions of this kind were
committed, the Istanbul press misrepresented “the Rodosto events,” casting them as a revolt
that the army had had to “put down.” The correspondent of the newspaper Gohag, who had
himself witnessed these events, denounced the Turkish press’s misleading interpretation of
them.34 He reported that, on 1 July, a boat had arrived carrying men who had volunteered to
help establish control over the city, which had been abandoned by the Bulgarian forces. The
Greek metropolitan, the Armenian primate, and representatives of the local governing bod-
ies went out to greet the new arrivals. Gohag’s correspondent reported that the soldiers had
surrounded the city’s neighborhoods, an Armenian was gunned down, the city’s inhabitants
panicked, and the stores in the bazaar were hastily abandoned by the Armenian shopkeep-
ers. According to this journalist, the Armenians had been directly targeted and the soldiers,
commanded by Şerif Bey, had been informed which houses belonged to them. The soldiers
proceeded to pillage the Armenians’ homes and stage massacres in the city and especially
its environs, where the Armenians worked as farmers. Many Armenians saved themselves
by taking refuge in the consulates or the homes of foreign residents. The clusters of refugees
were presented by the military commander as proof of a revolt in the making. At any rate,
such was the rumor that the officers started in the city, while simultaneously ordering that the
Armenians immediately turn in their arms. To avoid all possible provocation, the Armenians
remained in their widely scattered places of refuge for a whole week while stores were looted,
fields were burned, and a mill was partially destroyed. Thanks to an intervention by foreign
battleships, the Armenian population of Tekirdağ managed to emerge from this explosion of
violence without greater losses. It was estimated at the time that around one hundred people
had been killed, not counting the “missing.”
The steps taken by Armenian organizations to bring about reforms in the provinces were
doubtless the origin of this violence, which should probably be regarded as a clear message

sent to the Armenians by the CUP as a Thracian the daily extension of in the east. Localized
massacres also occurred at this time: one in Hacın in March 1913 and another in Bitlis the
following month.35
The Situation in the Eastern Provinces

during the Balkan Wars
The projected reforms in the Armenian provinces are in many respects comparable to similar
reform plans that the powers vainly tried to have implemented in Macedonia. While it is
undeniable that, in the Macedonian question as well as the Armenian case, the European
interference was partly motivated by political and economic interests, the fact remains that in
both regions real problems of security and a disastrous economic and social situation provided
a basis for the pressure that the powers put on the Sublime Porte. Abdülhamid had in some
sense responded as the Ottomans often did when confronted with such domestic questions.
In the West (with the possible exception of Germany), his energetic methods were depicted
as “bloody.” From the Ottoman imperial point of view, however, the massacres merely consti-
tuted a legitimate response to demands that, coming from subjects of the sultan, were quite
simply inconceivable, the more so in that they emanated from subaltern groups. The Young
Turks had of course inherited these imperial traditions. Moreover, like Abdülhamid, they were
fully conscious of the way such traditions were perceived by Westerners, who were objects of
both contempt and admiration thanks to their scientific savoir-faire and efficient methods of
colonial and military administration. During their years of exile in Europe, the Young Turks
had come to appreciate the extent to which nationalism had focused energies and cemented
identities there. When they contemplated importing this European model into the Ottoman
Empire, however, they were confronted by, on the one hand, groups endowed by their history
with a solid structure and, on the other, a “Turkish” people still unaware that it had become,
at least in the view of certain ideologues, a racial category.
The Armenian elites, who had also been educated in conformity with the Western mod-
els then fashionable in the Ottoman capital, were rapidly confronted with the question of
their future place in a disintegrating empire. Certain Armenian circles found personal ways
of meeting their expectations: they entered state service. Others took up the revolutionary
struggle with the objective of secularizing the institutions of the empire and introducing
“progressive” social models in Turkey. Despite the retrospective Turkish historiography that
portrays the Armenian revolutionaries as separatist nationalists, we have seen that, in the
four years following the July 1908 revolution, Armenian community institutions defended
loyalist positions and clearly indicated their desire to take part in the modernization of soci-
ety and the state. However, the April 1909 massacres in Cilicia, the increasingly author-
itarian tendencies of the Committee of Union and Progress, and the elimination of the
liberal opposition ultimately convinced even the most optimistic political leaders, such as
Aknuni, that the Young Turks had never seriously considered improving the condition of
the Armenian population of the eastern provinces, but on the contrary were intent on mak-
ing these Armenians’ lives so difficult that they would opt for exile. The countless reports
arriving from the provinces pointed to a marked deterioration of the situation. Its beginnings
may be dated to 1912, the year of the First Balkan War. A circular that Patriarch Hovhannes
Arsharuni addressed to the ambassadors of the powers sheds light on the position of the
official Armenian organizations:
The Patriarchate of the Armenians of Turkey begs to submit to Your Excellency a

translation of the takrir that it presented to His Highness the grand vizier on Saturday

evening. It would be loath to see its initiative interpreted as a sign tending to confer new
urgency upon the question of reforms in the eastern provinces. For more than two years
now, the Patriarchate has declined to engage in an exchange with the Ottoman gov-
ernment on this subject. It regrets that it cannot expect it to make any sincere effort to
reorganize these devastated regions. In the memorandum that the Patriarch presented
to His Highness the grand vizier on 12 May last, it contented itself with pointing out to
him, one last time, the threat of massacre hanging over the Armenians. It demanded
that effective measures be taken to eliminate this danger, which is growing daily. Your
Excellency is not unaware that the Armenians’ situation deteriorated suddenly in the
aftermath of the Balkan War. The unfortunate outcome of this war added a thirst for
revenge to a centuries-old hatred. From one end of Anatolia to the other, a threat of
massacre gathered over their heads. They became hostages in the Muslims’ hands. If
these massacres did not occur, it was due solely to the fact that the Armenians, albeit
victims of the most reprehensible crimes, refrained even from demanding justice, for
fear that their attitude might be interpreted as a provocation. To date, they have simply
managed to avoid wholesale slaughter. The number of murders has not diminished but
increased and, for some time now, these murders have been committed, significantly,
with the manifest intention of sowing terror among the Armenians. Exposed to these
outrages and the danger of mass slaughter, the Armenians cannot rely on protection
from the state and do not even have the right to defend themselves. If they procure
arms, they immediately find themselves accused of preparing a rebellion. The watch-
fulness of the government toward the Armenians never slackens. The government’s
action, which is such as to suggest that the Armenians are always ready to take up
arms, only whips up the hatred of the fanatical masses ... From Aleppo to the shores of
Lake Van, the Armenian people lives in fear of the future. Long convoys of families are
once again making for the borders. The Armenians find themselves forced to abjure
the ties that centuries of history and unremitting labor have forged between them and
this land. This situation, which has become unbearable, and the negative result of
the initiatives of the Patriarchate, [which], while it confidently awaits the forthcom-
ing solution to the question of reforms in Armenia, begs Your Excellency to take the
urgent measures that Your Excellency considers appropriate in order to avoid the dan-
ger of imminent massacres in Anatolia.36
Even as it appealed to the diplomats, the Patriarchate continued to keep records of the
exactions committed in the provinces and to inform the Sublime Porte that it was doing so.37
It called attention to “the harassment to which government officials subjected the Armenians
alone,” the “isolated murders, confiscations of property, kidnappings and acts of pillage,” and
the exodus of the population that these acts brought on. It did not, however, restrict itself to
drawing up an inventory of such acts. It also interpreted them:
This situation suggests that the Armenians no longer have the right to live in the
Ottoman Empire. This state of affairs can only lead to the annihilation of the Armenian
element in the above-mentioned regions; the government’s multiple assurances about
the adoption of measures to preserve the honor, life and property of our countrymen
have had no effect, and as there is nothing to add to the supplications, complaints and
protests to which I have already drawn attention, it only remains for me to appeal, with
an eye to the future destiny [of] the Armenian people – excluded from society – to the
conscience and sense of responsibility of the Ottoman state and people, as well as the
pity of the civilized world.

Thus, it was made clear that the Armenian organizations, which officially expressed their
views by way of the Patriarchate, were leaving the door open to direct negotiations with the
Sublime Porte even while appealing to the powers to intervene.
The complaints formulated in general terms by the Armenians reflected concrete reali-
ties. Among the excesses mentioned in the untold number of memoranda drawn up by the
services of the Armenian patriarchate, we find the pillage of the villages of Kâmiköl and
Bizer on 20 April 1329 (1913) by brigands from the kaza of Ğarzan (Bitlis); the transfer of the
kaymakam of Çarsancak, Şükrü Bey, because he had attempted to restore Armenian “proper-
ties illegally seized by the ağas”; the “untold depredations that the famous bandit Said Bey”
perpetrated in the village of Dad Bey, whose inhabitants had fled to Bitlis; the “crimes of
the beys” in the village of Asrat (on the plain of Mush), which had been abandoned by its
inhabitants; an attack carried out by Haso İbrahim, “well known for his crimes and subject to
an arrest warrant,” on the village of Elyoh, in the kaza of Beşiri (in the vilayet of Dyarbekir),
which had resulted in two deaths; the murders and depredations in the kaza of Gavaş (to the
south of Lake Van) committed by the “Grave” tribe, which had also made off with 2,000
sheep and killed two Armenian shepherds in the kaza of Şatak; the murder of an Armenian
tax collector; the kidnapping of a 14-year-old girl in the nahie of Edincik (in the kaza of
Erkek); the kidnapping and murder of five people from the village of Gorgor (Bitlis) on 13
May 1913; the murder of four Armenians in the kaza of Hizan, in the village of Banican, and
four others in Haron; the theft of 1,000 sheep in the same region; numerous murders and acts
of pillage in the sancaks of Mush and Siirt; the cutting off of communications, including the
closure of all roads, between the Armenian villages in the regions of Dyarbekir, Bitlis, and
Van; and so on.38
The same documents indicate that these acts of violence often interfered with farm work
and that bands of brigands “acted everywhere with impunity,” multiplying kidnappings and
ransom demands to the point that the Armenians of Erzincan and the surrounding area,
“desperate and no longer able to bear the exactions that they are made to endure,” were
emigrating to America. In the kazas of Silvan and Beşiri, the Kurds “are feverishly arming
themselves and continue to kill, plunder or threaten the Armenians.”39
Officially, the Sublime Porte was not indifferent to these grievances and passed them
on to the relevant departments so that the necessary measures could be taken.40 However,
in his response to them, the grand vizier, Mahmud Şevket, basing what he said on a report
drawn up by the interior minister, Haci Adıl Bey, did not hesitate to call the credibility of the
Armenian complaints into question, so that we are left wondering, above all, about the good
faith of the local and national authorities. The declarations that the minister made to the
newspaper La Turquie, to the effect that there was no need for reforms in Armenia because
there was no insecurity, everything was calm, and the gendarmerie was doing its job,41 cast
doubt upon the government’s real intentions. The Istanbul press, for its part, pointed out
the cynicism of the statement by this high-ranking Ittihadist, recalling his role during the
Cilician massacres, in particular the famous telegram in which he urged the local authorities
to see to it that foreign interests were spared!42
The arguments developed in the grand vizier’s response to the Patriarchate’s grievances
indicate the way the Sublime Porte handled this issue:43
Your Highness’s complaints about the government’s negligence in pursuing the ban-
dits and criminals do not reflect the reality of the situation. Not only were military
forces dispatched to Şirvan and Ğarzan in order to capture and punish bandits
disturbing public order in the vilayet of Bitlis, such as Yaşar Çeto, Hahme, Mehmed
Emin and Cemil, but the vali even went to Iluş in order to take steps to ensure the
maintenance of public order. The governor general of Van, for his part, traveled to

Şatak in order personally to direct the pursuit of the destructive, plundering tribes.
A force of four hundred men with two canons was put, for this purpose, at the dis-
posal of Cevdet Bey, the governor of Hakkiari, and Sefvet Bey, the commanding
officer of the regiment of sharpshooters. After these tribes have been put down, it
will be the turn of the Girav tribe. Once the Giravli are punished, Mir Hehe will be
left without support ... In short, the local authorities are doing everything in their
power to put a speedy end to the dangers threatening public order in the above-
mentioned regions.
With respect to the question of illegal confiscations of property, the grand vizier pointed
out that the issue had been “turned over to a special commission charged with resolving the
agrarian problem in the eastern vilayets of Anatolia; the commission is now about to leave
for that region.” As for the alleged atrocities and murders perpetrated in the kaza of Hizan by
Said Ali, the grand vizier remarked that Ali
was a respectable person; the Armenians have fallen into the habit of attributing every
crime committed in the whole vilayet to him, and the Armenian element is nurs-
ing, as a result, an intense hatred for this individual. Nevertheless, the legal and civil
authorities have not brought a single charge against Said Ali Effendi – who leads a sed-
entary existence – that would call for prosecution. And despite the Armenians’ belief
that the bandit Hahme, who operates in the Van and Bitlis regions, takes his orders
from Said Ali, Ali’s son Salaheddin, in an encounter with the aforementioned bandit’s
gang in the province of Van this week, killed one of Hahme’s followers and wounded
another. These two facts indicate that the Armenians’ assumptions are ill-founded.
Nonetheless, all Said Ali Effendi’s actions are under surveillance and the authorities
will not fail to deal severely with him should that become necessary.
Turning to the case of the famous Haso, Şevket wrote: “Not only has he had no hand in the
aforementioned events; he is not even a bandit. He is the chief of a tribe that had nothing to
do with the troubles of 1311 (1895), has never in any way harmed an Armenian and is well
liked by all Armenians.”
All the grievances formulated by the patriarch are given the same sort of response here:
“the crimes committed must be attributed to ordinary personal motives”; the local authori-
ties see to it that criminals are punished, dispatching troops, when called for, to punish the
tribes; there is no significant emigration from the Erzerum and Erzincan regions – in a word,
the Armenians are impugning people for their presumed intentions, not their acts.44 The
grand vizier’s response implicitly claims to be purely factual and without political connota-
tions to the Armenian protests. The Armenian organizations, however, far from regarding
the “explanations” provided by the cabinet as satisfactory, expressed their surprise that the
government had called the veracity of the information arriving from the provinces into ques-
tion: “The answers given above,” the Armenians remarked,
suggest that the communications received from our bishoprics and curacies are sheer
invention and slander, and that the Imperial government, without making the least
discrimination between Ottoman subjects, whatever their race or religion, is pursuing
and arresting all bandits and criminals without exception, while sparing no means
efficaciously to ensure the peace and welfare of the population. In view of this state of
affairs, our patriarchate is invited to attach no importance to, and put no confidence
in, these malevolent reports and inventions, and also to replace the bishops of Siirt
and Bitlis.45

Besides registering these complaints about fundamentals, the Armenian authorities also
sought to refocus the debate on local problems, particularly on the social sources of the inse-
curity reigning in the Armenian provinces:
We consider it essential to remind Your Excellency, without equivocation, of certain

historical truths bearing the closest possible relation to the situation prevailing today.
From time immemorial and in every province of the Empire, the eşrefs and large land-
holders have formed a class apart, a state within the state. This privileged class has
gradually acquired such power that it has proved capable of foiling the projects and
actions of the central state’s best-intentioned members. Local civil servants – from
those of the highest to those of the lowest rank – have unfortunately never been able
to escape its influence. Those who have tried have, as a result of ruse or slander, been
promptly dismissed or replaced, or else, obeying feelings of honesty or patriotism, have
resigned their posts. All the investigations carried out by local authorities of crimes or
offences committed in the provinces have had to be conducted under the influence of
this privileged class, that is, in conformity with its illegitimate interests. Anyone who
dared complain about the tyrannical actions of this class to either members of the
local administration or the national authorities suffered more, perhaps, because he had
lodged a complaint than from the act about which he had originally complained.
The Armenians concluded:
Given this state of affairs, it is only natural that the central government cannot form
an accurate idea of the situation in the provinces ... Over the last thirty years, the abso-
lutist government developed a system of oppression and exactions brought to bear, in
particular, on the Armenians living in eastern Anatolia; it went so far as officially to
instruct the provincial authorities that it was licit to make attempts on the life, honor
and property of Armenians, or at least intimated that to them. Persuaded, however,
that these actions carried out in violation of religion, conscience and the law had to
be hidden from the eyes of the outside world as far as possible, the above-mentioned
government had recourse to the basest, most monstrous means to deceive European
public opinion. Thus the legitimate complaints addressed by Armenians to the local or
national authorities were, on orders of the national authorities and under the influence
of the large landowners, simply filed away; indeed, those who had shown the courage
to lodge such complaints were accused of rebelling against the state. This policy of
harassing the Armenians culminated in the organization of appalling massacres. And,
so as to ensure the impunity of the perpetrators and instigators of these tragedies, the
criminals were not prosecuted as they should have been, whereas the Armenians [who
had] survived the massacres were. The aim was to bring these unfortunates to beg
for a general amnesty from which their tormentors would also have benefited. This
barbarous persecution, to which the Armenians were exposed for more than a quarter
of a century, eventually acquired – especially in the vilayets of eastern Anatolia – the
character of natural custom and, one might say, of a law superior to the civil and
religious laws. The tragedy of Adana, which took place after the proclamation of the
constitution, was one logical consequence of the transformation of this policy into
natural law.46
The Armenian Council further noted that this law had “convinced the oppressors that
everything was permitted when it came to our countrymen,” adding that “the national
authorities would not find it easy to make these tyrants change their minds today,” the more

so as the investigations in progress had been confided to low-ranking local officials who were
under the influence of Kurdish begs. This
made it impossible to maintain peace and public order. Most of these officials are sin-
cerely convinced that patriotism and the law make it their duty to conceal crimes
committed by Muslims against non-Muslims ... They use all sorts of tricks in an attempt
to deny or cover up undeniable realities. However, they themselves are so well aware
of the absurdity of a system under which the Armenians are presented as complaining
of nonexistent facts that they are at pains to make it seem as if our countrymen were
motivated by ill-will or invidious hatred.
The authors of this report underscored that the Armenians who had fallen victim to such
exactions had to
defend themselves unaided against the base slanders invented in order to force them to
withdraw their complaints ... Matters have come to such a pass that these unfortunates,
who know from experience that they will face all sorts of negative consequences as a
result of these slanders ... do not even dare to present themselves to the authorities in
order to identify their persecutors ... One has only to make an impartial examination,
in the light of the circumstances described above, of the reports submitted by local
government officials to the central authorities ... in order to appreciate the absurdity of
these accusations.47
The ARF’s official organ, Droschak, was still more direct. Pronouncing its mea culpa
for its own past attitude, it made no attempt to play down the Ittihad’s responsibility for
the situation that had been forced on the Armenian population of the eastern provinces:
“Constitutional Turkey has ... with greater deceitfulness and methodicalness ... been sucking
the blood of the Armenian people like a vampire for the past four years ... and we, naive as we
were and blinded by illusion, insensibly drew closer, a step at a time, to this fatal abyss.” The
Dashnak editorialist also took the full measure of the trap in which the Armenians found
themselves: “Today we are confronted with a cruel, frightening dilemma. At stake is the very
existence of the Armenian people: it will either secure real assurances of its survival as a
nation or must prepare to disappear under the ruins of Turkey, like a sacrificial victim. There
is no half-way solution, no half-way exit.”
The conclusion is even more striking: “The hellish plot that is being forged against the
Armenian people in the dark is no longer a secret. The Turkish government – the Young
Turks – no longer feel the need to hide the crime they are meditating.”48
In the internal reports drawn up by the Armenian Political Council, the facts are exposed
in a still cruder light:
According to information received in the past few days from absolutely trustworthy
individuals ... the persecution of the Armenians in the six vilayets is proceeding in
systematic fashion. It is not hidden, but takes place in broad daylight. Everything and
anything now serves as a pretext for imputing subversive ideas to the Armenians and
pursuing them before the law. If they kill a Kurdish brigand who has become the terror
of their region, if they are found bearing arms, if they come together to commemorate a
holiday, if they don a hat instead of a fez, they are immediately arrested and thrown into
prison. What they have done is always described as a crime jeopardizing “state secu-
rity,” so that they may be kept in prison until the end of a judicial investigation that of
course never ends. The Kurds, for their part, are armed to the teeth; they travel about

in compact groups ... By sowing terror, they help keep the Armenians submissive. By
plundering, they help the government wage the economic war it has declared against
the Armenians. Thus they serve everywhere as stand-ins for the Turkish authorities.
The same report notes that the murders of Armenians all have one characteristic in com-
mon: those felled by the murderers’ bullets are always people of distinction. The victims are
drawn from the ranks of schoolteachers, priests, village muhtars, farmers – in short, all those
who, by virtue of their education, profession, or social situation, perform functions useful
to the community. “Systematic extermination is at work here. It is strikingly reminiscent of
the procedures the Ottoman government recently used against the Balkan peoples,” notes
the author of this report. The land question, he writes, was also growing ever more acute.
New illegal seizures of land were taking place in the vilayet of Van, in Nordüz, Aghbak, and
Moks, in the vilayet of Bitlis, in Sasun, where “the Armenian villages ... were wrested from
their Armenian owners and turned over to Kurds.” The situation was similar in the vilayet of
Dyarbekir, in Beşiri and Ğarzan, as well as in the vilayet of Erzerum, in Bayburt and Bulanik.
In fact, the Political Council seemed to be convinced that the authorities had no intention
of giving the Armenians back their lands:
In spite of the government’s promises to carry out such restitution by administrative

means, this procedure has never been applied. The Armenians have had to turn to
the courts. The fate meted out to them by the courts is well known. It makes no dif-
ference whether they produce a title deed; the judge always finds an excuse to dismiss
their complaints. Sometimes terrorism plays a role here: an Armenian plaintiff is killed
on his way back from court ... We also hear that the Ottoman government is getting
ready to settle a good many of the emigrants from Rumelia in Armenian areas; entire
caravans are already on their way to the vilayet of Sıvas.49
Finally, the Political Council observed that, taking its cue from the government, the Turkish
press had launched an anti-Armenian campaign; that the tone of the Turkish newspapers was
growing more vehement day by day, with articles making open threats of massacre50 or a gen-
eral boycott.51 According to the Armenian leaders, the Turkish authorities were pursuing a
twofold objective: they wanted to terrorize the Armenians on the one hand and, on the other,
to be able to convince the powers that Ottoman public opinion made it impossible for them
to accede to the Europeans’ demands, however limited and modest they might be.52
In the latter half of 1913, the harassment of the Armenian population of the eastern
vilayets seemed to be part of a general strategy elaborated by the national leadership – prob-
ably by the Ittihad’s Central Committee.

Chapter 2
The Armenian Organizations’ Handling

of the Reform Question
T
he two preceding chapters describe the situation prevailing in the Ittihad and the
Armenian organizations after the crushing defeat in the Balkans. It is clear that
the radicalization of the Ittihad alarmed the Armenians. The Armenian organiza-
tions, which had long hoped that the Young Turk regime would put the desired reforms
into effect, finally decided to internationalize the question. From then on, the Armenians
found themselves in an agonizing, merciless face-off with their Turkish “compatriots.” As
the editorialist of the Hnchak newspaper, Gohag, pointed out, the Balkan Wars had cre-
ated a “new situation” and endowed the Armenian question with “new topicality.”1 For its
part, the ARF organ Droschak drew up a balance sheet of the past few years. It reminded its
readers that “since the establishment of the new regime, despite painful realities such as the
Adana massacres ... the Armenians have provided eloquent, concrete proof of the sincerity
of their feelings and their profound attachment to the Ottoman constitution.”2 Yet this, it
added, had had no effect.
Krikor Zohrab writes in his diary that it was in a July 1912 interview in Istanbul with
Alexander Guchkov, the president of the Duma, that he succeeded in tempering the Russian
leaders’ sharp hostility towards the Armenians.3 The Russians, probably influenced by
Ottoman diplomacy, suspected the Armenians of harboring separatist tendencies, to say
nothing of the veritable war that the Czars had declared on the Armenian revolutionary
committees, especially the ARF. The ARF’s hatred of the Czarist regime, which had not
abated since the party’s foundation,4 was a major obstacle for the official Armenian organi-
zations. If Russian diplomacy was to play an active role in bringing about the Armenian
reforms, the burden embodied by the ARF would have to be cast off, which is to say that the
party would have to consent to establish normal relations with the Czarist state.
We have not found documents that allow us to draw clear-cut conclusions on this ques-
tion, but the initial October 1912 negotiations between Catholicos Kevork V and the viceroy
for the Caucasus, Vorontsov-Dashkov, would seem to indicate that the ARF found common
ground with the Russians around this time. It is possible, if not indeed probable, that high-
ranking Armenian officials in St. Petersburg stepped in here. It is known, in any event,
that two eminent St. Petersburg personalities, Professor Nicolas Adontz (1871–1942) and the
lawyer Sirakan Tigranian, were present in Istanbul on 21 and 22 December 19125 and were
received in the Armenian chamber on the very day that it created the Security Commission
it charged with handling the reform question.
On 21 December, a “historic” meeting of the Armenian chamber was held behind closed
doors in its seat in Galata. The Political Council – comprising Stepan Karayan,6 a judge
on the court of appeals, the Hnchaks Murad Boyajian and Nerses Zakarian,7 the Dashnaks
Garabed Pashayan8 and Vahan Papazian, and the “centrists” Diran Erganian,9 Levon

Demirjibashian,10 Oskan Mardikian,11 and Sarkis Svin12 – presented its plan for enacting
reforms in the Armenian provinces.13 It fell to Zohrab, whose role in the plan to put the
Armenian question back on the agenda has already been discussed, to review the reasons for
the Political Council’s initiative. The proposed plan was unanimously approved by all the
tendencies represented in the Armenian chamber, which agreed that there was no longer
any alternative to radical measures in order “to put an end, once and for all, to the risks of a
generalized massacre attested by all the credible reports received in the recent past.”14
To deal with this question, the chamber moved to create an Advisory Committee that was to
collaborate closely with the Political Council. It was to have five members – Harutiun Shahrigian
of the ARF; Vahan Tekeyan of the Ramgavar party; David Der Movsesian, representing the
political Center; B. Kalfayan of the SDHP; and finally, Zohrab. To coordinate the whole, the
Mixed Council – a joint body comprising both the Political and Religious Councils – created
a Security Commission with the former Patriarch Yeghishe Turian as its president. The com-
mission included Krikor Balakian, Stepan Karayan, Oskan Mardikian, Levon Demirjibashian,
Murad Boyajian, and Dr. Vahan Papazian, who was named its executive director.15
Since the 1895 efforts to bring about reform, made under pressure from the powers and
with the cooperation of Patriarch Matteos Izmirlian, the Armenian national authorities had
never again sought outside support of any kind to achieve their objectives. They saw only
too clearly that the Western powers were simply exploiting moral arguments to wrest more
and more advantages from the Ottoman state. This time, with the benefit of experience, the
Constantinople Patriarchate went about matters in very methodical fashion, coordinating its
activities with the Catholicosate in Etchmiadzin. Elected in November 1912, the Armenian
political leadership and its Special Commission worked with the greatest possible circum-
spection. Thus, as Karayan admitted at the 21 April 1913 session, certain activities of the
Special Commission were not reported to the Armenian chamber for security reasons.16
While the Commission pursued its task, Boghos Nubar17 was appointed president of the
Armenian Delegation by Catholicos Kevork V. Late in 1912, Nubar settled in Paris in order
to conduct – in close coordination with Constantinople and Tiflis, where a commission had
also been formed – the preparatory work that it was hoped would lead to the implementation
of reforms in Armenia.18 Thus a division of labor emerged: Nubar was responsible for diplo-
macy and discussions with the European governments, while the Political Council, seconded
by the Constantinople and Tiflis commissions, was to negotiate the reform question with the
authorities of the Ottoman and Russian Empires.
At the same time, the Council did everything it could to curb the massive emigration of the
exhausted Armenian peasantry. It promised the peasants that a system of justice worthy of the
name would soon be established, exhorting them to remain in their villages; it dispatched com-
missions to tour rural areas and assess their needs; it called on Armenian communities abroad
to lend their compatriots in Armenia a hand; it tried to facilitate economic investment so as
to encourage the population to stay put; it arranged for a patriarchal bull urging the Armenian
population to stay in its homeland to be read out in the churches; it drafted plans for an agri-
cultural bank; it initiated in February 1913 a census of the Armenians; and so on.19
While the Political Council’s first overtures to Kâmil’s cabinet had met with an encourag-
ing response, things changed when Mahmud Şevket took the helm of state late in January
1913: the negotiations between the government and the Patriarchate ceased immediately.20
Şevket did not meet with the leadership of the Political Council until May 1913. Karayan,
who had been re-elected, took the opportunity to tender the grand vizier a very revealing
memorandum.21 It stated that the Armenians did not appreciate the fact that the press and
public opinion it had helped form had blamed the defeat in the Balkans on them. They were
even less enthusiastic, the memorandum went on, about intimations that it would be neces-
sary to destroy the Armenian element in the empire to forestall a European intervention.

The Armenian Organizations’ Handling of the Reform Question 155
Indeed, at the 21 April 1913 session of the Armenian chamber, Karayan, who had become
a member of the Council of State under Kâmil, had exclaimed: “All legal channels have been
exhausted. Our initial impression of the government’s attitude was a positive one. Today,
however, Armenia’s situation has become unbearable and dangerous. At this very moment,
we face an imminent threat in an area extending from Cilicia to Van.”22 The situation in
the provinces now seemed so tense that H. Khorasanjian, the leader of the center and a man
with a reputation for moderation, declared at the 7 May session of the assembly that, “if we
must perish, let us be cut down with honor: let us assume our responsibilities and die behind
our breastworks.”23
In the Caucasus, in Tiflis, the head of the Armenian church had also created a standing
committee modeled on the one in Constantinople. It comprised nine members, including
Alexander Khatisian, the mayor of Tiflis, the Dashnak leaders Nigol Aghbalian and Arshak
Jamalian, and Hovhannes Tumanian, a poet and public activist.24 Somewhat as they had
done during the preparations for the 1878 Congress of Berlin, the Armenian authorities now
entreated Czar Nicolas to see to it that the question of reforms in Armenia was put on the
agenda of the London Conference, scheduled for April 1913.25
For his part, Boghos Nubar had, upon taking up residence in Paris, called on the Turkish
ambassador in order to explain what he planned to do: work toward bringing the Russians,
British, Germans, and French to a consensus on the reform issue.26 After thus serving notice
of his intentions, he circulated a memorandum summarizing the question. The argument he
developed in it sought to show that, far from contravening the interests of the powers, the
reforms would help promote peace and stability in the region.27 This memorandum, which
contained concrete propositions, had been drawn up by the Special Commission under
the aegis of the Political Council and then submitted to André Mandelstam, a diplomat
and jurist attached to the Russian embassy in Constantinople.28 Officially, then, what was
involved was a “Russian plan” that all parties treated as if it had been Mandelstam’s.
The principle clauses of this plan may be summarized as follows:
1) unification of the six vilayets, with the exclusion of certain peripheral areas;
2) nomination of a Christian governor, Ottoman or European;
3) nomination of an administrative council and a mixed – that is, Muslim and
Christian – Provincial Assembly;
4) creation of a mixed gendarmerie commanded by European officers;
5) dissolution of the hamidiye corps;
6) legalization of the use of the Armenian, Kurdish, and Turkish languages in the local
administration;
7) the right for each community to establish its own schools, whose administration was
to be financed by special taxes of the kind previously levied for the sole benefit of
Turkish schools;
8) creation of a special committee charged with examining the land confiscations car-
ried out in recent decades;
9) expulsion from the provinces of the Muslim refugees or immigrants who had been
settled on Armenian-owned land;
10) application of identical measures in Cilicia; and
11) an obligation on the part of the European powers to see to it that the plan was
enacted.
From the outset, Britain and France were associated with the discussions about the con-
crete implementation of the plan. Of course, without the agreement and support of these
two powers, every reform would be condemned to remain a dead letter, even if the Russians

briefly toyed with the idea of unilateral intervention.29 The Germans, initially excluded from
the negotiations, were finally brought into them in January 1913, after the German ambassa-
dor in Constantinople had got wind of what was afoot.30
The preliminary discussions of the reforms threw the diverging viewpoints and conflict-
ing interests of the powers into sharp relief. Thus France, the Ottoman Empire’s main credi-
tor, was simultaneously negotiating to obtain a concession to build a railroad in Armenia, in
direct competition with the Germans. Britain, while it had prudently begun scaling down its
investments in Turkey in 1880, was treating the caliphate with kid gloves in order to avoid
the least risk of Islamicist contagion in its own colonies in Egypt and the Indian subconti-
nent, to say nothing of the first concessions it was trying to obtain in the oilfields near Mosul,
in these early days of the saga of “black gold.” Britain and French diplomats were still seek-
ing to maintain the territorial status quo in Turkey, which both Britain and France deemed
crucial to their immediate and long-term interests. Thus they regarded the Russian initia-
tive somewhat apprehensively, participating in it the better to control it. As for Germany,
which was heavily involved in the construction of the Berlin-Baghdad Railway as well as the
reorganization of the Ottoman army, it was hostile to the very idea of reforms, which could
jeopardize its attempt to consolidate its economic control over part of Anatolia. Indeed,
Germany, whose ties to the Young Turks had been growing steadily stronger, was attempting
at their behest to torpedo the “Russian plan.”
Thus, it is evident that the success of the plan was anything but a foregone conclusion,
so that Boghos Nubar’s efforts to allay Western apprehensions were by no means superflu-
ous. In the memorandum that the Armenian leaders submitted to the European chanceller-
ies, they were at pains to point up the “social aspect” of the reforms in order to dispel the
fears of Russian annexation agitating France and Britain. Their efforts did not prevent these
two powers from curbing Russian ambitions at the April 1913 London Conference, even
while refusing to rally to the position defended by the Germans, who believed that what was
involved here was meddling in the internal affairs of the Ottoman Empire, a serious infringe-
ment of its sovereignty and a green light for a partition of Anatolia that would leave the door
open to subsequent Russian annexation. To counter this thesis, Russian diplomats contended
that if the reforms were not rapidly put in place, there would be a sure risk of disorder, which
would inevitably bring on armed Russian intervention.
In the end, the reforms were approved of, in principle, by all the powers, including Germany,
on the condition that their execution be left to the Sublime Porte and that they be enacted
under its supervision or, if need be, that of the powers. Evidently, this new proposal, endorsed
by Britain and France, was categorically rejected by Russia, who saw in it nothing more than
an underhanded way of refusing to seek concrete solutions to the problem of re-establishing
security in Armenia.31 Unwilling to pursue the matter any further within the framework of
the London Conference, the powers decided, taking up a Russian suggestion, to charge their
respective ambassadors in Constantinople with pursuing the discussions. Meanwhile, backing
up his words with deeds, Czar Nicolas massed troops on the Turkish border and ordered his
agents to organize Kurdish provocations in Armenia in order to step up the pressure.32
While this bargaining was underway, Nubar attempted, especially in the months follow-
ing the London Conference, to soften the positions of the different powers. He sought sup-
port for his efforts from pro-Armenian national committees such as the British-Armenian
Committee, of which Lord Bryce was a leading member, and the Armenian Committee of
Berlin. He also brought his many personal relations into play. Both in his correspondence
and at all the meetings he attended, Nubar insisted above all that it was essential that the
reforms be overseen by the great powers if they could not be carried out under Russian super-
vision, an option that London and Berlin categorically rejected.33 It should be added that
Nubar was not genuinely displeased by this collective decision, since he himself opposed the

idea of Russian hegemony over the Armenian provinces. For the leading Armenian circles in
Turkey, Russian control was the solution of last resort when it came to imposing a normaliza-
tion of the situation on Istanbul. From his Paris base, Nubar did not hesitate to travel repeat-
edly to London to meet Sir Edward Grey, the British foreign secretary.34 Although he had the
support of members of parliament who also belonged to the British-Armenian Committee,
he was hard put to convince the British that his initiative was well founded. He was the more
shocked by Britain’s passive attitude, as the grand vizier himself, Mahmud Şevket, regarded
the demands for reform as reasonable and let it be known, shortly before he was assassinated,
that he was prepared to accept them.35
At all events, the discussions conducted by the ambassadors of the powers began in June
1913 in Constantinople. The basis for them was provided by the text of the 1895 memoran-
dum, supplemented by the one that the Armenian Patriarch had just submitted to them.36
Meanwhile, Nubar was sounding out Italian political circles in discussions with Galli, an
Italian parliamentary deputy who had just made a declaration before the Roman parliament.
Nubar reassured him that the Armenians were by no means pursuing autonomy, which was
impracticable in the present situation, but rather sought the establishment of an administration
capable of protecting their lives and property.37 Nubar also appealed to his friends among the
British to convince financial circles that it was crucial to promote the reforms in order to obtain
better guarantees for their loans to Turkey.38 He received solid support from the Armenian
Committee of Berlin, presided over by G. V. Greenfield. His efforts to explain the situation
to the Wilhelmstraße consisted of defense of the Armenian thesis: the surest way of ensuring
Russian non-intervention was to enact the reforms.39 In Constantinople, the press seized on
the reform question in July; vehement opposition to the plan was expressed in certain quarters,
and some went so far as to burn down the house near Hagia Sophia in which Talât was then
living.40 Plunged in to a disastrous financial crisis, the empire was hoping to obtain material
aid from Europe, which Nubar advised the Europeans to provide in exchange for a Turkish
political decision in favor of the reforms. This appeal was not taken seriously; the European
chancelleries paid virtually no attention to it. St. Petersburg, whose Armenian Committee
was headed by the historian Nicolas Adontz, was the only capital genuinely interested in the
question of reforms in Armenia. Moreover, doubtless with a view to exacerbating the antago-
nism between the powers, the Sublime Porte began circulating a rumor to the effect that it
intended to appoint British officers to head the gendarmerie in Armenia, and another alleging
Armenian hostility to European supervision.41 Thus, one sees that the Armenians’ leaders
devoted themselves body and soul to the extremely complex game in progress throughout 1913,
and were busy seeking support wherever it was to be had.
Ultimately, the Sublime Porte chose to publish a counter-plan encompassing all the prov-
inces of Asiatic Turkey, the Armenian vilayets included. The idea was to establish a network
of inspectors-general who were supposed to resolve all the region’s economic and social prob-
lems, ostensibly with a view of “decentralization.”42 At the same time, the German ambas-
sador, Hans von Wangenheim, continued to block the Constantinople negotiations, notably
by attacking the Russian diplomats, whom he accused of harboring ulterior motives. Nubar
therefore decided to travel to Berlin early in August 1913 to meet with the German foreign
minister and persuade him to modify his policy of obstructing the reforms.43 This visit to the
Wilhelmstraße proved decisive, for it unfroze the situation in Constantinople, bringing the
European ambassadors there to undertake serious negotiations.44 A few days later, Dr. Lepsius
sent a telegram to Nubar, indicating that “the situation [was] favorable” to successful com-
pletion of the negotiations, and proposing that Nubar come to Constantinople as soon as
possible in order to oversee operations there.45 Nubar’s response to the German Protestant
minister was that he could not decently step in to replace the Political Council, which had
been charged with handling the matter.46

Lepsius, specifically, seems to have played a major role in moving the negotiations for-
ward, serving as an intermediary between the Patriarchate and the German embassy,47 and
working hand-in-hand with Krikor Zohrab.48 Late in September 1913, it was reported that
the German and Russian diplomats had reached a compromise:
The country shall be divided into two sectors, one encompassing Trebizond, Erzerum,
and Sıvas/Sepastia, and the other, all the rest. The Sublime Porte requests that the
great powers appoint two inspectors, one for each sector. These inspectors shall be
entitled to appoint and dismiss their subordinates. Participation in local administrative
functions and representation in the assemblies and councils shall be half Christian,
half Muslim.49
This news, confirmed by the correspondence of the St. Petersburg Armenian Committee,
revealed the ambiguous but decisive part that Russian diplomats took in bringing about
an agreement. Nubar informed the Russian foreign minister, Serge Sazonov, of his satisfac-
tion at their 17 October meeting.50 Certain details of the plan, however, had yet to be set-
tled, especially those concerning the nature of the executive powers to be vested in the two
inspectors-general. Zohrab set about working out these details with Dr. Schönberg after the
German ambassador, Wangenheim, received instructions from the Wilhelmstraße to come
to terms with the Russian diplomats.51 France and Britain, which had been observing the
Russian-German tug-of-war with interest, also rallied to the compromise. The French min-
ister Pichon even pledged active French support.52
Late in October, after the “deal had been sewn up,” the dossier was transmitted to the Western
chancelleries, which had now to convince the Sublime Porte to enact the accord. To hasten the
process, Nubar organized in Paris an international conference on Armenian reforms. On 30
November and 1 December 1913, the leading representatives of the Armenian Committees in
Europe, as well as pro-Armenian associations, diplomats and politicians from Germany, Russia,
Britain, and Italy came together in the French capital to coordinate their efforts.53
On 25 December, the Russians and Germans officially transmitted the plan for reforms in
Armenia to the Ottoman government. After a few weeks of foot-dragging, the Sublime Porte
ultimately approved of the agreement on 8 February 1914. It had not succeeded in obtaining
suppression of the clause on Western supervision, however, which it considered decisive.54
The Negotiations over the Reforms with

the Ottoman Cabinet and the Ittihad
In the preceding section, we examined to an extent the public and diplomatic aspects of the
negotiations over the reforms. For the sake of clarity, we have chosen to devote a separate
section to the parallel negotiations, informal but crucial, which took place between a few
Turkish and Armenian protagonists.
As has already been pointed out, when the Armenian side decided to relaunch the idea of
reforms in the eastern provinces, Kâmil Pasha’s liberal cabinet constituted an ideal interlocu-
tor, and the negotiations advanced quite briskly. Not by accident, Kâmil Pasha summoned a
number of Armenian personalities to a 21 December 1912 meeting, on the initiative of his
foreign minister, Gabriel Noradounghian, in order to discuss the reform plan. Not only the
Political Council, but the ARF too was excluded from these discussions. The parties to them
were the former Patriarch Malakia Ormanian, the editor-in-chief of Sabah, Diran Kelekian,
the parliamentary deputy from Sıvas, Dr. Nazaret Daghavarian, and two senators, Azarian
and Eramian.55 This bypassing of the legal authorities caused quite a stir in Armenian circles,
so much so that Zohrab and Vahan Papazian, a former parliamentary deputy from Van and

executive director of the Security Commission, went to see Kelekian and Ormanian to demand
an explanation. Kelekian and Ormanian affirmed that they had stressed, in their conversations
with the grand vizier, that they were in no way authorized to speak on behalf of the nation and
that he would have to “speak with the Armenian national representatives.”56
The Ittihad, back at the helm of state after the 23 January 1913 coup d’état, profited from
its close ties with the Dashnak leaders, as soon as it had gotten wind of the reform plan, to
renew its contacts with the Armenian authorities, with whom it had broken off relations
some time earlier.57 As was often the case under such circumstances, Bedros Halajian, a
parliamentary deputy and member of the Ittihad, had been drafted to serve as an intermedi-
ary. The first meeting was organized in his home, probably in late January 1913, bringing
together, on the one hand, Mehmed Talât, Halil, the deputy from Menteşe, and the CUP’s
secretary general, Midhat Şükrü, and on the other, Aknuni, Vartkes, and Armen Garo. All
indications are that the Ittihad was convinced, at the time, that it would once again succeed
in destroying the unanimity about the reform plan that reigned in the Armenians’ ranks. It
was counting on the powers of persuasion of Talât, who reminded his Armenian comrades
of the friendship that had long united them. Sensing, however, that the Dashnaks, who
had silently suffered so many indignities since 1908, would not be persuaded all that easily,
Talât informed them that he himself wished to introduce reforms, modeled after the 1880
plan for Rumelia. He also pointed out that they were all “children of the same fatherland,
bound by mutual ties.” In order to underscore the ideological proximity between the Ittihad
and the ARF, and the corresponding distance between them and “conservative” circles,
he launched an attack against Boghos Nubar, describing him as a “Russian tool.” In a final
overture to the Armenians present, after intimating that the reform project was Nubar’s and
that the ARF bore no responsibility for it, Talât suggested inviting the Egyptian statesman
to Istanbul so that he might present his demands directly to the Young Turks.58 Another
meeting between the Dashnak leadership and the Young Turk leaders İsmail Hakkı, Hüseyin
Cahid, and Mehmed Talât took place on 1/14 February at Zohrab’s house. This time, the
discussion turned on a point of crucial importance – the powers’ intervention in the admin-
istration of reforms. The Ittihadists, of course, suggested settling the matter without external
mediation.59 The Dashnaks retorted that the Armenians had defended that position since
1908 but that the successive Young Turk governments had consistently rejected their propos-
als, even though they had been quite modest.
The Dashnaks were the more skeptical because they had seen the CUP resort to radical
measures almost as soon as the reform plan was floated. Among them were the organization,
late in 1912, of a parliamentary faction of Kurdish and Turkish deputies from the eastern prov-
inces, and that of a Union for the Defense of the Rights of the Eastern Provinces.60 But the
most concrete manifestation of the CUP’s attitude was a new policy of economic boycott of the
Armenians and their products, backed up by a panoply of measures such as the refusal of bank
loans and administrative harassment of those engaged in export. Religious circles “secretly
preached” that all business and trade with Armenians should be broken off. Beginning early in
1913, commercial groups exclusive comprising Turkish merchants sprang up, and it was recom-
mended that people patronize them and them alone, rather than “buying impure goods” from
Christians.61 Also noteworthy is the dismissal of all Armenian civil servants in the kazas of
Agn, Arapkir, Divrik, and so on, to say nothing of more spectacular acts, such as setting fire
to the bazaar of Dyarbekir, where the merchants and craftsmen were almost all Armenians, or
the burning down of Edirne’s Armenian quarter.62 While all this was going on, the Council
of Ministers was adopting the “Islahat kanoni,” a sort of reform avant l’heure, the sole pur-
pose of which seems to have been to sow confusion and provide an argument for suspending
the Armenian initiative. Mehmed Cavid was even dispatched to the eastern provinces in the
capacity of inspector in order to supervise the application of this “law.”63

In inviting Boghos Nubar to resolve the problem of the reform plan “in the family,”64
Şevket’s cabinet was seeking to bring him to leave Paris and thus abandon the work he was
pursuing in the Western chancelleries. In other words, the Ittihad’s as well as the cabinet’s
strategy in this period was to train their fire on the key point of the powers’ mediating role,
which the powers had to be stopped from playing if the reform plan was to be foiled.
In Armenian circles, it was noted that the ARF maintained contact with the Young
Turks, apparently without ceding to the pressures that the CUP was putting on it. It may
also be presumed that the ARF had no ulterior motives in collaborating with the Political
Council and the Security Commission, in which it was not merely represented, but also very
active, with the Dashnak Vahan Papazian serving as the Commission’s executive director.
It was, moreover, in this capacity that Papazian traveled to Paris in February 1913 in order
to meet with Boghos Nubar and hammer out certain crucial points of the memorandum
that the Armenian organizations were then drawing up.65 According to the memoirs of
this former parliamentary representative from Van, their conversations, conducted in French
(Nubar spoke Armenian poorly), went very well: they put the finishing touches on a joint
project that they planned to submit to the powers. It bore, notably, on the nomination of
European inspectors or counselors and the provision of guarantees by the European states.
In Istanbul, the Russian embassy was another crucially important interlocutor for the
Armenian organizations. Two of the men working for these organizations played special parts.
Ivan Zavriev,66 a Dashnak leader who was very well placed in ruling circles in St. Petersburg
(he was in Istanbul in 1913), played a decisive role in negotiations with the Russians, while
Zohrab was the “semi-official voice” of the Armenians.67 Zohrab, in his diary, remarks that
Zavriev “was the first Dashnak I ever knew who admitted the truth that, under a Turkish
government, the sole fate awaiting the Armenian world was annihilation”; he contrasts him
with Aknuni, who was “the last to part with his Turkophile dreams.”68 Zohrab and Zavriev
held many private interviews with the Russian ambassador B. Charikov and his adviser André
Mandelstam, who was charged with handling the reform issue. Work sessions were also organ-
ized with the participation of various experts, such as that of 12 April 1913, at which Zohrab,
the Russian ambassador, and a representative of the Patriarchate, as well as L. Demirjibashian,
Zavriev, and Zavarian,69 discussed demographic problems, which the diplomat considered to
be of great importance, and also the census of the Armenian population that the Patriarchate
had begun conducting in all the vilayets of Asia Minor in February.70
In spring 1913, after the London Conference, at which the Armenian project took a
big step forward, the Ittihad naturally revived the practice of meeting regularly with the
Dashnaks. Halajian served as an intermediary and a barometer of the CUP’s reactions.71 In
particular, a dinner was organized on the Island of Prinkipo in June 1913, bringing together
Ahmed Cemal, then military governor of the capital (accompanied by Vahan Tatevian,72 one
of his close associates) and the entire Dashnak leadership – Armen Garo, Aknuni, Vartkes,
Hrach Tirakian and Vahakn, and Vahan Papazian. Cemal was evidently blunter than Talât;
he made no bones about the fact that the CUP considered the Armenian initiative to be a
serious error. It came down, he thought, to working for the Russians. His party would con-
sequently use all available means to counter the project: “at stake,” he said, “is the territorial
integrity of Turkey, which has been imprudently endangered as a result of your actions.” He
agreed, to be sure, that the Young Turks had not succeeded in carrying out the required
reforms. The explanation, he said, lay in the country’s dire economic and social plight. “The
Armenians should have understood this,” he added, “rather than backing us up against the
wall.” Finally, he suggested that “the Armenians not broaden the existing gulf between Turks
and Armenians ... The consequences may be irreversible.”73 Papazian would later confess that
all the Armenians present had very well understood Cemal’s barely veiled threats, but that
they “were persuaded that Turkey was at the end of its rope.”74

In an interview granted to the Istanbul daily Azadamard during a visit to Paris early in July
1913, Mehmed Cavid, who had gone to France to negotiate a loan, spoke in very different terms.
He declared that the Ottoman government had decided to satisfy the Armenians’ demands
“because the political character of the Armenian question [had] changed since the last [Balkan]
war, becoming one of the essential questions before the empire.”75 In the same interview, he
also affirmed that he had met with Boghos Nubar and that they had reached full agreement on
nearly every point, “with the exception of the question of guarantees.”76 This positive declara-
tion seems, however, to have been inspired by the problem then confronting the Ottoman min-
ister of finance: convincing the French government to float a loan on behalf of a Turkey that had
been bled white and desperately needed cash with which to resume the war against Bulgaria.
This priority no doubt explains Cavid’s tone and the fact that he took the trouble to pay a visit
to Nubar, whose weight in French political circles was by no means negligible.
The impression that Cavid wanted at all costs to convince his auditors of his govern-
ment’s good intentions, fueling hopes of positive developments in the reform question, is
confirmed by a number of factors. It finds its explanation, above all, in the context – that
is, the imminent offensive against Edirne, which had probably already been decided upon,
and also the “Ambassadors’ Conference” held in Yeniköy from 3 to 24 July for the purpose of
putting the last touches on the plan for reforms in Armenia, in accordance with a decision
made at the London Conference.
We find confirmation of the temporary change in the strategy of the Young Turks, who
were obviously trying to gain time in which to realize their short-term projects, in another
interview, accorded this time by the interior minister, Mehmed Talât, to the newspaper
L’Union early in July 1913.77 Summoned to provide answers to delicate questions about, for
example, the reasons that the confiscated property of Armenian exiles had still not been
restored, the impunity of criminals, and forced conversions to Islam, Talât clearly stated that
he had assigned 500 more policemen to the eastern provinces; that the army was going to
help repress banditry; that the agrarian question was due to be examined in the near future;
that the government had shown that it had changed its attitude and that a commission of
inquiry was going to be created to study these questions in the eastern provinces themselves;
and that arrangements had been made to assign experienced civil servants to the region. In
other words, the minister conceded that there were problems – he was no longer denying that
fact – but added that he had now bent himself to the task of resolving them.
After the informal Prinkipo meeting attended by Ahmed Cemal, the Unionist Central
Committee also resumed its negotiations with the ARF’s Western Bureau in early summer
1913 – indirectly at first, by way of Zohrab and Halajian, and then in direct encounters
with Aknuni, Vartkes, and Armen Garo, who met with Halil (Menteşe), Midhat Şükrü, and
Talât.78 At these meetings, the CUP’s leaders demanded that the Armenians not try to profit
from the empire’s delicate situation, and refrain from appealing to outside forces, especially
Turkey’s mortal enemy, Russia. In exchange, they announced that they were prepared to
come to an agreement with the ARF and the Patriarchate about putting the reforms into
practice. But, they said, so as not to inflame public opinion the Armenians had to reject
all forms of outside interference in the country’s internal affairs. Talât concluded with the
remark that, in any case, “they would find the means they needed to scotch the plan if
the Armenians did not yield to their demands.”79 In private, then, even with their former
Dashnak allies, the Unionists’ discourse was distinctly less benevolent, yet was also marked
by a certain consistency: now that the Ambassadors’ Conference was imminent, they wanted
to persuade the Armenians to abandon the idea of mediation by the powers. The Armenian
leaders, conversely, were unanimously in favor of maintaining the principle of a negotiation
guaranteed by the European states, since they were convinced that that was the sole way to
ensure authentic reforms.

Parallel to these semi-official negotiations, the interior minister was making public
appearances of a kind that were meant to impress. Thus, on 22 June 1913, he paid a visit, in
his official capacity, to the Patriarch. He was received in the Patriarchate’s official reception
room, where he solemnly announced a reform of the judicial system and the gendarmerie in
the provinces. The Patriarch responded that he would like to believe that there would be
an end to the violence and pillage that had not ceased in the eastern provinces, touching
off a massive exodus of the Armenian population. He added that if the problems had been
resolved by the government as they arose, outside intervention of any sort would have been
perfectly superfluous.80
The Dashnak leadership seemed to confirm, in its official organ, that it was not disposed
to make new concessions to the Ittihad. In the September 1913 issue, it reminded its readers
that
the Party for Union and Progress, its untold solemn promises notwithstanding, has not
met the most elementary demands of the Armenian people and the Dashnaktsutiun –
for example, demands for guarantees of personal safety, a solution to the land problem,
a redistribution of taxes to finance education or proportional Armenian representation
in the civil service at the local and national levels.81
The real negotiations, however, began only after the Ambassadors’ Conference came to
an end – indeed, only after Germany and Russia reached agreement on the essential points
on 25 October 1913.82 The first version of the plan, endorsed by the ambassadors in July,
stipulated that only people with fixed abodes had the right to vote and that the hamidiye
regiments would be dissolved.83 The Russian-German text did not, however, provide for the
restitution of confiscated land, nor did it prohibit the settlement of muhacir from the Balkans
in the eastern provinces. As for the hamidiyes, they were renamed “lightly armed troops.”84
About the last phase of the negotiations, in which Zohrab was the main Armenian
participant, we now have a valuable source of information in his recently published diary,
which sheds new light on many different aspects of the acrimonious discussions between
Armenians and Young Turks. Not by accident, the Ittihad appointed Halil (Menteşe), the
president of the Council of State, to explain to Zohrab the party’s opposition to certain
aspects of the plan that it categorically rejected.85 The two men knew each other very well.86
The Young Turk leader went to see Zohrab at his home on 20 December 1913 and set out
the Ittihad’s position, summed up in a formule (Zohrab uses the French word in his diary):
“The Turks would rather die than accept interference of any kind from the powers in the
Armenian question, although they know that the country would die along with them. They
regard this as ... a question of life and death for all of Turkey and their party.”87 After a year
of negotiations, temporization, and advances and retreats, depending on the circumstances,
the two sides had reached the end of the road. The Ittihad’s new initiative had to be accord-
ingly interpreted, Zohrab acknowledged, as “the final, supreme argument before the rupture
between Turks and Armenians was transformed into a war.”88 Zohrab and Halil therefore
envisaged ways of reducing “the reigning tension between Armenians and Turks” and coop-
erating on putting the reforms into practice.89
“I would have preferred,” Zohrab wrote,
that someone else had been in my shoes then; someone conscious of his responsibilities
and familiar with all the discouraging details of our situation; someone who saw, as if
it were right there in front of him, the imminent, inevitable clash that was going to
take place between the Armenian and Turkish element, with, as its consequence, the
definitive failure of the Armenian question.90

Coming from a man with as much experience as Zohrab, this disabused reflection testifies to
the tension that marked the last phase of the negotiations. He doubtless sensed the unspo-
ken hostility in the Committee of Union and Progress and the lack of political discernment
characteristic of some Armenian leaders, who had initially refused to negotiate with the
Ittihad.91
The “impasse” was produced by a demand “that constitutes the very basis of our question”
and that “they have always opposed.”92 The issue was, in Zohrab’s words, of a “guarantee”
from the power. In Halil’s formulation, it was one of “supervision.” In an effort to persuade his
interlocutor to accept the terms that the Armenians preferred, Zohrab set forth a number of
different arguments. He was well aware, he said, that the Sublime Porte could curry favor with
Russia and Germany by granting them certain advantages. It might be possible to bury the
Armenian question in that way. But, he wondered, would that truly represent a success for the
Turks? He suggested that they should rather try to regain the Armenians’ confidence, and, to
that end, carry out reforms without delay, since “it was not possible to leave the Armenians
as dissatisfied as they were.”93 As for the role of the powers, Zohrab contended that it was not
a question of “foreign supervision,” but of a “guarantee,” since the inspectors would be offi-
cially “designated by the Sublime Porte,” while the ambassadors of the powers would merely
signify their agreement orally. Halil, however, told him that these stipulations had been firmly
rejected by his party.94 “I believe,” Zohrab nevertheless wrote, “that I succeeded in convinc-
ing him of a point that is the cornerstone of our cause, a point [the Ittihadists] have always
opposed ... I prepared him to convince his party to consent ... to the principle of a recommanda-
tion [in French in Zohrab’s text] from the powers ... and go back to the formula of a European
inspecteur général [in French] to whom powers would be delegated.”95
Zohrab writes that Halil then promised him to do everything in his power to convince
his party, but adds:
It was obvious that he would have to overcome a number of difficulties, many more
than we thought. A military faction among the Turks, led by Cemal Bey, was the most
firmly opposed, and the Committee was favorably inclined toward this faction. Halil
Bey feared, precisely, that those in Cemal’s faction, although fully aware of the conse-
quences of their actions, would remain adamant.96
Zohrab was thus cognizant of the pressure that this military faction, associated with Enver,
was bringing to bear on the Ittihad and the government to take total control of the army
and adopt an even more radical political line.97 Indeed, the Turkish press was, in this period,
passionately inveighing against the Armenians in alarming terms,98 while Vartkes, who met
with Ahmed Cemal about the same time, around 20 December, heard the Young Turk officer
speaking even more bluntly than usual, proffering threats of massacre in the event that the
Armenians failed to abandon the clause about a guarantee from the powers.99
Zohrab was, however, also alarmed by the Armenian political parties’ inclination to raise
the stakes and their blindness to the results their decisions might have. The Armenians, he
thought, had to be able to admit the possibility of not “obtaining everything” and treating
the reforms as “a stage,” as Ambassador Wangehneim had put it.100 When, the very next day,
on 21 December, Zohrab gave an account of his meeting with the president of the Council
of State to the Patriarch, Karayan, Papazian, Boyajian, and Armen Garo, putting the accent
on the impasse around the issue of “supervision” by the powers, he observed with dismay the
intransigence of his colleagues and sighed, “may God grant that we emerge from all this with
as little damage as possible.”101 He reminded them that Article 61 of the Treaty of Berlin,
the basis for the reform plan, provided for an “international guarantee,” not “international
supervision.”102 He urged them to make concessions: this would enable them to “improve

[their] relations [with the Turks], which had become extremely bitter and were taking on
increasingly threatening forms.” By way of response, he was told that the Turks’ aim was
to negotiate this difficult moment while eluding European “supervision,” so as “to leave the
Armenians in a face-off” with them alone.103
Halil’s failure to obtain significant results no doubt prompted the minister of the interior
to intervene in person. On 24 December 1913, Zohrab went to see Halil at his residence:
there he found Talât, who confirmed that he wanted the inspectors-general to be named
by the Sublime Porte. This came down to doing away with European mediation and limit-
ing European supervision or guarantees.104 Zohrab responded that it was essential that the
reforms succeed; it was not enough merely to announce reforms, as had been the case with
the army, where there had been no tangible results. “You will grant,” he said to Talât, “that
the Armenians’ desire for security is legitimate. Agree, at a minimum, to make a ten-year
commitment on the agrarian question and on language, military service, the school tax and
the hamidiye.”105
The next day, Zohrab, Vartkes, and the minister of finance, Mehmed Cavid, who was
reputed to be a moderate, had a dinner meeting that represented the last chance to reach a
compromise. Cavid said that he approved of the reforms, but suggested that the Armenians
make the concessions the Ittihad had asked for.106
In his diary entry for 28 December/10 January 1913–14, Zohrab noted bitterly that he had
had to bear with the anti-Czarist positions of the Dashnaks for five years and that the party
had now broken off discussions with the Ittihad against his advice.107 His misgivings were by
no means unfounded, for a new factor had arisen to complicate the negotiations: the acrimo-
nious discussions between the Russians and Germans on the subject of the German military
mission in Turkey headed by Otto Liman von Sanders.108 The Armenians doubtless consid-
ered that if the Germans showed willingness to compromise on this matter, the Russians
might also be inclined to make concessions on fundamental points of the reform package.
There can be no doubt that the failure of the December 1913 Armenian-Turkish negotia-
tions left profound traces at a time when the Ittihad had decided to take complete control
over the army and the state. For Zohrab, the Armenians had made a serious political error and
nothing could now be done to remedy it. This is what he said to Vahan Papazian and Armen
Garo when they came to see him on 17 January 1914 and announced that they were prepared
to accept the compromise that they had rejected three weeks earlier. The damage had already
been done, and Zohrab flew into a rage when they suggested that he go to see Halil. He criti-
cized them for refusing to bargain, and particularly for having dismissed the proposal to bring
Boghos Nubar to Turkey in order to carry on direct negotiations with the government.109
Zohrab informed Papazian and Garo that the Young Turks had agreed to apply the fifty-
fifty principle to local political institutions, and also in appointing civil servants and police-
men in the vilayets of Bitlis and Van. A proportional system was to be applied in the other
regions. At the meeting of the Security Commission held the same day, the Armenian side
proposed that the problem of the Kurdish hamidiye regiments be resolved by, at a mini-
mum, incorporating these regiments into the army. The Patriarch insisted that the fifty-fifty
principle be applied in Erzerum as well.110 But the Armenians had to act quickly, because
the Russian ambassador was to call at the Sublime Port at three o’clock. Zohrab hurriedly
drafted the Patriarchate’s response to the proposals of the Sublime Porte as transmitted by
the ambassador. This was, to say the least, an odd situation, although perhaps not such an
unusual one in the last years of the Ottoman Empire: the representative of a foreign state
was acting as an intermediary between a party of government and a party representing an
Ottoman national group.
The final details of the reform plan were examined on 4 February 1914 in the presence of
André Mandelstam and Zohrab, at a dinner given at the residence of the Russian ambassador.

In a telegram, St. Petersburg had instructed its diplomats to insist on three points: first, that
the fifty-fifty principle be applied to the vilayet of Erzerum as well; second, that muhacir be
prohibited from entering Armenia; and third, that Christians be guaranteed the right to sit
on the general councils in the zones in which they were a minority – in Harput, Dyarbekir,
and Sıvas.111 The Sublime Porte rejected the first demand, gave an oral promise with regard to
the second, and accepted the third.112 On 8 February, the agreement was officially signed.
Since spring 1913, the Armenian leadership had also been conducting negotiations over
Armenian representation in the Ottoman Chamber of Deputies, with an eye to the upcom-
ing elections.113 The Justice Ministry, however, let it be known that the electoral system
was not a proportional one: parliamentary deputies were chosen to represent, not an ethnic
group, but the whole Ottoman nation, and the ministry consequently saw no reason to allot
the Armenians a number of seats proportional to their relative weight in the population.
Moreover, the Turkish and Armenian authorities disagreed about the number of Armenians
living in the empire. After numerous discussions – from which the Patriarchate was officially
excluded, even though its political leadership was the Porte’s official interlocutor – a meet-
ing attended by the Armenian parties, national leadership, and a few Armenian dignitaries
was held on 18 December 1913. There it was decided to demand at least 18 to 20 seats in
parliament, with the deputies to be elected by the nation and distributed among the different
vilayets in accordance with the demographic weight of the Armenian population in each.
The Ittihad had initially accepted these propositions, but then changed its mind, doubt-
less when the negotiations over the reform plan were broken off. In February 1914, Stepan
Karayan and the new Patriarch elected in August 1913,114 Zaven Der Yeghiayan, held a meet-
ing with Interior Minister Talât and the secretary general of the Ittihad, Midhat Şükrü, at
which they finally agreed to set the number of Armenian deputies at 16. It was, however,
also stipulated that the candidates recommended by the patriarchate would first have to be
presented to the bureau of the Ittihad, so that they could be “officialized.” For “good meas-
ure,” the minister even promised, “as a show of his trust in the Armenians,” that he would
have one of these candidates elected vice-president of the Ottoman chamber; carry out the
reforms, which were needed in Armenia, as quickly as possible; and revitalize the economy in
these regions by building a railroad there.115 According to Vahan Papazian’s memoirs, Talât
declared at this meeting that there was no good reason “that they could not also come to an
agreement on the question of Armenian representation in the Ottoman parliament.” The
aim of all these declarations by Cavid, Talât, and even (in Tanin) Hüseyin Cahit was, how-
ever, to appease Europe, with which the Ottoman government had for months been negoti-
ating to obtain new credits – the more so as Paris and London had given them to understand
that one of the conditions for obtaining the desired loan was rapid implementation of the
Armenian reforms. Papazian also informs us that rumors had even been making the rounds
to the effect that Bedros Halajian might be named inspector general. “This,” writes Papaian,
“is how they succeeded in duping the Europeans and throwing sand in their eyes.”116
By the end of this wrestling match, which had gone on for more than a year, the official
Armenian organizations had, to be sure, had their way on the main points. In the meantime,
however, the government had passed from the hands of the liberals into those of a radical
Young Turk cabinet, which ultimately ceded only under heavy pressure from the powers. All
indications are that the Ittihad remained deeply hostile to reforms, which it considered to
be the first step in a separatist process. It seemed that nothing could reconcile Young Turks
and Armenians, who were now in a tense face-off, like a couple that has already filed for
divorce.

Chapter 3
The Establishment of the Ittihadist

Dictatorship and the Plan to
“Homogenize” Anatolia
F
rom January 1913, when the CUP took the country firmly back in hand, to the congress
of the Ittihad in October of the same year, the “young officers” led by Enver plainly
attained a position of dominance in both the party and the conduct of state affairs. But
this ascension was still far from having reached its apex, held back as it was by many differ-
ent oppositional tendencies. The project to reform the army put forward by Mahmud Şevket
accordingly aimed above all to keep the officers out of politics, just as the restructuring of
the Ittihad had sought to reduce the risk that the army would bring the Central Committee
under its control. Far from laying down their arms, Enver and his partisans kept up their
pressure on the party and the government. Late in 1913, as the question of the Armenian
reforms was entering a critical phase, the Ittihadist Central Committee found itself caught
on the horns of a dilemma: it could either yield to the officers’ bid for influence, at the risk of
allowing a certain anarchy in the army, or reorganize the army by depoliticizing it.
The fact that the Ittihad and Said Halim’s cabinet were indeed under pressure was con-
firmed when, toward the middle of December, Major Enver went to see the grand vizier
Halim to insist that he be given the post of minister of war. The Egyptian prince pointed out
that Enver was still too young for a position of that sort, but proposed to make him the chief
of staff in order to show that he was aware of the young man’s growing influence. Talât, for
his part, hesitated to lend Enver his support,1 probably because he was already wary of Enver’s
ambition and fearful of being sidelined in his own party.
These questions of personal ambition aside, what was at stake was the remodeling of the
army already set in motion by Şevket. Halil (Menteşe), by now president of the Council of
State, notes in his memoirs that “after the disastrous defeat in the Balkans, the question of
the modernization of the army was on the agenda. The list of commanding officers to be sent
into retirement had already been compiled.”2 But not everyone in the army shared the view
that these officers should be shunted aside, beginning with the incumbent minister of war
and chief of staff, Ahmed İzzet Pasha, who was reluctant to enact the decision. According
to Halil, İzzet invoked the fact that all these high-ranking officers were “my friends.”3 More
probably, he was of the view that if he eliminated the old guard of ranking officers to a man,
he ran the risk, quite simply, of decapitating the army and aggravating the disorder that
already reigned in it. Opposed, like Şevket, to the politicization of the officer corps, he doubt-
less constituted, after the assassination of the grand vizier, the last obstacle to the Young
Turk leaders’ assumption of total control over the army. Educated in Germany, İzzet was a
close acquaintance of General Liman von Sanders, the head of the German military mission
charged with reorganizing the Ottoman army. It was İzzet who went to receive von Sanders

at the Sirkeci train station when the Prussian general arrived in Istanbul on 14 December
1913.4 It may reasonably be supposed that, like many civilian and military leaders in the
Hamidian period, he harbored serious apprehensions about the Young Turks and their ability
to conduct affairs of state. Moreover, the Ittihadist Central Committee apparently wished to
push İzzet aside. Indeed, Halil reports that, “One day, the late Talât said: ‘Halil Bey, we will
go to İzzet Pasha this evening. You know the problem. I will make this gentleman one last
offer. If he shows the least hesitation, I shall suggest that he resign.’ ”5 Obviously, the Ittihad
was after more than just a reorganization of the Ottoman army; it was seeking to impose its
own commanding officers on it so that it would no longer have anything to fear from that
quarter. The army had become a major political stake, and control over it was now a prereq-
uisite for holding power. The Committee, its mistrust of Colonel Enver notwithstanding, had
no choice but to make use of him and the circles of officers supporting him in order to push
General İzzet Pasha out the door.
İsmail Enver seemed confident of success. On 30 December 1913, he wrote to his fiancée
and member of the imperial family, Naciye Sultan, that his appointment to the position of
minister of war was certain and that he had been promoted to the rank of brigadier general.
However, the daily Tanin did not report his appointment as war minister until 3 January 1914
and it was not until the day after that an official communiqué announced that Colonel Enver
had become a brigadier general and been named minister of war.6
A diplomatic dispatch announcing İzzet’s resignation noted with alarm: “the man whom
the Committee has named as his successor is a threat: with Enver Bey in the position of min-
ister of war, we may confidently look forward to adventures of the worst kind.”7 The dispatch
also confirms the major role played by the Committee in this affair and the fame that Enver
had already acquired despite his youth. Furthermore, there is every reason to believe that
the Committee had also decided to make the radical purge of the army that was carried out
a few days later: 280 ranking officers and 1,100 officers in all, “in whom [Enver] saw political
adversaries,” were “abruptly dismissed” on 7 January 1914.8
“We soon learned,” Liman von Sanders writes, “that a number of officers had been con-
fined in the cellar of the War Ministry – those who Enver feared might react.”9 We are
inclined to suppose that, among these officers “who were no longer fit to serve or had become
too old,”10 some had played decisive roles in the “Halâskâr Zâbitan” (freedom officers), the
group that brought down Said Pasha’s cabinet in July 1912, and that the Ittihad at last saw
its chance to liquidate them.
The head of the German military mission adds, bitterly, that he had “received no official
notification of these measures,” despite the clauses in the military mission’s contract stipulating
that it “was to be consulted on the choice of personnel for ranking positions”; he was never
allowed, he writes, to interfere in this area.11 There was good reason for this: the newly appointed
officers were drawn, without exception, from the CUP’s ranks. Moreover, von Sanders “later
frequently had occasion to confirm that it was a waste of time to complain about an officer who
belonged to the Committee,” adding that he “was never able to determine how many members
it had or who they were, apart from the main leaders whom everyone knew.”12 This time the
Ittihadist Committee had taken a decisive step in its patient effort to subordinate the organiza-
tions of the state to the party. Never, perhaps, since the Ottoman Empire was founded, had
civilians been so thoroughly under the thumb of the military, even if in January 1914 the army
did not yet have the full apparatus of power in its grip.13 With Enver’s arrival at the head of the
armed forces, Unionist ideology had finally been imposed on the Turkish army, which it would
dominate for several decades to come.
For Enver and his partisans, according to Turfan, “reforming the military was equiva-
lent to reforming the state.”14 The dissolution of the Council of Military Affairs, promptly
decreed by Enver on 7 January 1914,15 also directly served the CUP’s purpose, which was to

The Establishment of the Ittihadist Dictatorship 169
eliminate all alternate sources of power and all risk of interference with its policies. From this
point on, to cite the no doubt exaggerated formulation of a historian,
the destiny of the Ottoman state was under the control of the Committee of Union and
Progress, the Committee of Union and Progress was under the control of the Central
Committee, the Central Committee was under the control of the Triumvirate [in
Turkish, ücler; that is, Enver, Talât and Cemal], and the Triumvirate under the strong
will of the Minister of War, Enver pasha.16
It would seem that the CUP’s strategy was to create the impression that it was a trustworthy
partner and thus a first-rate, dependable ally for the German militarists. In his war memoirs,
the head of the German military mission, who was also inspector general of the Ottoman
army, stresses that the Ottomans systematically sought to hide the deplorable condition of
the Turkish troops from him by systematically preparing his inspection tours in advance. To
pull the wool over his eyes, Enver’s staff would transfer one company’s equipment to another
so as to paper over deficiencies. The Turks also “hid sick soldiers, constitutionally feeble sol-
diers, and even the insufficiently educated,” so that the German general would not see any-
thing shocking or unpleasant. “In many units,” van Sanders goes on, “the men were infested
with vermin that bit them unmercifully. Not a single barracks had baths ... The kitchens
were as primitive as one could imagine,” and even the equipment sent by the Germans
sometimes remained “in its pristine packing,” unused from when it arrived five years ago.
Moreover, many buildings belonging to the army’s service corps “offered, inside, a prospect
of the greatest possible desolation, with piles of garbage in every corner.”17 Slovenliness and
disorderliness constituted an obvious handicap for this army, an army that its Young Turk
leaders hoped to make over into an instrument for conquering back what the empire had
lost. “What was needed more than money,” Von Sanders writes in this connection, “was a
sense of order, cleanliness, and the importance of work. In those days, the Turks did not like
to hear a German officer tell them to go to work; they preferred to find all sorts of excuses
and pretexts for continuing to lead the contemplative life.”18
The last important measure taken in December 1913, shortly after the arrival of the
German military mission, was the subordination of the Ottoman gendarmerie, “an elite force
of more than 80,000 men,” to the Interior Ministry. Officially, the aim was to avert conflicts
between the foreign officers serving in the gendarmerie, among them a commander of the
gendarmerie, the head of the German military mission, and the French General Baumann.19
It is more probable, however, that this administrative measure was intended to provide the
interior minister with the military means he needed to deal with domestic matters, such as
the Armenian civilians of the eastern provinces.
The effects of the reform agreement were not slow to make themselves felt. It is likely that
the provincial authorities were ordered to harass the Armenian population. The “patriotic”
fundraising campaign launched by the Trebizond Ittihadist club for the official purpose of
“purchasing battleships” is a good illustration of this policy: the task of collecting the money
was assigned to local delinquents,20 who seized the opportunity to “extort large sums from
Armenians and Greeks and occasionally to loot stores.”21 The Young Turk cabinet’s official
endorsement of “the plan to enact reforms in Armenia” did not preclude sharp tensions,
probably provoked by the Ittihad’s networks. A French diplomat remarked that
the government again succumbed to the temptation to authorize the least respectable
of those under its jurisdiction to meddle in public affairs, with the underlying design
of then using the supposed resistance of Muslims to supervision [of the reforms] as a
pretext for declaring itself powerless to ensure their enactment.22

In February 1914, wrote the French chargé d’affaires in Constantinople, “anti-Christian”

agitation was on the rise and “isolated attempts to launch boycotts” could be observed.
According to the same source,
the chauvinistic excitement that the Committee’s propagandists are trying to provoke
among the masses, not without success, threatens to lead to an explosion of religious
fanaticism and, in any case, to engender an anti-Christian mood. From this point of
view, the propaganda that the agents of [the party of] Union and Progress are churning
out in the provinces brings with it a danger that it is impossible to ignore.23
There can be little doubt about the Ittihadist cabinet’s intention to sabotage the pro-
grammed reforms by inciting riots and other forms of violence, as Talât had indeed announced
several months earlier in a discussion with his Armenian “friends.”24
True to its usual methods, the CUP simultaneously announced the appointment of 80
civilian inspectors to posts in the provinces. Their mission was to supervise the maintenance
of public order, the organization of the gendarmerie and the police, military recruitment
and transportation, electoral activity, censuses, and the sedentarization of nomadic tribes.25
In the provinces, however, there was widespread discontent, reflected in the many differ-
ent complaints about a Young Turk administration that was constantly laying the country
under contribution. Mass emigration was a problem plaguing not only the Armenian prov-
inces, but the Arab regions as well, sparing no religious confession.26 The minister of the
interior hoped to settle immigrants from the Balkan countries in Syria, but this region, he
was told by a well-informed interlocutor, was losing every week a thousand inhabitants flee-
ing dire poverty. “Those are Christians,” Talât Bey is supposed to have replied, in a tone
indicating that he was glad to be rid of them. But he was unaware that Muslims were also
moving abroad. Emigration was proceeding so rapidly that, according to the same source,
“the region would soon no longer need either farmers or craftsmen.” The laws prohibiting
people in certain social categories from leaving the country were powerless to halt the
trend. Talât’s interlocutor suggested that “it would be preferable to keep the people from
considering emigration by improving the administration, reducing taxes and promoting
agriculture.”27
The more or less chronic discontent of the Kurds was itself exploited by the Ottoman
government, which presented it as if it were “directed against the reforms,” whereas it was
above all a question, as General Şerif Pasha insisted, of anti-governmental agitation. The
leader of the revolt, Mollah Selim, had to set the record straight in a letter addressed to
the archbishop of Bitlis, Suren, before the government ceased to exploit the problem.28
Taner Akçam’s recent work,29 based in particular on the memoirs of Kuşçubaşizâde Eşref
(Sencer),30 the head of the Special Organization in the Aegean region, reveals that a “plan
to homogenize” Anatolia, cleanse it of its non-Muslim “tumors,” and eliminate “concentra-
tions of non-Turks” was discussed from February to August 1914 at several secret meetings of
the Ittihad’s Central Committee in the presence of the minister of war, although a number
of other ministers were not informed of it. This “plan” was, as early as spring 1914, aimed
first and foremost at the Greeks of Anatolia and the Aegean coast; it centered on Smyrna.
It involved the implementation of 1) “general measures” carried out by the government (by
Vali M. Rahmi); 2) “special measures” enacted by the army (the task of cleansing the region
was put in the hands of Cafer Tayyar Bey); and 3) “measures” taken by the CUP (under the
supervision of its delegate in Smyrna, Mahmud Celal [Bayar]). Halil (Menteşe) remarks in
his memoirs that it was not supposed to look as if the government and administration were
implicated in these exactions, which would take the form of massacres, deportations, forced
exile, and the spoliation of hundreds of thousands of Greeks.31

It seems that the plan also provided for the transfer, at a later date, of the Armenian
population to Syria and Mesopotamia.
From the Aborted Armenian Reforms to

the Arrest of the Hnchak Leaders
As we have seen, the reform issue mobilized the official Armenian organizations for many
months. They were, however, exhausted by the veritable battle that had pitted them against
the Ittihad. There was even a degree of bitterness in the Armenians’ ranks: some Armenians,
such as Zohrab,32 grasped the gravity of the situation and took anxious note of the Ittihad’s
radicalization.
Nevertheless, on 7 February, the day before the official decree announcing the reforms
was signed, the Political Council made a public declaration before the Chamber of Deputies.
In it, Karayan, the president of the chamber, confirmed that signature of the decree was
imminent33 and gave a public account of all the actions that the council and the Security
Commission had taken in close collaboration with the Armenian National Delegation and
the Tiflis and St. Petersburg committees.34 All these efforts, in Karayan’s view, had culmi-
nated in a globally positive result, even if it had been necessary to accept the division of the
Armenian provinces into two “governorships,” as well as the inclusion in these governorships
of regions that were plainly located outside the boundaries of the Armenian high plateau.
The patriarch, Zaven Der Yeghiayan, voiced the same cautious optimism at the 9 May 1914
spring opening session of the Armenian chamber.35
The task of finding candidates capable of exercising the functions of inspector general
in the two “governorships” provided for by the reform agreement was entrusted to Boghos
Nubar, who had many connections in Europe.36 The two men who were chosen arrived in
Constantinople in April. Zohrab received them. The Dutchman Louis Constant Westenenk,
formerly chief administrator of the Dutch East Indies, was assigned to Erzerum (the north-
ern sector), and Major Nicolai Hoff, a Norwegian officer, was assigned to Van (the southern
sector, to which the vilayets of Bitlis, Dyarbekir, and Harput had also been attached).37 The
Sublime Porte signed the decree confirming the appointment of the two inspectors rather
quickly, but only Hoff was able to assume his functions in Van early in August 1914, after
assembling a supporting staff.
In 1914, Van seemed to be recovering from the disasters it had recently undergone. The
vali, Tahsin Pasha, had restored law and order to the vilayet and showed signs of being well
disposed toward the Armenians. Hoff, for his part, set about gathering information on the
current situation and collecting the data he needed to implement the reforms.38 On 16/29
August 1914, however, the Ministry of the Interior summoned the inspector general to quit
his post and return to Constantinople without delay. His departure coincided with the
arrival of the German consul in Erzerum, an occasion marked by a grand military review in
which “twelve thousand goose-stepping soldiers paraded by.” A few days later, Tahsin Pasha
discovered that he had been semi-officially “seconded” at the head of the vilayet by Enver’s
brother-in-law Cevdet Bey, who was provisionally given the twofold title of military governor
of Van and commander-in-chief of the Turkish troops massed along the Persian frontier.39 It
is hard to understand these developments as anything other than measures taken in antici-
pation of the gathering conflict, indicative of the Ittihad’s intentions and its desire to throw
the Ottoman Empire into the battle.
In the course of a meeting that Hoff had with interior minister Mehmed Talât after return-
ing to Istanbul, the Armenian deputy Vartkes Seringiulian, who had also been invited to
attend, saluted the Norwegian’s return with a witty bon mot: “You have reformed Armenia,
inshallah, and now you are back.” In his diary, Zohrab wrote that “Hoff returned with, at the

very least, the conviction that Armenia needed reforms and that the Turks had no desire
to enact reforms there.”40 But the Armenian leaders sensed the threat hanging over their
nation. The fact that the sultan made no mention of “the appointment of two European
inspectors for the eastern vilayets”41 in his 14 May 1914 speech to the Turkish parliament
inaugurating its new legislative period was itself a sign fraught with significance.
Nonetheless, until July, the staff of the Constantinople Patriarchate was very active around
the question of the reforms, as is attested by the many letters it exchanged with dioceses in the
provinces (in Trebizond or Gürün, for example) about the enactment of the reform plan and
the measures to be taken to smooth the way for it. These documents make systematic refer-
ence to a 17 February 1914 circular sent out by the Patriarchate.42 It seems everyone’s ener-
gies were mobilized for the purpose of establishing the beginnings of order in the Armenian
provinces. If all these tasks were to be successfully performed, it was of crucial importance to
establish a close relationship with the central Ottoman administration. Since the rupture of
December 1913, however, the Armenian leaders in the capital, and even the Patriarchate, had
been quite simply ignored and only rarely had an opportunity to confer with their Young Turk
colleagues. The situation was the more difficult in that the Ottoman parliament had recessed
on 2 August, the day before the proclamation of a general mobilization,43 leaving it to the
cabinet to adopt “temporary” laws. The Cercle d’Orient, where it was possible to meet politi-
cians, high-ranking officials, and foreign diplomats and gauge the situation in the country, was
in this period very faithfully frequented by its two Armenian members, Zohrab and Halajian.
Among the Dashnaks, Armen Garo and Vartkes Seringiulian maintained personal contacts
with certain ministers and members of the Young Turk Central Committee.44
What turned out to be the final session of the Armenian chamber was held on 4 July of the
same year. Gabriel Noradounghian, who chaired it, opened the debate in the hemicycle in
Galata in the presence of the leading lights of Armenian politics, Zohrab and Seringiulian.45
At a time when, in the wake of the ultimatum the Austrians had issued Serbia in late June,
warning signs of war had already appeared on the horizon, the Political Council duly noted
the first measures taken in the provinces in the framework of the reform plan. It was only
in mid-July that a sharp change in the nature of the threats hanging over the Armenians
became perceptible in Armenian circles. The press campaigns that, albeit malignant, were
business as usual, now yielded to a much more alarming sort of discourse: they portrayed the
Armenians in general as rebels conspiring with political exiles and foreign powers. The new
campaign, which seems to have been orchestrated in high places, began with the 16 July
1914 arrest of some 20 leading members of the Social Democratic Hnchak Party, promptly
followed by the imprisonment of about 100 activists of lower rank and searches of the party’s
editorial offices and clubs as well as the homes of those arrested.
The story of the Hnchaks, which occupied the political stage for a full eleven months, had
multiple ramifications, culminating in the 15 June 1915 execution of 20 Hnchaks by hang-
ing. Although it has rarely been studied by historians, this story constitutes one of the main
components of the official discourse designed to justify the measures the state took with
respect to the Armenian population in 1915. The basis for an examination of this episode is
provided, on the one hand, by explanations that the Hnchaks themselves furnished,46 and,
on the other, by the grave accusations that the Turkish minister of the interior leveled at the
time of the events.47 This question cannot, then, be ignored, the more so as it allows us to
follow the emergence and evolution of the official discourse stigmatizing the Armenians.
We have already seen that the SDHP was the Young Turks’ bête noire during the period
in which the anti-Hamidian opposition was in exile, and no less during the “constitutional”
years, thanks to its positions, alliances with the liberal opposition, and political struggle
against the Ittihad. After the party’s historical leaders, Murad (Hampartsum Boyajian) and
Stepanos Sapah-Giulian had returned from exile, this revolutionary committee found itself

confronting the need to make a political choice between becoming a legal organization or
maintaining its underground structures. At their Sixth General Congress, which opened in
Istanbul on 12 July 1909, the Hnchaks had unambiguously opted for legality and proceeded
to draft new statutes in conformity with Ottoman law. The official declaration published
at the end of this Congress did, however, point up the limits of the Constitution and the
conservatism and benightedness of Ottoman society, as well as the religious hatreds that
continued to dominate it, breeding clashes between its component groups together with the
absence of “class consciousness.”48 In other words, the party remained critical while nursing
hopes that the situation would evolve.
The party’s discourse changed little over the next few years. At its Second General
Assembly, convened in Istanbul on 26 September 1912, it condemned the “nationalistic,
Pan-Turk” policies implemented by the Ittihad and reaffirmed its alliance with the Ittilâf.49
The pact it signed with the Ittilâf nevertheless defended “the integrity of the Ottoman state
and the rights guaranteed by the Constitution” and “rejected all separatist aspirations”
(Article 2), “defended the civil rights of all nations comprising the Ottoman state” while
“rejecting the domination of any one of its components over the others” (Article 3), and
called for resolution of the agrarian question as well as settlement of the muhacir where land
was available.50
The SDHP seems to have made a turn, however, at its Seventh General Congress, which
opened on 5 September 1913 in Constanza, Rumania.51 In the conclusions to which this
Congress came, we read that the party had adopted a legalist course at its previous Congress
and decided against pursuing “separatist policies.” However, having observed over the pre-
ceding four years that “the promises made by the Ottoman Constitution [had] remained
without concrete effect and [had] no real significance,” and also that the Ittihad, the sole
political force in power, had “no basic principles beyond that of safeguarding the Turkish
bureaucracy ... and [had] plainly set out not only to assimilate the constituent nations, but
to annihilate them, to massacre them,” the SDHP decided that it had become necessary to
struggle against the Young Turks by illegal means, “until more favorable political and eco-
nomic conditions [were] created.” In obedience to its revolutionary logic, the party, which
had denounced the Young Turks’ nationalism when it was still in exile in Paris, decided to
employ “violent revolutionary tactics” in an active struggle against the Ittihad. This was, in
its view, the only way to foil the Unionists’ criminal plans.52
According to the author of the official history of the Hnchak party, “all sections of the
Hnchak party in Turkey, without exception, approved the [decisions of the] Seventh Congress,
particularly the [use] of terror,” while all possible precautions were taken to keep the latter
decision secret. Party members chosen to carry out terrorist operations were “whisked off to
the countryside.”53 However, this official account is contested by Hmayag Aramiants, who
affirms that a majority of the local committees in Turkey – 44 of 61 – did not take part in the
Congress and, accordingly, did not endorse its decisions.54 A reading of these two versions
reveals the existence of serious dissensions in the SDHP; it is probable that the organizers of
the Congress had tried to exclude the militants likely to oppose the most extreme positions.
The exclusion of Aramiants himself, who was clearly in the legalists’ camp, as was the major-
ity of the Istanbul party leadership, would appear to confirm this hypothesis. The Hnchak
committee in the capital, which, in the person of one of its leaders, Nerses Zakarian, a mem-
ber of the Patriarchate’s Political Council, was actively working to settle the question of the
reforms side by side with all other Armenian political forces, opposed the decisions reached
at Constanza. They led to the dissolution of the official party in Turkey, henceforth placed
under the tutelage of an underground committee.
What these Hnchak party officials did not, in any case, know was that interior minister
Talât had succeeded in infiltrating the party with an officer from the intelligence service.

This officer, Arthur Esayan, alias Arshavir Sahagian,55 had arranged to have himself named
a delegate to the Constanza Congress by the party’s Cairo committee. By way of the Ottoman
consul in Dede Ağac, he provided Talât with a comprehensive account of the decisions
adopted by the Congress and a list of the participants. Since most Armenian organizations
were under surveillance by the minister’s agents, one may suppose that the SDHP, uncompro-
misingly opposed to the Ittihad and made up of fearless activists, was watched more closely
than all the others. There is even every reason to believe that after decapitating the liberal
Ottoman opposition, the Young Turks had decided to rid themselves of the Hnchaks, who
unremittingly condemned their political practices. The open letter to the European govern-
ments that the SDHP published in Paris in 1913 after the Constanza Congress56 can only
have strenghthened the Young Turks’ resolve, given the considerable effects it produced in
Europe. In this text, the party criticized Europe for the vacillations of its diplomacy since the
adoption of Article 61 of the Treaty of Berlin, pointing out the devastating impact on the
Ottoman Armenian population of the failure to honor the promises the treaty contained.
A number of European newspapers even published editorials on the question of the “reforms
in Armenia,”57 reminding their readers of the powers’ “moral” obligation to put an end to
the exactions to which successive governments had subjected the Armenians, or had at
least covered up. The Hnchaks’ appeal, written by individuals with strong social values,
denounced the archaic nature and conservatism of the Young Turk regime, the similarity of
its practices to Abdülhamid’s, and its instrumentalization of the Muslim masses. Although
cast in quite sophisticated terms, the appeal could hardly have provided the basis for an
indictment in a democratic society – not for an indictment for criminal conspiracy, at any
rate. What is more, the source of this appeal was the “external” Central Committee, from
which, according to the party statutes, the Turkish Committee was independent, and noth-
ing justified the affirmation that the Turkish Committee condoned the appeal.
At this point in our discussion, the question obviously arises: if the documents that
Arshavir Sahagian assembled were as compromising as the Ottoman government would
later affirm, why did it wait until 16 July 1914 to arrest the Hnchak leaders of Istanbul?58 Was
the reason for the delay the imminence of the war, which the Young Turk leadership had
already decided to enter? Was it the preparation of an assassination attempt on the minister
of the interior himself, to which no allusion was made until after the interrogations had
begun? It is certain, in any case, that this was a particularly opportune moment, since the
attention of all Europe was fixed on the Austrian-Serbian crisis. From the detailed account
of the interrogations to which the Hnchak leaders were subjected and from the nature of
the offences for which they were subsequently indicted – Bedri Bey, the police chief in the
capital, personally informed them of the charges against them – there emerges a general
accusation of conspiring to endanger state security; criminal involvement with General Şerif
Pasha, at the head of the opposition in exile in Paris; and attempted murder of a person
whose identity was not revealed.59
The battery of charges was probably not particularly solid, inasmuch as a number of those
accused were released after a few days or weeks of questioning – although their liberation
can also be interpreted as a tactical decision of Talât’s on the eve of a general mobilization
to which all Armenians of draftable age were subject.60 In any event, this first warning shot
fired by the government alarmed the SDHP’s Istanbul organization, which had been unceas-
ingly taking its distance from the decisions of the Constanza Congress.
Perhaps with a view to clarifying its positions in the wake of these accusations, the SDHP
of Turkey convened its Third General Assembly in Istanbul on 24 July 1914. It was attended
by 31 delegates from its local committees61 and elected a new committee comprising Murad
(Hampartsum Boyajian), Nerses Zakarian,62 Vahan Zeytuntsian63 and Harutiun Jangulian.64
Most probably, this initiative was taken after Dr. Benné,65 delegated by the SDHP’s Central

Committee to take control of the Turkish Committee, ordered that the party dissolve itself
and go underground, in accordance with the decisions reached at Constanza.66 The Istanbul
branch of the party considered it imperative to thwart this process and dispel the serious
suspicions hanging over the party. In any case, the Hnchaks’ Ottoman networks had been
virtually neutralized by July 1914; they were occupied with the defense of their imprisoned
comrades, against whom very real charges had been brought.
The Armenian authorities were not indifferent to these events. The Political Council
and the patriarch personally had stepped in to try to obtain the release of the Hnchak
prisoners, or at least improve their conditions. Certain well-known magistrates were even
approached and asked to intercede on their behalf. Often, in Eastern societies, those against
whom extremely serious accusations have been brought, justifiably or not, can be “pardoned”
as long as they or their friends have the means and connections required. It is probable that
some of the Hnchaks were able to obtain their freedom in this way.
The second event exploited by the Ittihadist cabinet in order to make the Ottoman
Armenians out as traitors to their country was the ARF’s Seventh Congress, which opened
in Erzerum in late July 1914. The Dashnaks, who still considered themselves privileged inter-
locutors of the Ittihad, were alarmed by the repression of the Hnchaks and the way the
Istanbul press had been exploiting it. They had already understood that, by way of the SDHP,
all Armenians were being portrayed as traitors and rebels. They therefore arranged for their
party’s congress, which had been scheduled long in advance, to disappear from public view.
The delegates were dispersed after only two weeks of discussions. By the time they were, they
had learned that war had broken out in Europe, that the reforms had been “suspended,” and
that, on 3 August, a general mobilization had been proclaimed. The congress, while reaf-
firming that Armenians should meet their civic obligations in the countries of which they
were citizens in case of war, decided to dissolve the ARF’s Constantinople-based Western
Bureau.67 It added that, if it should be confirmed that the government was obstructing the
reforms, “the party should oppose the methods employed by the government to thwart reali-
zation of the plan and defend the rights of the Armenian people.”68 A special commission
made up of nine members, including, notably, A. Vramian, Rostom, and Aknuni, was chosen
to elaborate the party’s politics in the light of the most recent developments. It was this com-
mission that received Dr. Bahaeddin Şakir69 and two famous CUP fedayis, Ömer Naci and
Filibeli Ahmed Hilmi, who arrived in Erzerum on 8 August.70 They had not come as emis-
saries of the CUP, but had been charged with preparing the future activities of the Teskilât-ı
Mahsusa (Special Organization).71 Şakir suggested to his Armenian interlocutors that they
take part in the campaign of subversion then being planned for the Caucasus, offering to cre-
ate an autonomous Armenia in exchange for Armenian help in destabilizing the area behind
the Russian army’s lines.72 The ARF now found itself torn between its two poles, Russian
and Ottoman. It had been asked to take an impossible position, to betray one of the two
states with an Armenian population. The Dashnak leaders once again issued a public call
to Armenians to remain loyal subjects of the empire, but this was not enough to satisfy their
Young Turk colleagues. Şakir reported to the CUP’s Central Committee on the Armenian
delegates’ rejection of his proposal.73 In his coded response, dated 17 August 1914 and entitled
“Orientations,” Midhat Şükrü, the Central Committee’s secretary general, wrote: “Beyond a
doubt, the Armenians are not inclined to collaborate with us. [See to it] that our orientation
is kept secret from them.”74 The Ittihad, the “orientation” of which seems already to have
been set, had probably not expected the ARF to respond any differently and had no other
aim than to lay the groundwork for the government’s future propaganda campaign on the
theme of the Armenians’ treachery.
As soon as the ARF’s leaders had returned from the Congress of Erzerum, they organized
a series of meetings attended by Zohrab and the party’s Istanbul officials. The same question

was examined from every possible angle: what position should the Armenians take in the
anticipated conflict, in which Armenian soldiers called up in both Turkey and Russia would
have to fight in both the Ottoman and Russian forces? The discussions always led to the
same conclusion: the Armenians in the empire should do their duty, accept conscription into
the armed forces, and pay the special taxes to help finance the war effort.75 On the evening
of 13 August, aboard a steamboat bound for the island of Kınalı, Zohrab said to his fellow
deputy Vahan Papazian, who was scheduled to leave the next morning for his electoral dis-
trict, Van: “You can be sure that they’re going to do something to us.”76 The Armenian elite
had already understood that it had been taken hostage and was no longer in a position to
influence the course of events. Vartkes and Armen Garo, whom Zohrab invited to his sum-
mer home on Prinkipo on 16 August, observed that “the Turks want to profit from this war.
The objectives of some of them are modest, those of others are grandiose.”77 This apparently
insignificant phrase pointed to a question of crucial importance for the Armenians: what
aims were the Ittihadists really pursuing in preparing to enter the war?
The Dashnaks, for their part, wondered what the coming conflict held in store for them.
They were being solicited from different quarters: both the Russians and the French made
overtures to them. A party official, Parsegh Shahbaz, returned from Paris in early August
1914. He informed his comrades that Victor Bérard, a pro-Armenian militant, had met with
French Prime Minister Gaston Doumergue at the latter’s request, and Doumergue had asked
him “whether the ARF would be willing to help the Entente.” Bérard had then made contact
with Droschak’s editorial board in Geneva and its director, Mikayel Varantian, had dispatched
Shahbaz to the Ottoman capital.78 Malkhas (Ardashes Hovsepian), who was present at the 22
August meeting called to discuss this question in the editorial offices of Azadamard, writes that
the members of the committee were unanimously in favor of declaring that the Armenians
had to remain “loyal citizens wherever they were found, especially in Turkey,” adding that the
leadership was opposed to the creation of groups of volunteers in the Caucasus.79 Given the
ambient hostility and the accusations that they were pro-Entente, the Dashnaks knew that,
multiplying their efforts, they had constantly to “prove” their loyalty.
An article attributed to Simon Vratsian, the editor-in-chief of Droschak, gives us a rather
good sense of the dilemma confronting the ARF as well as the Ittihadist leaders’ mood at
this time:
Turkey, too, has thrown itself into the fray. It has of course sensed – or, perhaps, its
German mentors have brought it to understand – that the critical hour of truth has
sounded for the Ottoman Empire as well. “If the French-English-Russian Entente
defeats Turkey, it will be partitioned between those three victorious states. If the
German-Austrian alliance wins the war, Turkey will be able to gain back some of the
territory that it lost in the Balkans, and perhaps in Egypt and the Caucasus as well.”
Thus a straightforward calculation has convinced the Ittihadist government to lose no
time jumping on the bandwagon of the German-Austrian alliance, justifying the deci-
sion with the arguments of the faction led by Enver Pasha, who is under the Germans’
spell. Turkish troops are accordingly advancing toward the Caucasus, on the one hand,
and Egypt on the other. The Russian army has entered Turkey, won a few battles, found
itself confronted with the rigors of the climate, slowed its advance and even come to
a halt here and there, but it is stubbornly pursuing its march on Erzerum, the citadel
of Armenia, where Turkey has concentrated significant forces and created a powerful
defensive system under the lead of German officers.
When will the Russians take Erzerum? How far will Russia advance into Armenia?
What are St. Petersburg’s plans for this region? These questions are so many crucial rid-
dles for the Armenians today. In the liberal Russian press, voices favorable to Armenian

autonomy have been raised, but there is no doubt that other circles are very differently
disposed. The Czar’s Manifesto was read aloud by the viceroy before an audience of
Armenian dignitaries in Tiflis, but we should not overestimate the value of this kind of
declaration, full of promises. Manifestos of this sort have been widely diffused among
the other peoples of Russia. They are written to be forgotten. We should not delight-
edly and enthusiastically applaud such declarations or promises: there are painful his-
torical precedents, such as the 1826 Russo-Persian War, during which the Armenian
people, following its spiritual leader, rose as a single man and made a powerful contri-
bution to the Russian conquest of the two khanates. This justified Armenian hopes of
obtaining at least limited autonomy. Yet such hopes proved vain ... Two years later, the
Russian army took Erzerum, but then quickly abandoned it and withdrew, leaving the
Armenian population, which had shown unreserved sympathy for the Christian army,
at the mercy of the vengeful local population.
Evoking the Russo-Turkish War of 1878, which had also led to “acts of violence, the exile
of entire populations to the Caucasus, famine and endless misery,” the writer calls for
restraint:
Thus we have no reason to meet the invaders of yesterday with childish manifestations
of joy and thanksgiving ... The principal objective of the Armenian volunteers’ legion,
which was enthusiastically recruited from all quarters and has been put under the com-
mand of first-rate leaders, should be to protect the Armenian population in the event
of Turkish massacres, especially in regions where the Armenians are weak, unarmed
and in a minority ... It would be criminal naivety to rely on the Russian army to avoid
massacres. The Russians have set out to conquer the Armenians’ lands and their hearts
will not grieve if Armenian blood once again flows abundantly here and there.80
The Dashnaks’ mixed feelings about Russia find a perfect illustration here, as does their
reading of the Ittihadists’ intentions. The ARF was no longer, however, simply a tool that each
of the powers could try to bend to its own use. Beginning notably in 1912, while certain party
officials responsible for military matters envisaged the organization of a system of self-defense
in the Armenian provinces, its leadership consistently rejected the idea, continuing to pursue
the legalist political line that culminated in the adoption of the “reforms in Armenia.”
The Secret Pact between Turkey and Germany

and the General Mobilization
The negotiations between the German ambassador Hans Wangenheim and the Ittihadist
cabinet, in particular the minister of war, İsmail Enver,81 took place over a ten-day period
beginning on 24 July82 – which is to say, even before war broke out in Europe. According
to the memoirs of the head of the German military mission, Liman von Sanders, both
Sanders himself and ambassador Wangenheim had until then been opposed to an alliance
with Turkey because they put no faith in the military capacities of an army that was as
poorly equipped and undisciplined as Turkey’s was.83 Furthermore, as early as April 1914 Said
Halim’s government had made it known that the cabinet was leaning toward the Entente. In
mid-May, Talât even sailed to the Black Sea on the imperial yacht in order to meet with the
Czar and Sazonov.84 Though his proposals were rejected, the presence of a Turkish delega-
tion did not go unnoticed among the Germans of Istanbul. How, then, are we to explain the
signing of the secret treaty that was a decisive step on the way to Turkey’s entry into the war?
While it is true that the tradition of putting the reorganization of the Ottoman army in the

hands of German officers had by this time been firmly established for decades, that certain
Ittihadist leaders genuinely admired the German Empire and its militaristic traditions, and
that also Germany had more or less backed Turkey on the question of the Armenian reforms,
these factors do not suffice to explain the German-Turkish treaty, which many observers
both domestic and foreign regarded as irresponsible given the general state of the country.
However, Germany’s pledge to provide Turkey with “massive” economic aid opens up per-
spectives that we shall now go on to examine.
According to the testimony given at the November–December 1918 hearings before the
Fifth Commission of the Ottoman parliament by former ministers in the war cabinets, the
negotiations, which took place in Wangenheim’s summer home in Tarabia and in the Yeniköy
residence of Grand Vizier Said Halim, had been conducted at the urging of Enver Pasha, who
is supposed to have taken the initiative leading to these discussions single-handedly.85 What
we know about the practices of Ittihadist circles, however, makes this explanation rather
implausible. Although Enver did succeed in obtaining a sharp increase in military funding
and financial advantages for army officers from Minister of Finance Mehmed Cavid,86 it is
unthinkable that he had acted without the approval of the Ittihad’s Central Committee and
the grand vizier. Moreover, Cavid himself notes that on 2 August 1914, when Said Halim
invited him to his residence, he found Talât, Enver, and Halil (Menteşe) there, along with
the dragoman of the German embassy, Weber. By Cavid’s account, they were in the thick of
a negotiation.87 Thus, it is probable that, in this short period in which many different initia-
tives were being taken, the whole Ittihadist network had been activated. How else are we
to explain the simultaneous signing at Said Halim’s residence (on the evening of 2 August)
of the secret German-Turkish accord and the decree proclaiming a general mobilization, as
well as the imperial irade recessing the Ottoman parliament on the following day?88 There
were, furthermore, many different meetings between Young Turk leaders in this period. This
tends to indicate that the debates were intense, but that decisions were taken collectively.
Thus, on the evening of 3 August, Talât and Cavid went to see Enver at Ferid Pasha’s konak,
where Enver was then living (here they learned that Weber had come round that morning
to pick up the treaty signed by Halim the previous evening). On 4 August, the same people
met again at Halim’s residence.89
According to the minister of public works, Çürüksulu Mahmud Pasha, “the signing of
the treaty was never brought up before the Council of Ministers”90 in order to keep the
treaty secret and forestall resistance from ministers opposed to the war. For, in addition to
Said Halim, Cavid, Çürüksulu Mahmud, Süleyman el-Bustani, and Oskan Bey (Mardikian)91
made no secret of their desire to see Turkey remain neutral. A note in which the three
Entente powers pledged to respect the territorial integrity of the Ottoman Empire if it main-
tained “absolute neutrality” was made public on 16 August 1914. It had been negotiated with
the ambassadors of the Entente by Minister of Finance Cavid.92 The negotiation and publi-
cation of the note had probably been intended as a means of evaluating the advantages that
Turkey could reap from the powers in this context, but the aim may also have been to put
the Germans under pressure. Significantly, in August the CUP also conducted negotiations
with Bulgaria with a view to bringing it into the war on the German side. It also sought to
secure the neutrality of Romania and Greece. On 1 September, Talât returned from a trip to
Romania and Halil came back from Bulgaria.93
It is only too clear that Turkey was counting on German protection in order to conduct its
own war and thereby acquire the status and capacities of the great power that it no longer was.
But what precisely did the Ittihadists expect to gain from this adventure? Vahan Papazian,
the parliamentary deputy from Van who was still in the Ottoman capital in early August,
cites persistent rumors then circulating about Turkey’s possible entry into the war and the
recovery of lost territories – those in Bosnia-Herzegovina, those lost during the Balkan Wars,

and even a conquest of the Caucasus.94 Beyond such territorial ambitions, which are com-
mon during wartime, some authors also believe that Turkey’s entry into the war was further
motivated by domestic objectives, particularly a plan to annihilate the Ottoman Armenians.
Vahakn Dadrian cites many accounts by different German and Austrian officers that pro-
vide solid support for this thesis.95 In his memoirs, Marshal Pomiankowski, who was for a
long time attached to the Ottoman general staff, reports “opinions expressed spontaneously
by many intelligent Turks” to the effect that the subject peoples should have been forcibly
converted to Islam or else “exterminated.” “In this sense,” he concludes, “there is no doubt
that the Young Turk government had decided, well before the War began, to take advantage
of the first occasion that came along to correct this error, at least partially.” “It is also very
probable,” he adds, “that this consideration, that is, their project, decisively influenced the
Ottoman government’s decision to ally itself with the Central Powers.”96 We shall see later,
when we examine the sources of the Ittihad’s ideology and in particular the conditions sur-
rounding the implementation of its project for a “national economy” or, again, the military
operations it carried out in spring 1918, that the Unionist regime always gave absolute prior-
ity to its “domestic security” goals, privileging them above all other military and economic
considerations.
The general mobilization order issued on 3 August 1914, the day after the secret German-
Turkish agreement was signed, does not seem to have resulted from a hasty decision.
According to Mehmed Cavid’s deposition before the Ottoman parliament’s fifth commis-
sion, the decision to issue the order was not made at a meeting of the Council of Ministers.
Rather, Enver took the initiative that led to it, “arranging for each of the ministers to sign,
separately, a draft of the imperial irade.” The order was not published in the Official Gazette
until after it had been publicly proclaimed.97 This rapidity can doubtless be explained by
the minister of war’s desire to take advantage of the emotion generated by the announce-
ment of war in Europe in order to generate an upsurge of national feeling. Zohrab, an atten-
tive observer of the Ottoman world, remarked – with a good dose of fatalism and no little
clairvoyance – that the mobilization took place under extremely chaotic conditions, “more
like a coming together of forces getting ready to massacre and loot than a regular fighting
organization.”98 The chaos probably resulted from the successive cultural grafts attempted
onto the Ottoman army.
Men between the ages of 20 and 45 were the first to be affected by the mobilization order.
This held for the eastern provinces as well. According to reports received from dioceses in
the provinces, the mobilization seems to have proceeded calmly, but the conscription of the
20-to-45 year-olds led to an almost complete standstill of agricultural and commercial activ-
ity.99 These reports also indicate that the Armenian draftees, who were not used to handling
weapons or to life in the army, had a hard time adjusting to their new conditions.100 The main
problem in the eastern provinces was the lack of basic structures and organization. Papazian,
who was in Mush in mid-November, saw groups of young conscripts arriving daily. They were
lodged in mosques, khans, or dilapidated depots, often left to their own devices, in the cold
and without food. Deserters were legion among all the population groups in the empire.101
Papazian notes further that requisitions had attained major proportions by early December
1914, for Mush had by then become a major recruitment and training center to which reluc-
tant conscripts from Dyarbekir, Harput, Gence, and Hazo were brought in droves. The store-
houses were filled with grain and other products that had been seized in the Armenian
villages on the plain of Mush or from shops in the market that had been stripped clean of
their merchandise.102 In a country such as the Ottoman Empire, where officials had a repu-
tation for dishonesty, the requisitions ordered by the government offered a golden oppor-
tunity for abuses. In Erzerum, a few days after the general mobilization had been decreed,
the military authorities began to requisition carts, cattle, horses, and foodstuffs from the

area’s inhabitants, and rice, wheat, and sugar from Armenian and Turkish merchants, with-
out offering them any compensation whatsoever.103 The Armenian primate noted that the
approaching winter season threatened to be particularly difficult for those peasants on the
plains of Pasın, Khnus, and Tercan, for the requisitions had left them without reserves.104
Preparations for War: The Creation of the Special Organization

We have seen that the Committee of Union and Progress, since coming to power in 1908,
often made use of its fedayis to do its dirty work, fight the opposition, liquidate critical jour-
nalists, give direction to its clubs in the provinces, and take control of key posts in the army.
Yet everything indicates that this paramilitary structure retained an “amateur” organiza-
tion down to the time of the Balkan Wars. The various sources at our disposal all confirm
that it was the trauma brought on by the Balkan Wars that contributed decisively to a new
radicalization of the Ittihad and prompted the party to create “special forces” that would be
operational in case of war – that is, capable of both destabilizing an army’s rear by organizing
a network of spies behind enemy lines and struggling against “separatist movements” within
the country itself.105
The first, still embryonic Special Organization was especially active in the second Balkan
War, particularly during the July 1913 campaign to take back Edirne.106 This first group was
unsurprisingly made up of young officers, CUP fedayis, and partisans of Enver. It recruited
for the occasion from the ranks of the Müdafa-i Milliye Cemiyeti (Committee of National
Defense), which was led by well-known Ittihadist officers such as Halil (Kut), Enver’s uncle,
Filibeli Ahmed Hilmi, Yenibahçeli Nail, and Yakup Cemil.107 We also know that, in the
course of the year, Halil Bey terrorized the Greek villages of Thrace at the head of 5,000
çetes, indicating that the organization was already a force to be reckoned with. According to
another source, hardly had Enver been named to head the War Ministry than he ordered,
on 24 January 1914, Kuşçubaşızâde Eşref (Sencer), one of his fedayis, to found a branch of the
Special Organization in Smyrna; Greeks and Armenians, the minister of war affirmed, had
transformed the churches of the city into arsenals that had to be “cleaned out” (temizleme).108
French consular sources, in turn, indicate that CUP fedayis were criss-crossing the provinces
of Asia Minor as early as spring 1913. Yakup Cemil, “who had already come” to the city of
Adana in Cilicia “in 1909, shortly before the massacres,” returned on 11 April 1913, accom-
panied by three “officers in civilian clothing,” for a meeting with the Ittihadist Şakir Effendi
and the vali.109 This suggests that the leaders of the Special Organization had set out to rein-
force their local networks. We do not, however, know what they were trying to accomplish.
Although this secret organization created on Enver’s initiative110 had not yet taken its final
form, this handful of examples attests that it was no longer interested only in conducting
sabotage and destabilization operations abroad, but was also already dealing with questions
of “the domestic security of the Ottoman Empire.”111
To judge from the documentary evidence presented at the Ittihadists’ trial (sixth session,
17 May 1919), it would appear that from late July 1914 this first Special Organization, con-
trolled by Enver and the army, had a second, subsidiary structure.112 It was around this time,
according to the indictment of the chiefs of the CUP, that the Ittihad’s main leaders held a
secret meeting at party headquarters in Nuri Osmaniye Street. The decisions taken at this
meeting constituted a decisive step toward creating a new Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa and defining
its tasks.113 According to Arif Cemil, an official in the new organization, the secret meeting
was held “the evening of the day on which the mobilization order was published” – that is,
3 August.114 Cemil further notes that a ferocious battle was then raging in the CUP for con-
trol of the paramilitary groups linked to the party: Ahmed Cemal controlled the Türk Ocağı
(“Turkish Hearth” society), while Enver sought to increase his personal power by means of

the Special Organization, to which he hoped to transfer some of the CUP’s prerogatives.115
Thus we should not exclude the possibility that the second Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa was born of
Talât’s – and above all, Nâzım’s and Şakir’s – desire to curb Enver’s megalomaniacal ambi-
tions. Cemil also points out that from the moment the Special Organization came into
being, its “main objective was [the creation] of an Islamic Union and the union of all the
Turks living outside Turkey’s borders.”116
The Ittihadist leaders’ trial also sheds light on the internal structures of the second Special
Organization. It reveals that it answered to the Ittihad’s Central Committee and was control-
led by a political bureau headed by Bahaeddin Şakir. The trial also shows that the political
bureau was made up of five members – that is to say, half – of the Central Committee, who
were charged with the political leadership of the Special Organization: Dr. Nâzım, Dr. Şakir,
Dr. Rüsûhi,117 Yusuf Rıza Bey,118 and Atıf Bey (Kamçıl).119 They were assisted by Aziz Bey,
head of the Interior Ministry’s Office of State Security, and Colonel Cevad, who replaced
Enver’s uncle Halil Pasha (after the latter’s departure for Van and Iranian Azerbaijan) as
Istanbul’s military governor and a member of the Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa’s political bureau.120
Finally, it should be noted that the Special Organization had its head office in the headquar-
ters of the CUP in Nüri Osmaniye Street.121 Here, Aziz Bey, Atıf Bey, Nâzım, and Halil (Kut)
went about their duties, along with Colonel Cevad and Halimoğlu Yusuf Ziya Bey, who is
mentioned only once in the course of the Unionists’ trial, as a member of the Ittihad’s Central
Committee and also as the head of the Special Organization in Trebizond.122 Moreover, all
the telegrams and documents addressed to the networks in the provinces that were presented
as evidence at the Unionists’ trial bore the signatures of these officials based in the organiza-
tion’s headquarters. They show that the individuals who worked on Nuri Osmaniye Street
planned and coordinated the operations carried out in the field, whereas the president of the
political bureau of the Special Organization, Şakir, together with Rüsûhi and Yusuf Rıza Bey,
led these operations directly.
After reading out the indictment of the Ittihadist leaders, the presiding judge at the court-
martial summed up the results of the pretrial investigation:
It has been established that the secret network was created by the leaders of Union and
Progress under the name Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa, on the pretence that it was to participate
in the War, as appears in the indictment. It was headed by Dr. Nâzım, Dr. Bahaeddin,
Atıf Bey and Rıza Bey, members of the Central Committee, as well as Aziz Bey, the
head of the Department of Criminal Investigations. Bahaeddin went to Erzerum to
direct the forces in the eastern vilayets from there. Rıza Bey led the forces in the
Trebizond area. Aziz, Atıf and Nâzım Bey worked in Constantinople, where their deci-
sions had to be approved and executed by the local military commander, Cevad. This
is proven by a secret decision, document no. 150; it is addressed to Bahaeddin Şakir,
contains the words “the Committee should punish Galatali Halil” ... and bears the sig-
natures of Aziz, Atıf and Nâzım as well as Cevad’s stamp of approval.123
Thus, the structure of the Special Organization and its organic connection with the Ittihad’s
Central Committee appear quite clearly. We shall go into these matters in greater detail
later.
Can we, in light of the foregoing, speak of two Special Organizations that had different
missions, or were even in competition? The trial of the Unionists and “responsible secretar-
ies,” the party’s all-powerful representatives in the vilayets, does not allow us to give more
than a partial response to this question, for a number of the accused fled Turkey before the
trial began, while those present were manifestly unwilling to divulge the secret motives for
their actions.

Two eminent CUP members admitted, albeit rather reluctantly, the existence of two
organizations functioning independently of each other – Major Yusuf Rıza Bey, head of the
Special Organization in the Trebizond region (on 17 May 1919, at the sixth session of the
Unionists’ trial),124 and Colonel Cevad, the military governor of Istanbul and a member of
the Special Organization’s political bureau (at the fourth session of the same trial, on 8 May).
Cevad added that the first of the Special Organizations fell under the jurisdiction of the War
Ministry while the second answered to the CUP.125 The Ittihad’s secretary general, Midhat
Şükrü, confessed, for his part (at the seventh session of the trial, held on the afternoon of 17
May), that certain members of the Central Committee had taken a direct hand in the crea-
tion of the Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa. The others did not react:126 they either refused to testify about
this subject, on the pretext that Enver’s War Ministry was the body responsible for such mat-
ters, or else flatly denied that there had been two Special Organizations.
Arif Cemil’s memoirs, albeit written with considerable caution and teeming with fla-
grant mistakes, contain information that sheds more light on the question of the Special
Organization. According to this Ittihadist officer, Talât very quickly gained the upper
hand over Enver in the match that saw them struggling for control of the second Teşkilât-ı
Mahsusa. Initially, however, when the Ittihad’s Central Committee decided, as the general
mobilization was getting underway, that CUP members were to take part in the war effort in
the framework of the Special Organization, two competing groups left Istanbul for Erzerum
and Trebizond more or less simultaneously. The first, created on Talât’s initiative, was led
by Şakir – according to Cemil, it was Talât who asked Şakir to go to Erzerum to set up the
Special Organization (after reminding him that he had been present at the siege of Edirne
and thus had the required experience) – in association with Ömer Naci, the CUP’s inspec-
tor general; Filibeli Ahmed Himli, a military official of the party; Emir Halmet and Çerkez
Reşid, both leaders of çete bands, with their underlings; and finally, the officer Rüşdi Bey.127
The second group, made up of Ittihadist fedayis, was sent east on the initiative of Enver and
the minister of war.128 Following Cemil’s account, the Central Committee designated Ömer
Naci and Rüsûhi Bey to direct operations on the Persian border. Süleyman Şefik Pasha,
Hüseyin Rauf (Orbay), and Übeydullah were dispatched to Afghanistan; İbrahim and Yusuf
Rıza were assigned to the Caucasus; and Celal Bey was given responsibility for Macedonia.129
Finally, the Committee sent the responsible secretaries based in party headquarters on mis-
sions to the eastern provinces. All were instructed to travel incognito and reveal their identi-
ties to the local governors only when absolutely necessary.130
These details are not insignificant. They show that two structures coexisted in early
August 1914. One was founded on a decision of the Ittihad’s Central Committee with
Talât’s and Enver’s approval and put under Bahaeddin Şakir’s responsibility. The other,
which had already been in existence for some time, was subordinated to the War Ministry,
and Enver in particular, and led by a colonel on the general staff, Süleyman Askeri,131 who
was succeeded by Kuşçubaşızâde Eşref (Sencer). Can we, then, speak of distinct, compet-
ing organizations? The two organizations were indeed in competition, to the extent that
the objectives of the second Special Organization were not fundamentally different from
those of the first. They were distinct as well, except in the eastern provinces where they
would merge in spring 1915. In fact, the first Special Organization pursued two very differ-
ent goals at the same time: it conducted military counter-espionage and, secondarily, “har-
assed domestic foes,” in Macedonia, Thrace, and on the Aegean coast. The second Special
Organization also carried out operations behind enemy lines beyond the empire’s borders;
it sought in particular to foment rebellion among the Muslim and Turkish-speaking popula-
tions of the Caucasus, but then rapidly confined itself to liquidating or deporting “internal
enemies.” It only partially accommodated the demands of the military; above all, it carried
out “internal” missions, but sometimes, in Turkish environments, “external” missions as

well. Kuşçubaşızâde Eşref, the head of the Special Organization in the war ministry, con-
fesses in his memoirs that
the Special Organization was a black box that became the fundamental structure for
ensuring the security of the Ottoman state at home and abroad ... To this end, it had
its own officers, uniforms, treasury and secret code; it was a state within the state.
In taking on missions that went beyond normal limits, it acquired a moral personal-
ity. Pursuing its three main objectives – concretely, the unification of Turkey, Islamic
union and Pan-Turkism – the Organization put the domestic and foreign policy of the
state into practice.132
By the Ittihadists’ ideological logic, these “domestic” and “foreign” operations were two sides
of the same coin. They were complementary contributions to the ultimate goal of the reign
of Turkism, which was to impose, everywhere, the Ittihad’s national ideal. In other words, the
CUP saw no contradiction in its actions. Taking advantage of wartime conditions, it would
use its secret weapon to accomplish its supreme mission in the name of the nation.
The antagonism between the Ittihad and the War Ministry was superficial, even though
it sometimes makes it hard to understand the structure and workings of this apparatus. The
Ittihad and its emanation, the political bureau of the Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa, maintained exclu-
sive political and operational control of the organization’s activities, with the help of the
Interior Ministry and the local government agencies under its aegis. The military authorities,
for their part, were responsible for recruitment, equipment, officer training, and, of course,
financing the squadrons of killers with secret funds at the disposal of the War Ministry.133
Collaboration in the field sometimes proved difficult but, as the examples adduced in the
fourth part of this study show, political objectives always took precedence over military or
ethical considerations. The overlap between the two sources of power, political and military,
and the extraordinary skill with which the Ittihad camouflaged the Special Organization’s
operations as counter-espionage activities, no doubt explain why certain scholars have failed
to perceive the existence of the second Special Organization.134
There was, however, a basic distinction between the first Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa and the sec-
ond, one that reveals the narrower goals of the CUP’s Central Committee from August 1914
on. This difference stemmed from the introduction of a crucially important innovation:
convicts released from Turkish prisons were extensively recruited by the second version of
the Special Organization for the purpose of making up its squadrons. Examining the way
this innovation worked out in practice and the nature of the missions entrusted to the new
organization is quite simply tantamount to assessing the Ittihad’s genocidal intentions. It also
allows us to identify the precise period in which the Young Turk regime made the decision
to translate its plans into action.
A wire sent by the Bursa committee to the Ittihad’s Central Committee in response
to orders transmitted on 15 September 1914 is the first source to mention the recruitment
of criminals. This document indicates that all the local committees had been apprised
of the request to enroll convicts in the Special Organization, but that it proved hard “to
find sufficient numbers of people who frequently engage[d] in murder and theft.” The local
Ittihadists nevertheless believed that they could furnish from the vilayet of Bursa between
500 and 1,000 recruits with the desired profile.135 One sees, then, that the CUP’s usual
networks were still being utilized in the first weeks of the recruitment campaign, probably
because the political bureau of the Special Organization had not yet come into existence
or been organized.
There is, moreover, virtually no documentation of the Special Organization’s activi-
ties prior to early autumn 1914. Thereafter, with the official declaration of war, the sources

suddenly begin to proliferate. A coded 13 November 1914 dispatch from Halil (Kut) – who
was not appointed commander of the Fifth Persian Expeditionary Corps until December –
to Midhat Sükrü, the party’s secretary general, ordered that the responsible secretaries in
the provinces speed up the creation of squadrons of the Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa. This document
was counter-signed by Dr. Nâzım, Atif Bey, and Aziz Bey, the head of the Office of State
Security,136 thus justifying the suspicion that, by the beginning of November at the latest,
the political bureau of the Special Organization was already operational, while more and
more convicts were being released from detention. Other telegrams, bearing mid-November
dates, were read out at a session of the trial of the Unionists (during the interrogation of
Colonel Cevad); sent by Bahaeddin Şakir, then based in Erzerum, or addressed to Midhat
Şükrü, they bore on the CUP clubs in Bursa, Ismit, Bandırma, and Balıkeser,137 and indicate
both that the president of the Special Organization’s political bureau was corresponding with
the Ittihad’s secretary general about matters connected with forming squadrons, and also
that the Istanbul members of the political bureau were working directly with the responsible
secretaries dispatched by the CUP to all the regions of the empire. A 20 November 1914
encrypted telegram from Musa Bey, the CUP inspector in Balıkeser, informs the political
bureau that the mutesarif received, on 16 November 1914, an encrypted telegram from the
interior minister containing an order to form bands in a week’s time by enlisting convicts
released from prison and sending them to the localities where they were to serve.138 In other
words, the minister of the interior and local government officials were also helping to create
squadrons of çetes in the same period.
November thus marks a turning point in the implementation of the decisions of the
Ittihad’s Central Committee: it was in November that the process of releasing criminals from
prison was accelerated. One hundred twenty-four were liberated from the prison of Binian
(in the vilayet of Sıvas) in November alone, thanks to the vali Muammer, who interceded
directly with the presiding judge of the local court.139 Research conducted by Krieger indi-
cates that no fewer than 10,000 imprisoned common-law criminals, most of them murderers,
were set free and enrolled in squadrons of the Special Organization beginning in fall 1914.140
It is worth pointing out that the health services, the army, the gendarmerie, and a judge par-
ticipated in the release of each of these convicts, as can be seen in the case of Angora’s cen-
tral prison, whose 249 freed criminals appeared before a commission comprising Mahmud
Celaleddin Bey, the head of Angora’s Health Department; Captain Fehmi Bey; Colonel
Mehmed Vasıf Bey, the commander of the Angora gendarmerie; and Ali Haydar Bey, a judge
on the Imperial Court of Appeals.141 Special committees were set up in all regions of the
country to supervise the procedures by which felons were selected, released from detention,
and incorporated into the squadrons. The CUP’s secretary general, Midhat Şükrü, respond-
ing to the court’s questions at the sixth session of the Unionists’ trial, stated that once the
çetes had been set free and integrated into the squadrons of the Special Organization, they
were considered namuslu (“respectable people”), “for they massacre[d] Armenian women and
children to serve the fatherland.”142
The Special Organization thus benefited from the active collaboration of state agencies,
especially the Ministry of Justice, without whose approval it would have been impossible to
release felons from prison. Yet a minister, İbrahim Pirizâde, nevertheless affirmed, in respond-
ing to a question before the fifth commission of parliament in November 1918: “I knew
nothing about this organization. The Council of Ministers did not know anything about it,
either. We were completely unaware of its purpose and activities. I know absolutely nothing
about it and, what is more, I am under no obligation to.”143 A deputy hereupon pointed out
that “it was Ömer Naci Bey who initiated the implementation of measures connected with
the Special Organization [and] it is rather odd that İbrahim Bey, who was a member of the
Council of Ministers when all these events took place, found out about them only after the

fact.” Cornered, İbrahim Bey finally conceded the point: “I remained in the cabinet in order
to counteract, to the extent that one could, acts of this kind of which I was informed. Rest
assured that when I say that we did not know about the Special Organization, I mean that
no decision was made by the Council of Ministers.” When the Arab deputy Fuad Bey asked
İbrahim Bey if he had authorized the release of common-law criminals, İbrahim admitted, in
his fashion, that he had: “Yes. I no longer remember the vilayet involved. But when I learned
of the intention to liberate convicts in this vilayet in order to send them to the front, I vehe-
mently protested ... We then drafted a law on this matter that was ratified by your honorable
assembly.”144
Revelations made by Colonel Cevad, Istanbul’s military governor (muhafız) and a member
of the Special Organization’s political bureau, show that certain provincial valis were unwill-
ing to carry out the orders that they had received from the national leadership – that is, to
perpetrate deportations and massacres. As we shall see, such men were promptly dismissed
and sometimes replaced by responsible secretaries delegated by the Ittihad. The Young Turk
government’s response took the form of a special law intended to overcome the scruples of
certain officials. Passed in December 1914, it legalized the enlistment of convicted criminals
in the militia.145 In other words, everyone knew the kind of task that the çetes were supposed
to perform. A 7 December 1914 wire from an officer on the general staff, Colonel Behiç
Erkin, to the Special Organization’s political bureau is revealing in this regard. Informing the
political bureau of passage of the law on the enrollment of criminals, the dispatch points out
that provincial governors will henceforth be able “to act on a legal basis.”146
Finally, as far as the role of the minister of war in the Special Organization’s operations
is concerned, the Ittihadists’ trial reveals that Colonel Cevad acted as coordinator between
his own ministry and the organization’s political bureau, of which he was a member. Besides
overseeing the operations of the Special Organization, which had its offices in the War
Ministry (this supervisory task had initially been assigned to Süleyman Askeri, and, later,
Kuşçubaşzâde Eşref), the second bureau, better known as the Intelligence Department
(Istihbarat Şubesi), which was subordinated to the Ottoman army’s high command and
headed by Colonel Seyfi of the general staff, played a prominent part in carrying out propa-
ganda work, ensuring logistical support for the Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa, and planning deporta-
tions. The same agency, as a captain working for it reported, controlled the secret funds
earmarked for the Special Organization.147
In his testimony before the fifth parliamentary commission, Said Halim declared, with
regard to the creation of the Special Organization: “It was brought into being by the mili-
tary authorities ... The government had nothing to do with it. This matter was not discussed
by the Council of Ministers.” When the judge presiding at the court-martial asked Halim
whether he had been informed of “the creation of such an organization,” he admitted that
he had, but only “after everything was over.” And when he was asked about the fact that
“no one was ever criticized in connection with this business,” he responded, continuing to
speak in abstract terms, that he had himself leveled such criticisms. He then pronounced a
terrible conclusion: “but what use were they after all the evil that had already been done!”
Answering one last question about how the Special Organization was financed, Halim con-
firmed that “the minister of war had large sums at his disposal.”148
The elements just reviewed warrant the conclusion that the Special Organization founded
in 1914 was meant to pursue, in complete independence, objectives related to the state’s
“domestic” security and “external” interests, to use the classical formula. In other words, it
was to deal with both “domestic enemies” and Turkish populations outside Turkey. It was a
kind of specialized branch or military extension of the Ittihad’s Central Committee. This
explains why the Special Organization depended on the Ittihad’s local networks for sup-
port, especially the delegates or responsible secretaries whom the party had named in each

region:149 they have power over all civilian and military authorities to execute orders received
from the Special Organization’s political bureau.
To free the felons who were then enrolled in the squadrons, the political bureau relied
on the services of the Interior and Justice Ministries; to select, train, and equip the killers,
it called on the Ministry of War. Each of these institutions had representatives on the spe-
cial commissions formed in every kaza, sancak, and vilayet. These representatives were, as a
general rule, valis, military authorities, senior judges, police chiefs, and the heads of health
departments, as well as local CUP delegates.
The interrogation of an important member of the political bureau, Atıf Bey (Kamçıl),
provides valuable insights into the power relations or hierarchy within this complex network.
When the presiding judge asked him why the Ittihad’s Central Committee and the interior
minister maintained direct contact with the squadrons, to which they transmitted orders
by way of local government officials or CUP delegates even though the Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa
was officially under the jurisdiction of the War Ministry, Atıf dodged the question with the
remark that “it was not a question of orders, but of advice about certain matters.” When it
was then pointed out to him that the interventions of the party’s authorized delegates with
local authorities plainly took the form of orders, not expressions of opinion, and that further-
more the instructions of the Interior Ministry were sometimes countermanded by the party’s
Central Committee, Atıf gave no further response. Moreover, telegrams read in the course
of the same session attest that certain delegates had expressly asked whether they should
obey the Interior Ministry’s directives or the Central Committee’s.150 In other words, the
Special Organization’s political bureau was sometimes conflated with the Ittihad’s Central
Committee. One might perhaps go so far as to say that there was at most a simple division of
labor among the members of the party’s highest body.
Nothing was said about the nature of the Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa’s “domestic operations” until
the fifth and seventh sessions of the Unionists’ trial. It was at these sessions that a member
of the Young Turk Central Committee, Yusuf Rıza Bey, whom the party had dispatched to
Trebizond, brought himself to admit that there had existed two organizations bearing the
same name, one active on the front and the other in the interior provinces. The second of
the two was involved, he said, in deporting the Armenians, “for there were not enough gen-
darmes (zinayr) to accomplish this task.”151
The trial of the Special Organization’s leaders also shows that care was taken to destroy
orders having to do with the çetes. In evidence he gave at the second session, Colonel
Cevad, the member of the political bureau responsible for logistics, revealed that he had
received a 21 January 1915 circular requesting that he “organize irregular forces in the First,
Second, Third, Fourth and Fifth Armies.” A copy of this circular, which bore the stamp
of the general staff of the army in the War Ministry, had been sent to the commanders-
in-chief of each army. “Once the information was received, we had to send it on to the
addresses indicated ... After the order had been distributed and carried out, we were sup-
posed to destroy it.” The same document, No. 1117, also includes the following instructions:
“Send the squadrons of çetes whose training has been completed to the areas that have
already been specified.”152
In a written deposition submitted on 5 December 1918 to the ex-vali of Angora, Hasan
Mazhar, the president of the Commission to Investigate Criminal Acts set up on 23 November
1918, General Vehib Pasha, who had assumed command of the Third Army on 20 February
1916, drew up a detailed list of the inquiries that he had conducted after his arrival in
Erzincan. He affirmed that Bahaeddin Şakir, in his capacity as president of the Teşkilât-ı
Mahsusa, had freed a number of convicts and integrated them into squadrons of çetes or, as
the general put it, “butchers of men.”153

In the prosecutor’s 13 January 1920 concluding statement before the court-martial, in

which he demanded that Şakir be condemned to death, he declared, referring to General
Vehib’s deposition, that
the extermination of the Armenians and confiscation of their property and land flowed
from decisions made by the Central Committee of Union and Progress. Bahaeddin
Şakir organized battalions of butchers in the area under the jurisdiction of the Third
Army [comprising the vilayets of Erzerum, Bitlis, Van, Dyarbekir, Harput, Trebizond,
Sıvas and the mutesarifat of Canik] and coordinated all the crimes committed in this
region. The state was complicit in these crimes. No government official, no judge, no
gendarme ever stepped in to protect the populations subjected to these atrocities.154
The general added, in the “resumé of the convictions” contained in the complete, still
unpublished version of his deposition
it is obvious that all the disorders and troubles in the [jurisdiction] of the Third Army
were brought on by the deceptive actions of Bahaeddin Şakir Bey. Traveling in a spe-
cial automobile, he went from one local center to the next to communicate orally the
decisions made by the Party for Union and Progress and the directives dispatched
to the various sections of the party and the heads of government [the valis] in these
localities ... The atrocities that were committed, on a premeditated plan and with abso-
lutely predetermined intent, were first organized and ordered by delegates of the Party
for Union and Progress and its highest bodies and then carried out by the leaders of
the governorships, who had become pliant tools serving the designs and desires of this
organization, which knew no law and had no scruples.155

Chapter 4
Destruction as Self-Construction:
Ideology in Command
I
n the preceding chapters, we isolated certain salient traits of the ideology that prevailed
among Young Turks, observing in particular that the need for a centralized state was
for them a fundamental, unquestionable principle – in other words, that they were
viscerally opposed to any and all decentralization schemes, such as the one put forward by
Prince Sabaheddin and the Ottoman liberals. Whereas, for the liberals, decentralization
was the price to pay for maintaining the integrity of the Ottoman Empire, Ittihadists of all
stripes never considered making the slightest concession to the non-Turkish groups in the
country. On the contrary, the policies they pursued in Albania, Macedonia, and Yemen
bear witness to a radicalization that each collective failure only intensified. For, beyond the
integrity of the empire, which had been maintained by dogma, a solid project to found a
Turkish nation could be seen emerging. It was to replace the imperial model, characterized
by a cosmopolitan society and a division of labor that had given rise to a nascent industri-
alization process favoring the country’s Christians. Originally purely theoretical, especially
during the period of opposition and exile, the Young Turk project naturally ran up against
the harsh realities of the Ottoman Empire, which made the Ittihadist elite’s objectives
impracticable. The Ittihad accordingly had to conclude “tactical” alliances with groups
that were hostile to its ambitions on principled grounds, and sometimes had to cast the veil
of an acceptable, plausible discourse over those ambitions: the ideology of Ottomanism,
developed by the Young Turks’ modernist precursors, had, in some way, to be popularized
and adapted to the needs of the Young Turk cause. It must be admitted that Ottomanism
initially succeeded in capturing the attention, or even favor, of the empire’s non-Turkish
elements, thanks in part to their memories of the tyrannical Hamidian regime. In tradi-
tionalist circles, the egalitarian discourse that accompanied Ottomanism inevitably gave
rise, in a society incapable of entertaining egalitarian perspectives, to aggressive protests.
Yet paradoxically, as we have seen, the Ittihadists themselves profoundly despised this con-
cept, which they regarded as an empty abstraction. Mobilizing nationalistic, Islamic, and
egalitarian themes by turns, the CUP was often caught defending blatantly contradictory
positions, unmasked by oppositional groups and, on two occasions, driven from power. It
was not easy for the Committee gradually to eradicate all opposition and take control of
the state apparatus and army. Although it is not possible categorically to affirm that the
1908–18 period was exploited to attain, step by step, the CUP’s supreme goal of founding
a “Turkish” nation within as yet unspecified borders, the course of events as well as the
decisions made by the Young Turk elite in this period give the impression, at the very least,
that that is what happened.
This is not the place to detail the origins of Turkism or, more generally, Young Turk ideol-
ogy, subjects on which scholars have advanced clashing views.1 We shall confine ourselves to

considering the points directly or indirectly pertinent to our study – the conceptions of the
state and army, and of society and the state, developed by the CUP.
In an Ottoman Empire that rested on the foundations of ongoing military conquest and
built on past successes to obtain new ones, an empire in which only professional soldiers
could hope to attain prestigious social positions, the military superiority of the West gradu-
ally made itself felt, engendering endless territorial losses and a long internal crisis whose
culmination can be schematically dated to 1923, when the empire ceased to exist. Such was
the curious destiny of a state that, although its grandeur was owed to the sultans’ ability to
mobilize all its internal forces, in the end implacably rejected a substantial segment of those
forces. It is easy to imagine how bitter the clash of mid-nineteenth century civilizations must
have been for the Ottoman elite when the West, which the empire had deeply penetrated
and from which it had drawn much of its substance for centuries, now appeared not as an
object of prey but as a predator solidly sustained by a form of national unity unknown in
the East. What, this elite must have wondered, is the secret of the West’s power and energy?
Why have we been overwhelmed and subjugated by these nations that we dominated only
yesterday?
All these questions, frustrations, and traumas formed the Ottoman heritage, which the
Young Turks sought less to assume than to cast off. Paradoxically, this colonial empire, with
its colonial character mitigated by an Islamic social base, found itself confronting another
kind of imperialism – a modern one.
Although the central elements of this heritage can be traced to Abdülhamid’s reign, some
of its features can also be attributed to the Young Turks themselves, especially their elit-
ist conception of society and their social conservatism. For the Unionists, it was never a
question of making a popular revolution or educating the illiterate masses and affording
them the opportunity to participate directly in the decision-making process. Nor was there
any question of creating a mass organization. Their goal was an elitist, centralized party.
In their view, society mattered only to the extent that it served the interests of the state.2
Social Darwinism was the natural law that governed biological processes and also legitimized
social inequality – or, if one prefers, the Young Turks’ contempt for society. As an elite, they
judged themselves to be the nation’s “social physicians,” the only ones capable of enlighten-
ing the “masses”3 – on the condition, of course, that the masses consented to obey them
unquestioningly.
Many – this holds for the ARF – blamed circumstances for the authoritarianism of
the CUP, which was long perceived as a constitutional movement. Yet, “examination of
the Young Turk secret correspondence and publications, as well as the private papers of the
leading members of their organizations, clearly reveals that they viewed themselves above all
else as the saviors of an empire.” For this reason, the Young Turks did not regard themselves
as bound by the Constitutional pact. At most, they made use of it to acquire a presentable
image. As M. Sükrü Hanioğlu points out, “the Young Turks’ inclination toward authoritarian
theories was by no means a coincidence.”4 All the currents of thought that held their atten-
tion – biological materialism, positivism, social Darwinism, elitism – interested them to the
extent that they could legitimize their conception of the state and society, at antipodes from
the idea of the equality of all citizens that they defended in public. Their social Darwinism
was founded on the idea of “human inequality,” while sociological theories interested them
only insofar as they made it possible to understand mass psychology and justify the activ-
ity of the elite – that is to say, their own activity. From this point of view, their readings of
European authors, especially sociologists, might be called utilitarian. They were engaged in a
sort of quest for magic formulas that could legitimize their own practice.
Hamit Bozarslan has discerned a crucial element in the mental universe of this Young
Turk elite – its adoption of the positivist conception of the laws of historical development.

Destruction as Self-Construction 191
This allowed them “to engage in a given activity, but also to continue to deny their role as
historical actors.”5 In other words, their positivism allowed them to act without considering
themselves responsible for their acts, since they were the agents of a supreme mission.
For the closed circle of some 30 people who controlled the Ittihad, the idea of human
rights was an abstraction, as was the motto of the republic. “Liberty, equality, fraternity” was
an archaic “metaphysical fantasy” that had no other aim than “to win over various Ottoman
ethnic groups to the cause of Ottomanism.”6 What mattered more than anything else, soci-
ety included, was the creation of a strong authoritarian state7 to be at the Committee’s beck
and call and be capable of realizing the Committee’s ends. Nothing was to be allowed to
interfere with this historical mission, especially not the opposition, as we saw in discussing
the January 1913 attack on the Sublime Porte and the murder of the minister of war. Had it
not been for certain contingencies of domestic and foreign politics, the dictatorship that was
put firmly in place in January 1914 would have come into being much earlier.
Thus, it will be readily understood that the July 1908 revolution represented anything
but emancipation for Ottoman society, even if it opened up spaces of freedom that had not
existed under the regime of Abdülhamid. It is, moreover, quite symptomatic that this “revo-
lution” succeeded only because of the young officers. As Hanioğlu has magisterially shown,
when Bahaeddin Şakir and Nâzım restructured the CPU/CUP between 1905 and 1907, both
of them understood very well that, without the army, their projects might well never get off
the ground and they themselves might remain in exile forever. After attempting to induce a
few high-ranking officials of the Hamidian administration to defect, they were forced to open
the doors of the Central Committee to members of the armed forces.
The amalgam constituted by these Young Turks in exile, shaped by the theoretical debates
between Ahmed Rıza and Prince Sabaheddin as well as their frequent contacts with their
fellow Armenian exiles, was thus necessarily neither fish nor fowl. This was the more so as
the “order and progress” the Young Turks called for would have required for their realiza-
tion a social environment that did not exist in the Ottoman Empire. Thus was born the
sociological oddity consisting of the “substitution of officers for an industrial class,” with
the role of “sole actor” devolving upon the army.8 Turkey bears its stamp even today. The
theories of the father of the reorganization of the Ottoman army, Colmar von der Goltz,
which assigned the military a special role in pre-industrial societies, enjoyed great popularity
among the young officers who had graduated from Istanbul’s Military Academy. They also
flattered the prejudices of the Committee of Union and Progress, which thought of itself
as a semi-military structure9 above the law. Hanioğlu observes in this connection that, “in
the Ottoman Empire, where the military had traditionally played a more significant role
in policy-making than the militaries of many European states did, the reemergence of the
military as a dominant power was a relatively easy transition.” Even “civilian” members of
the Ittihadist Central Committee were steeped in militarist traditions. Had not two of the
eminent founders of the “reformed” CUP, Şakir and Nâzım, graduated the Military Medical
School, and were they not both army officers? In 1914–16, in any case, one finds them at the
head of the Special Organization, which was carrying out “domestic missions,” and was quite
simply a paramilitary structure concocted by the “saviors of the nation.”10 To save the nation,
however, a military elite did not suffice. What was required were men of exceptional capaci-
ties, the “supermen” about whom Şakir wrote, with disappointment and anger, that “the only
Turk possessed of a will strong enough to become the Übermensch [was] Sultan Abdülhamid”
himself.11 Apparently, not even Enver Pasha found grace in Şakir’s eyes.
Rejection of the Ottoman model and its linguistic and cultural plurality, which the
Ittihadists sought to replace with “Ottomanism,” was another key feature of the Young
Turks’ project. However, what they offered – in essence, the possibility without alterna-
tives of adhesion to Turkism – ran up against solidly anchored identities, whether Arab,

Greek, or Armenian, and had the disadvantage of proposing fragile cultural bases to these
groups. Moreover, rather than actually seeking to include non-Turks in their melting pot, the
Ittihadists rejected all forms of particularism. Nâzım did not beat about the bush: “Nationalist
protests and aspirations exasperate us. Only one nation and one language should exist on
our soil.”12 “Ottomanism,” of course, was merely a decorative flourish, as was the discourse
about equality.
It might even be ventured that the slow erosion of the Ottoman world, which yielded
its place to nation-states, together with the Ittihadists’ frequent contact with Albanian,
Macedonian, and Armenian revolutionaries endowed with solid national identities, helped
catalyze the Young Turk project to found a Turkish nation. As Bozarslan forcefully points
out, the Ittihadists who suggested this project discovered that there was, properly speaking,
no Turkish “nation”13 living on its ancestral lands, but a dominant Muslim Ottoman group
that had never wondered about its identity and had long ceased to trace its origins back to its
Central Asian ancestors. Thus, the construction of the Turkish nation could proceed only
by way of opposition to other groups, which for their part had identities based on a culture
and a homeland. The rejection of the rules defining a life in common – the cement that had
ensured the cohesion of the empire – could not but lead to a clash. The transformation of
a multicultural empire into a nation-state was an impossible task and inevitably a source of
antagonism. There is every reason to believe that that antagonism was induced, or perhaps
revealed, by the Ittihad’s nationalist ideology.
Because the Ittihad conceived the modernity to which it claimed to aspire in terms of
the creation of a Turkish nation, it pursued policies based on the rejection of groups that did
not fit into its ideological scheme. It was no longer a question of dominating others, as in
the Ottoman Empire, but of assimilating them. If this was the point of departure, how was
it possible to conceive of a political arena, a zone of dialogue? Both of their led only a paper
existence. As many have emphasized, on the rare occasions when power changed hands in
the Young Turk period, the change came about through the use of force, as the result of a
coup d’état. Significantly, the term adopted to designate “politics” (siyasa) denoted the art of
governing or controlling a horse.14
Under these circumstances, there could be no question of granting equal status to non-
Turks, let alone non-Muslims. Discussing the Young Turks, Tekin Alp, an ideologue of
Turkism, points to one of the problems confronting them:
Ottomanism was a truly bad bargain for them; here, they could only lose. They could
not put themselves at the same level as their fellow citizens from other groups ... The
risk was that they would turn out to be the junior and not particularly brilliant partner
in the association that they had proposed amid the hope and enthusiasm of the first
embrace.15
While it is by no means certain that the Ittihad ever really proposed the kind of association
that this prophet of the Turkish nation says it did, it is obvious that the idea of making all
Ottoman citizens equal opened up perspectives that could not but alarm the less radical
Young Turks. A member of the Ittihadist inner circle, Hüseyin Cahit (Yalçın), whose news-
paper, Tanin, was a good barometer of the mood in the capital, offered the following inter-
pretation of egalitarianism:
Does the statement that non-Muslims will have the same rights as Muslims mean
that this country will become Greek, Armenian or Bulgarian? No! This country will
remain the Turks’ country. We will come together under the label “Ottoman,” but the
form of the state will never be altered to the detriment of the special interests of the

Turkish nation. No measure jeopardizing the vital interests of Muslims will ever be
taken ... Whatever people may say, the Turks are the dominant nation in this country,
and will continue to be!16
Everyone knew the basic rules of the game. There was never any question of creating a politi-
cal space for the other groups making up the empire.
On the other hand, the Young Turk project involved the adoption of elements of
European civilization and, as we have already indicated, social models described by
European sociologists, as well as European technical know-how. Enver Pasha’s pregnant,
poetic formula, uttered in conversation with a German, summed up the conception of the
majority of Young Turks: “Your civilization is a poison, but it is a poison that quickens
men’s spirits ... Because we have admitted the superiority of your civilization, we also tolerate
its vices.”17 The Ittihadists were aware that their society lacked inspiration, as if its flame
had been extinguished, and that it was in sore need of stimulation. They also knew that
its most dynamic groups, the ones that precisely had been the most successful at assimi-
lating Western achievements, happened to be the empire’s Greeks and Armenians, while
the nascent Turkish nation was the most resistant to such influence. How were features of
European civilization to be combined with those of Muslim Ottoman civilization? How
could Muslim Ottoman society become modern while remaining true to itself?18 Such were
the questions confronting Young Turk intellectuals.
Among the models proposed by the West, the notion of “race” plainly caught the Young
Turks’ eye, since it made it possible to construct a Turkish model transcending national
boundaries. Exploiting this model, however, was problematic because the classificatory sys-
tem adopted by European “scientists” put the Turks at the bottom of the scale, beneath even
the “yellow race.” Moreover, as Hanioğlu points out, the concept “Turkish race” was rarely
evoked from 1907 on, since it was too patently at odds with the Young Turks’ “Ottomanist”
propaganda.19 The Committee’s ideologues could not put European racial theories to use in
the empire, for they would generate effects contrary to those sought, threatening even to
identify its non-Turkish elements as superior to its Turkish elements.
Indeed, in their search to forge a distinctly Turkish nation, the Ittihadists repeatedly
butted up against an apparently insoluble problem: the multiethnic Ottoman heritage.
It did not take them long to realize, after coming to power, that it was quite simply
impossible to Turkify the Greeks and Armenians. Indeed, at least for some Young Turks,
“Turkishness” probably replaced the idea of fraternity among the various components of
Ottoman society20 even before the 1908 revolution. To valorize the Turkish model, the
alternatives had to be denigrated and rejected. The Young Turk poet Mehmed Emin cap-
tured this idea in four suggestive lines written in 1910: “The most beautiful face is ugly
in our eyes / We love the Turkish face / The best essence is bad in our eyes / We want the
Turkish essence.”21 Turkishness was thus plainly associated with a fascinating Western
model – nationalism.
This nationalism was manifested, Bozarslan notes, in the fact that “merely demanding
minority rights was immediately identified as separatism and, in a staggering amalgam, with
defense of the old system.”22 However, since the Young Turks wished to imbue the whole
nation with Turkish patriotism, which turned on use of the Turkish language, they were also
aware that they had to lead a struggle against Ottoman cosmopolitanism while modern-
izing Turkish, a language, Ömer Seyfeddin wrote, that “was disastrous, miserable, baneful,
illogical.”23 A further objective of this quest for modernity and identity was to enhance the
status of the Turks and valorize their glorious past. To this end, it was necessary to obliter-
ate the Ottoman historiographical tradition, in which the East is portrayed as the barbaric
homeland of the bloodthirsty Mongols. In other words, it was necessary to break with the

inherited, established Byzantine imperial model and turn to these famous Mongol cousins
as well as the Tatars of Russia for inspiration. An affirmation by the writer Ahmed Midhat
illustrates this aspiration. Midhat declared that it was Turkishness, rather than Islam, which
endowed “four hundred tents of the Oğuz tribe, come from the Asian steppes,” with the
energy required to build one of the world’s greatest empires.24 In the space of a few years,
the intense work carried out by the Young Turk networks incontestably contributed to the
emergence, in Ottoman society, of a more flattering image of the Turks.
The next stage in the formation of Turkish nationalism, constructed as a reaction, doubt-
less owes a great deal to Yusuf Akçura (1876–1935), a pure product of the French school of
political science. Akçura preached the unity of all Turks, wherever they might be found,
and staunchly opposed the idea of an “Ottoman nation,” which he deemed impractica-
ble.25 Ahmed Agayev/Ağaoğlu (1869–1939), who, like Akçura, was a Tatar, grew up in the
Armenian environment of Shushi, the Karabagh district’s “little Paris.” He too received his
higher education in Paris and preached Turkish nationalism, but called for its liberation from
the grip of Islam, or at least demanded that Islam be transformed into a “national religion” –
that is, subordinated to the Turkish nation.26 For Ağaoğlu, Islam’s universal dimension was
intolerable because it was at odds with the project of establishing a distinctly Turkish cul-
ture.27 As we have seen, however, Ağaoğlu did not hesitate to warn that Islam was in danger,
launching an appeal for a jihad in January 1913 after the disaster in the Balkans.28 There
were obviously contradictions in the discourse of all these prophets of Turkish national-
ism, torn between their patriotic feelings and their Islamic heritage, as there were within
the Young Turk movement. Among the Tatars of Russia, who, as we have noticed, very
early established ties with the Young Turk movement – Hüseyinzäde Ali (Turan) and Yusuf
Akçura are prominent examples – Ahmed Ağaoğlu stood out, for he quite rapidly secured
himself a place on the Ittihad’s Central Committee. He was the only one of its members not
only to have experienced but also to have taken a direct hand in a clash with Armenians
in the Caucasus in 1905. Ağaoğlu can probably safely be called the very type of the Turkish
nationalist formed through contact with Russian imperialism, and Russian and Armenian
revolutionaries in Baku as well as Paris. He grew up in Shushi, one of the leading nineteenth-
century Armenian cultural centers and a city that boasted a remarkable intellectual elite.
It was probably here that he discovered the force that resides in the cultural cohesion of a
nation and, by way of contrast, the road that his Tatar compatriots would have to travel
before they could constitute themselves as a nation. The goal, as he saw it, was to take
advantage of the territorial acquisitions of the Ottomans in order to unify all the Turks. The
fact that he was descended of a family of donmës29 – Turkish-speaking Jews of the Caucasus
who had converted to Islam – may well have strengthened his determination to work toward
this goal. The part he played in the July 1911 creation of the Türk Yurdu Cemiyeti (“Turkish
Homeland Society”), alongside Mehmed Emin (Yurdakul) and Akçura,30 also shows that
he was not merely a theoretician and did not hesitate, notably in the massacres of the Baku
Armenians, to get his hands dirty.
As Erik J. Züricher has observed, the most nationalistic of the Young Turks hailed from
areas that had mixed populations or were situated on the borders of the empire, and it was
their direct confrontation with the multiethnic character of these areas which showed them
the basic problems of Ottoman society and familarized them with the “question” of the
“nationalities.”31
Tekin Alp, who was born in Serez, provided the “best exposé”32 of the Pan-Turk program.
He embodies a particularly striking example of the position of certain “minority” individuals
who identified with the national ideal. Although he was a non-Turk and thus excluded from
the leadership of the Ittihad, he came forward as a prophet of the grand Turkish national
project.

Ziya Gökalp, Pan-Turk Ideologue, and Bahaeddin

Şakir, Pan-Turk Activist
All the Young Turks espoused the principle of a strong, centralized state in which the army
would have a special role, but the myriad contradictions thrown up by Pan-Turk ideology
remained objects of controversy and a source of uneasiness until Mehmed Ziya Gökalp forged
his celebrated synthesis, which turned on the supremacy of society over the individual. The
matter was made more complicated, however, by the fact that, for Gökalp, “society” meant
“nation” and “nation” meant “Pan-Turkism” – in other words, a combination of nationalism
and exclusion. To explain the Turkish world’s calamitous plight, Gökalp contended that the
Turks possessed a highly developed culture but that this culture had been extinguished by
the Islamic-Arab and Byzantine civilizations of the Middle Ages. As a means of rediscover-
ing and regenerating it, he pleaded for a combination of modern European culture and this
original Turkish culture, although he did not thereby exclude Islam from his project.
Gökalp’s synthesis was intended for a Young Turk movement that included a great many
military men and was consequently hostile to theoretical discourse;33 yet it commanded
virtually universal assent, for it entrusted the nationalist elite with the mission of pursuing
an ideal common to all Turks. The fact that this modest parliamentary representative from
Dyarbekir, who took part in the CUP’s fall 1909 congress in Salonika, was elected a member
of the Central Committee at the next congress, in November 1910,34 shows just how well
what he had to say answered to the expectations of the Unionist elite, justifying the CUP’s
single-party regime. Gökalp’s “synthesis,” Bozarslan writes,
definitely eliminates Islam as a basis for legitimizing the social order but gives a large
place to religion, because, with its help, the Committee [could] hope to rally most of
the Islamicist opposition to its side, and also because it treats Turkishness and civiliza-
tion as literally inseparable from Islam. The exclusion of religion from the political
field comes at the price of assigning it a primordial role in the formulation of Turkish
identity or even the definition of the political field.35
Far from being purely theoretical, Gökalp’s model defined practical stakes, such as control
over the economy, and set itself ambitious aims, such as conquest of the Russian provinces in
which Turkic languages were spoken. In Gökalp’s view, the only way the Turks could restore
the ancestral virtues of the Turkish nation was to assimilate Western culture, as long as they
took care not to lose their souls in the process.36
It is true, Bozarslan writes, that, “before the establishment of the constitutional regime,
there were already many Turks [in Turkey]. But since the idea that ‘we are the Turkish
nation’ was absent, there was no Turkish nation.”37 Thereafter, the Ittihad strove to con-
stitute this nation while struggling against the “national consciousness” of the other
groups in the empire. The goal was to establish meşrutiyet, a “unique Ottoman national
personality”38 – that is, a pact of adhesion to Pan-Turkism. As Gökalp saw it, there was no
longer any place for the official representations of the millets, the non-Muslim communities,
whose very existence was merely a historical anachronism inherited from the Ottoman
Empire. The millet was “a secret state organization specific to the minorities,” and, we would
add, a highly suspect one.39 Yet, it was no easy matter to do away with the Armenian and
Greek Patriarchates any more then it was to forge a homogenous nation within the bounda-
ries of the Ottoman Empire, since the indispensable precondition was assimilation of the
non-Turks, including the Arabs and Kurds. The “Turkification of Islam”40 was indeed part
of Gökalp’s program, and the CUP also made an attempt to realize this goal. The results,
however, were disastrous. In these foreign environments with their own codes of behavior,

the party managed at best to recruit marginal elements or delinquents alienated from their
own cultural milieu.41
There was another strand in Gökalp’s ideological project that was of crucial importance,
for it legitimized the activity of the Young Turk elite. This was the substitution of the con-
cept of the nation for that of society or, in other words, the rejection of the individual as
a political agent in favor of the collectivity, the nation, with which the CUP, as we have
seen, unreservedly identified. To be sure, Gökalp distinguished the “hero” or superman from
this subjugated mass. The hero, unlike the mass, had total freedom of action, including the
freedom
to short-circuit society and legal institutions and place himself above society, and espe-
cially the law. For the legitimacy of the hero’s acts does not reside in their legality, and
even less in their conformity to a tradition; it resides in the historical import of his
project. The realization of this project may call for the use of means that are altogether
exceptional and non-traditional and thus naturally capable of undermining any social
consensus; they may also be illegal, if that is what is called for.42
This ideological validation of practices that were already firmly established in the Ittihad is
reminiscent of the self-justification of certain Armenian revolutionaries who also cast them-
selves as “heroes” struggling for the sake of their nation. The legitimization of the hero’s
activity, of his conviction that he has to act outside the law for the good of his people and
in order to safeguard his nation’s future, formed the core of what Talât had to say to Western
diplomats and, later, his accusers. A comment that Dr. Reşid, the vali of Dyarbekir, made
shortly before his suicide in 1919 falls into this category: “The Armenians will either sweep
the Turks aside or will be swept aside by the Turks ... I do not much care what the other
nations write about me.”43
The last element popularized by Gökalp, the grandiose plan to unify the Turks that
had been adopted by the Ittihad as its supreme ideal in the years immediately preceding
the First World War, was, of course, not completely new; Hanioğlu has brought out the
part a review such as Türk played in popularizing this theme at the dawn of the twentieth
century. However, with Gökalp (who, be it recalled, was a member of the Ittihad’s Central
Committee, where for a time he rubbed shoulders with another Pan-Turk thinker, Ahmed
Agayev), this theoretical notion, which had until then been a sort of Pan-Turk rallying cry,
acquired a practical dimension. It was no longer the watchword of an oppositional group, but
of a Committee that had put it at the heart of its political program and had the apparatus
of power in its hands. Gökalp even maintained that a state “called Turkiyya and a Turkish
nation” would not be viable unless it embraced all the Turks, and unless these Turks spoke
a common language, Islamic and Turkish, that had yet to be created; the whole would be
based on a Turkish national economy and division of labor.44 Agayev foresaw several stages
on the road to the supreme ideal of the unification of the Turks: “Türkiyacılık (unification
of the Turks of Turkey), Oğuzculuk (unification of the Turcs of Oğuz), and, finally, Turancılık
(unification of all Turks).”45 This was a vast program – one that the first Ottoman mili-
tary operations in the Caucasus sought to realize, as we shall see. Gökalp’s Pan-Turk project
doubtless explains why he countenanced, at the very least, the extirpation of the Armenians,
which was retroactively justified by their “treason.”46 Close to Şakir and Nâzım, Gökalp prob-
ably took part in the war “effort” like his uncle, the parliamentary deputy for Dyarbekir,
Feyzi Pirincizâde,47 who was the main accomplice in Vali Reşid’s liquidation of the 120,000
Armenians in the vilayet.
Gökalp’s nationalism obviously informed his radical view that it was impossible for the
Turks to coexist with the other groups making up the empire. These non-Turkish groups

constituted, in his estimation, a major obstacle in the development of Turkism and the crea-
tion of a fatherland in which everything would be Turkish:
A country whose ideals, language and religion are common to all. / Its parliamentary
deputies are its own. / A land in which the Boşo48 have no right to speak. / In which all
the capital circulating in the market is Turkish, / Like the science and technology that
guide its industry. / Its businesses help each other. / The arsenals, factories, ships and
trains belong to the Turks! / Behold, sons of Turks ... There is your country.49
Behind this Turkism plainly lay another crucial feature of the program of the Unionists
and their foremost ideologue, Gökalp: exclusion of non-Turks from the fatherland that was
being constructed for the Turks. Implicit in Turkism, in other words, was the destruction or
elimination of everything that stood in the way of building the Turkish fatherland.
The First World War provided the Unionist Central Committee with the opportunity to
realize its unification plan. According to Arif Cemil, an officer in the Special Organization,
“it had decided to carry out its plan to unite the Turks of Russia with those of Turkey on the
first occasion that offered. [The members of the Central Committee] had become so firmly
attached to this idea that they had gone so far as to draw up plans to make it a reality.”50
With the failure of the campaign of winter 1914–15, however, “the planned operations of the
Special Organization ... in the Caucasus had become irrelevant, and the expansionist ambi-
tions of the first weeks had given way to a preoccupation with defending the fatherland.”51
Once the Committee was confronted with the harsh realities of the war, the second face of
its project, exclusion, seems to have replaced the drive for unification. Unable to link up with
the Turks of Russia, the Ittihadist state committed itself to a project that was much more
clearly within its grasp because it was domestic.
Before the president of the political bureau of the Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa returned to Istanbul
from his mission to recruit çetes in all the eastern provinces, he decided – in terms that, albeit
very general, are suggestive – “to convert the Special Organization’s headquarters into an
active, efficient [center].” He further decreed that
preparation of the plans should be left up to the local authorities. It is incumbent on

them, in particular, to identify the means that the Organization requires. It is essential
that the çetes, the individuals and the corps that are to be dispatched to the eastern
zone be subordinated to the eastern center52 of the Special Organization.53
Cemil plainly notes the Ittihad’s turn toward domestic objectives. “As for Dr. Bahaeddin
Şakir Bey,” he writes, he had decided, in Istanbul, that he would no longer concern himself
with the operations aimed at the Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa’s foreign enemies, but, rather, turn his
attention to the country’s internal foes. Bahaeddin Bey was now convinced,” the Ittihadist
officer insists, “that we had to worry as much about the enemy within as the external foe.”54
One could hardly state any more forthrightly that the time had come to “worry about” the
Ottoman Armenians. Cemil is less forthcoming about what happened next. He remarks
cautiously yet clearly that, “when Dr. Bahaeddin Şakir Bey returned to the Caucasian front
several months later, the situation had been clarified. But we shall not go into this.”55 Cemil
does, however, remark that “a grand national awakening can make it possible to eliminate
the foreign microbes lodged within the Islamo-Turkish group.”56
According to Bozarslan, the success attained by Gökalp’s “synthesis” owes a great deal
to the skill with which he combined “elements espoused by three different currents of
thought” – Turkist, Islamicist, and Westernizing – while ably overcoming their contradic-
tions. One particular element was, for Gökalp, crucial to the successful realization of his

program – suppression of “Ottoman cosmopolitanism.” Conceived as a “surgical operation,”

the Ittihad’s eradication of “cosmopolitanism” allowed its number-one ideologue to “impose
his formula ‘Turkification, Islamification, Westernization’ as if it were a magic spell.”57
At the May 1919 trial of members of the Ittihad’s Central Committee, the judge pre-
siding over the court-martial repeatedly questioned Gökalp, asking in particular about
his activities at the head of the review Yeni Mecmu’a, founded by his colleague Bahaeddin
Şakir. He was asked if he had indeed “written essays in which he said that Turanism should
become Turkey’s program.” Gökalp confirmed that in some of his essays he had developed
his ideas on Turanism, which he “considered beneficial for Ottomanism.” Asked if “this had
not angered the non-Muslim groups,” he declared: “These groups were constantly in pursuit
of autonomy. Turanism was to have left the other nationalities their freedom while strength-
ening the Turkish element ... I do not deny the existence or rights of the other national-
ities.” Before his judges, the ideologue denied that he had advocated the “exclusion” of the
Armenians, which he had nevertheless defended as an imperative duty for all who aspired
to the ideal of the “unification of the Turks.” Questioned about the Central Committee’s
internal organization, Gökalp provided details of little interest: “The members of the Central
Committee earned thirty pounds monthly before the War. During the war, they earned fifty
to seventy pounds.” Exasperated, the presiding judge ordered someone to read out a number
of dispatches received by the Central Committee bearing on both the deportations and the
Committee’s connections with the Special Organization. Gökalp finally blurted out, “When
it was called for, the Committee provided support.” Asked to confirm “that the deporta-
tions had been decided on in the Central Committee” and, thereafter, whether the Central
Committee had indeed ordered “massacres and acts of pillage,” he answered that they had
“learned about them afterwards and lodged a complaint with the minister of the interior.
There were inquiries, but all that continued.”58
While Gökalp did a great deal to elaborate and legitimize the projects of the Ittihad’s
Central Committee, especially its program to eradicate the Armenian population, there
can be no ignoring the determinant role played by another Central Committee member,
Dr. Bahaeddin Şakir, in putting the program into practice. Until Hanioğlu brought out
Şakir’s central role in the evolution of the Ittihadist movement between 1905 and 1908,
very little was known about this “guardian of the Young Turk temple,” distinguished by the
fact that he never exercised ministerial functions or held high-ranking administrative posts.
Indeed, Turkish historiography has almost entirely ignored him. A short biographical notice,
recently supplemented by the “research” of an academic, presents him as a “Turkish scientist”
who was born in 1880 (he was in fact born around 1870, in Bulgaria), completing his stud-
ies in the Military Medical School in 1896, where he graduated with the rank of captain,
and was then named assistant professor of forensic medicine in that institution in 1900. He
went on, we are told, to serve as Prince Yusuf İzzeddin’s personal physician. The biographical
notice further informs us that,
since he espoused republican ideas, he was assigned to the Third Army, stationed in
Erzincan. From there, he managed to flee to Paris. Returning secretly to Istanbul in
[1907], he made contact with the leaders of the Committee of Union and Progress
[which no longer had a branch in the capital]. After the proclamation of the 1908
Constitution, he returned to his fatherland and again took up his functions in the
Military Medical School. One year later, he was appointed to its medical faculty as a
professor of forensic medicine. He was the secretary general of this faculty from 1910
to 1921 [in fact, he fled to Berlin on 30 October 1918]. In this period, he published the
newspaper Şûra-yı Ümmet and founded the periodical Yeni Mecmu’a (New Review) [an
ultra-nationalist Pan-Turk review, which Şakir founded with Ziya Gökalp].

Finally, the biographical notice informs us that Şakir was “condemned by the forces of
the Coalition” – that is, the Anglo-French alliance – which we must translate to read “con-
demned to death by the court-martial established in Constantinople against the advice of
the British.” “Fleeing Istanbul,” the notice goes on, “he found refuge in Berlin. There he was
shot and killed by an Armenian. He has left a book entitled Lessons in Forensic Medicine.”
Near the end of this notice, we are informed that, “during the First World War, he was
charged with organizing the migration of the Armenians within Turkey.” 59
The report on Şakir prepared by the Information Bureau of the Armenian Patriarchate in
1919 strikes a different note. The Information Bureau mentions Şakir’s functions as Prince
İzzedin’s personal physician and his activities in the Ittihad’s Central Committee before the
war, first in Paris and then in Salonika. It points out that a “Special Council [incuman]
made up of Talât, Bahaeddin Şakir, Nâzım, Atıf, Rıza, Aziz and Cevdet” oversaw all the
provincial incumans that had the squadrons of çetes of the Special Organization at their com-
mand, adding that Şakir was the Central Committee member responsible for carrying out
the liquidation of the Armenians.60 The same report indicates that he traveled to Erzerum as
early as August 1914, accompanied by Çerkez Hüseyin Husni, in order to set up these incu-
mans in the Armenian provinces and supervise the training of the squadrons of the Special
Organization. The responsible secretaries or special delegates whom the CUP dispatched to
each region acted as his intermediaries.61
A coded telegram that Şakir sent on 4 July 1915 from Erzerum to the vali of Mamuret
ul-Aziz, Sabit Bey, requesting that Sabit forward it to Boşnak Nâzım Bey (of Resne), the
Committee’s delegate in the vilayet,62 precisely indicates what kind of work the president of
the Teşkilat-ı Mahsusa’s political bureau carried out: “No. 5, for Nâzım Bey. Have you begun
to liquidate the Armenians who have been deported from there? Are you eradicating the
harmful individuals whom you say you have deported or exiled, or are you simply relocating
them? Give me explicit information, my brother.” This document, which survived the purge
of the Special Organization’s files, shows that its leader could not orchestrate all its opera-
tions by traveling from one place to another in his famous “special automobile,”63 but had
sometimes to use encrypted telegrams to communicate.
The Patriarchate’s report further spells out that Şakir not only bore the main respon-
sibility for the murder of 500,000 Armenians in the six vilayets, but also directly super-
vised the liquidation of hundreds of thousands of other deportees who had been sent to
the camps of Syria and Mesopotamia. It also indicates that “he saw to it that a significant
part of the Armenians’ confiscated property made its way into the coffers of the Ittihad’s
Central Committee,” and finally adds that he conducted propaganda tours through Persia
and Afghanistan during the war in hopes of laying the groundwork for a vast Pan-Turanic
movement against the British.64
Details in the biographies of Şakir published after he was assassinated in Berlin give us a
better sense of the man. Thus we learn that he was employed in Parisian hospitals during his
1905–8 exile in the French capital; worked as an assistant in the field of forensic medicine
before being named to a teaching post in 1909; served as the chief physician in the Red
Crescent’s hospital in Edirne when, in fall 1912, the city was besieged by the Bulgarians,
who eventually took him prisoner; and became the director of Istanbul’s morgue the follow-
ing year and, in 1913, president of the Justice Ministry’s medical commission.65 In 1914, he
was promoted to the rank of colonel.66 Thus, this army doctor had had difficult moments:
one can readily imagine how humiliating his capture by the Bulgarians must have been for
him. Thanks to his field of specialization, he was thoroughly acquainted with the anatomy of
the cadavers that it was his task to examine daily; one of his students says that he practiced
autopsies with great skill. The gusto with which he supervised the summary slaughter of
hundreds of thousands of Armenian civilians, carried out for the most part with knives, axes,

or bayonets, testifies to his lack of inhibitions when it came to perpetrating mass violence, as
well as his utter lack of scruples. This specialist in forensic medicine was doubtless the best
incarnation of the faction of the Ittihad that was driven by racist, xenophobic, nationalistic,
and criminal impulses.
The Millî Iktisat (National Economy), or the Spoliation

of “Abandoned” Armenian Property
It has rarely been understood, or even considered, that the economic dimension of the
destruction of the Ottoman Armenians conceived by the CUP was one of the major mate-
rial and ideological objectives pursued by the Ittihad’s Central Committee and, accordingly,
one of the factors that triggered the genocidal act. The Armenians themselves clearly sensed
that the spoliation of which they were the victims was not pillage of the usual sort carried
out, for example, under Abdülhamid. The 1913 economic boycott of the Armenians had
already made the most perceptive among them aware that they were facing a coordinated
movement designed to ruin them financially. It is, however, by no means clear that they
fully foresaw the consequences of the unilateral abolition of the Capitulations on 1 October
1914.67 Traditionally depicted by Turkish historiography as a sign of the country’s determina-
tion to free itself of the shackles imposed by the colonial powers, the abolition of these bilat-
eral agreements stripped foreign investment and foreign property in the Ottoman Empire of
all legal safeguards and, above all, cleared a path for their “nationalization.” With the aboli-
tion of the Capitulations, the Ittihadist Central Committee set the first phase of its plan to
“nationalize” the economy in motion. The aim of the second would be to seize the property
of the Greeks and Armenians.
Coming to power after several decades of an economic liberalism based on modernized
legislation encouraging trade and foreign investment, the CUP rapidly opted for “economic
independence.”68 The Young Turks, in line with their nationalist ideology and Turkist dis-
course, decided to construct a national economy. Zürcher points out, however, that the
“naïveté of Young Turk economic policies,”69 was inspired in part by flamboyant figures
such as Alexandre Helphand, who advocated building up a native merchant and indus-
trial bourgeoisie. Yet it was Gökalp, a man deeply influenced by the German tradition of
social solidarity, who convinced the Ittihad to “nationalize” the economic sphere, since, as
he wrote, “every modern society in which organic [that is, non-ethnic] solidarity prevails
runs the risk of disintegration.”70 He had well understood that without a bourgeoisie it would
be impossible to realize his Turkish national project. Yet, from the Ittihad’s standpoint, the
Ottoman bourgeoisie patently lacked the requisite qualities – it was basically Greek and
Armenian. Therefore, this state of affairs had to be remedied by “nationalization” of Greek
and Armenian enterprises – that is, by putting them in the hands of Turkish entrepreneurs.
In fact, the program Gökalp defended was much more ambitious and thoroughgoing. He
had given much thought to the way the Turks could gain access to civilization – or, if one
prefers, acquire the “status of a modern nation” – and had grasped the “indissoluble bond
between the emergence of capitalism, access to civilization and nation-formation.”71 He was
aware that the Turks were “state-centered” by “nature,” so much so that even their “revolu-
tions” had been the work of the “state,” which was predestined to play an important role in
the economy, the formation of corporatist organizations, and the establishment of social
order. These were all activities that “flow[ed] naturally from Turkish law.”72 The state inter-
ventionism advocated by Gökalp was explicitly directed against classical political economy,
which it thought hindered the development of a national economy. Gökalp’s program sought
to lay the foundations of the emergent nation, which would have to be firmly controlled by
its elites.

Another CUP ideologue, Tekin Alp, was well aware that credit for Turkey’s nascent
industrialization did not go to a Turkish bourgeoisie, a circumstance he deemed most unfor-
tunate. Alp also regretted the fact that Turks preferred military or civil service careers73 – a
symptom, he thought, of their conception of the state as the source of all initiative. Yusuf
Akçura stated the preoccupations of Young Turk circles more prudently: “We, too, con-
sider the Turkish-Ottoman commercial and industrial class capable of competing with non-
Turkish Ottomans to be essential to establishing equilibrium among the different groups
making up the Empire.”74
Undeniably, Western and non-Turkish firms basically dominated Ottoman economic
activity on the eve of the First World War. The problem, however, ran still deeper. Even
craftsmanship was to a large extent in Greek and Armenian hands. To appreciate the pre-
vailing imbalance, one need only leaf through the huge directories listing Ottoman enter-
prises, such as the Annuaire oriental de 1915. They show that the Westernization of society
eagerly pursued by the CUP had begun first and foremost among the Greeks and Armenians,
the natural partners or competitors of Western entrepreneurs. Even the Banque Impériale
Ottomane, which continued to function as a bank of issue during the war, was distinguished
by the fact that most of its capital was held by two enemy countries, France and Great Britain.
The empire was so dependent on foreign capital that the Council of Ministers, which had
decided to nationalize the BIO on 11 July 1915, finally changed its mind in view of the stout
opposition of the Germans, as well as the risk that the national currency would collapse if it
acted on its decision.75
When the war broke out, the Ittihad doubtless concluded that the time had come to
put an end to its dependency on the West and, at the same time, organize the transfer
of the country’s business enterprises to a Turkish middle class. The local Ittihadist clubs
also attempted to open modern schools and get “Christian” master craftsmen to take on
“Turkish” apprentices, to the sole end of preparing society to manage without non-Turks.
The results of these initiatives, however, were evidently unsatisfactory. Raising the general
educational level was an indispensable condition for developing Turkish society. Yet the
education provided by prestigious schools such as Robert College or the Galatasaray lycée,
to cite only those two examples, generally benefited non-Turks, since Turkish parents were
reluctant to enroll their children in foreign schools. In the form of the economic question,
then, the Young Turks who had taken it upon themselves to save the nation were confronted
with a fundamental cultural choice.
Some progress had been made toward the creation of Turkish joint-stock companies.
There were only two such companies in 1908. The number rose to 13 in 1909, and to 39 from
1915 to 1917, only to fall back to 29 in 1918.76 But these figures hardly evince a new trend,
even if Hüseyin Cahid declared, in an article that appeared in Tanin on 7 May 1917, that
the war had had, along with its deleterious effects, “very positive effects on [the Ottoman
Empire], especially in the economic sphere.”77 As it is well known that the Ottoman popula-
tion endured severe shortages of all kinds during the conflict, no great acumen is required to
understand that this well-turned phrase alludes to a “source” of revenue to which the Young
Turks had easy access in the period: Armenian assets.
In everyday life, the plans to create a “national economy” took very concrete forms.
Needless to say, prevailing political conditions as well as the Balkan Wars prepared the
ground for boycotts of Greek and Armenian products and businesses. In the Armenian
case, the reports of foreign consuls in Turkey abound in examples of such boycotts, espe-
cially in the period when negotiations over the reforms were underway. Thus, the Istanbul
longshoremen’s guild refused to unload a ship belonging to an Armenian merchant when
it docked in the city’s harbor because, as the diplomat who reported this incident put
it, “this economic civil war is the talk of the town; according to information furnished

by our vice-consul in Sıvas, it would appear to be the result of orders received from a
Central Committee.”78 The French ambassador to Turkey, Bompard, held a meeting with
Talât in which he called the minister’s attention to “the boycott of the Christians and
the violence and intimidation” of which they were the targets. Reporting on the inter-
view immediately afterwards, he noted that Talât had told him that the government “was
looking for ways to prevent the spread of the boycott.” Talât had added, however, that
he was
confronted with a movement that had profound causes, beginning with the Muslims’
resentment of the Greeks living of the coast, whom they suspect[ed] of wishing to
throw off Ottoman rule ever since the Greek victories; moreover, the Turkish popula-
tion ha[d] a legitimate desire to take advantage of the reigning situation to loosen the
economic grip that Greek and Armenian merchants had acquired over it.79
Given the nature of the system, there is good reason to suspect that orders were issued to
ensure the success of this boycott, which served as the occasion for a general call to “buy
Turkish.” A law passed in June 191480 was one of the first concrete manifestations of state
interventionism, and was expressly intended to recruit a national bourgeoisie of entrepre-
neurs from the ranks of provincial Muslim merchants, economic guilds, and even civil serv-
ants. The June 1914 law sought to promote local industry by encouraging people to buy
Ottoman products even when they cost as much as 10 per cent more than the competing
foreign goods. Zürcher underscores that the principal victims of this economic policy were
urban consumers as well as Greek and Armenian businessmen, who were forced to bring
Turks into their firms at the management level before they were swept up in the terror cam-
paign waged by the Special Organization during the war years. When some of them were
deported, their businesses were then turned over to entrepreneurs who frequently proved
incapable of running them.81
The program to develop the “national economy” launched in autumn 1915 was put under
the responsibility of a member of the Ittihadist Central Committee, Kara Kemal, who was
both minister of provisions and the initiator of the national companies formed under the
aegis of the Heyet-i Mahsusa-i Ticariye (Special Trade Committee).82 Kemal was in some
sense charged with giving concrete form to the work of the emvalı metrukes, the commissions
responsible for “abandoned property,” whose activities we shall examine later. Between 1916
and 1918, 80 companies were founded with active CUP “support,”83 started up with confis-
cated Armenian assets.
Thanks to the general mobilization and the abolition of the Capitulations, the Young
Turks gained total control over rail transportation. The least one can say is that the Young
Turk Cabinet used these circumstances to their advantage. It profited from its monopoly to
take complete control of trade, seizing the opportunity to collect a “tithe” that considerably
exceeded the traditional 10 per cent. According to Zürcher, only those provincial merchants
in good odor with the CUP were now able to dispatch their goods to the capital or the army.
By way of the National Defense Committee and the Guild Association, the CUP dominated
virtually all trade and distribution in the cities. The consequence was not “the development
of Turkish capitalism,” but large-scale corruption. “The ‘rich of 1916’ – in other words, the
war profiteers – became infamous. The price was, of course, paid by the wage-earners in the
towns, who had to pay hugely inflated prices (prices rose by more than 400 per cent during
the war).”84 The testimony of various ministers in the war cabinets at the November 1919
hearings before the fifth commission of the Ottoman parliament reveals extensive economic
corruption, made possible notably by a monopoly on flour that earned a fortune not for the
state, but for the CUP.85 Liman von Sanders, closely acquainted with İsmail Hakkı Pasha, a

member of the party’s Central Committee and the senior administrative officer of the gen-
eral staff in the War Ministry, reports that Hakkı
and the subordinates and agents he had everywhere in the empire requisitioned eve-
rything that came their way. Since he was also (as far as is known) the Committee’s
treasurer and, as such, responsible for paying for the purchases that Enver made, he had
a hand in many different financial deals.86
The spoliation of Armenian and Greek businesses carried out from the very outset of the
war in the guise of military requisitions was probably the first stage of a comprehensive CUP
plan. It paved the way for the official confiscations of Armenian property undertaken a few
months later, when the deportations began. Acting on the same authority as the Special
Organization, the CUP supervised, working through various ministries, the creation of
“commissions for abandoned property” in all the provinces. According to the Information
Bureau of the Armenian Patriarchate in Constantinople, which conducted an inquiry into
the matter late in 1918, Abdürahman Bey and his assistant Mumtaz Bey were the special
delegates charged by the Ittihad’s Central Committee with setting up emvalı metrukes in
every province, and “enforcing” what was known as the law of “abandoned property.”87 From
another document, we learn that the attendant procedures were worked out in detail by the
kiami siasi, the head of the national police force’s Department of Political Affairs, Mustafa
Reşad. Reşad in particular was responsible for drawing up the lists of entrepreneurs to be
arrested and setting up the emvalı metruke commissions.88
The document that most convincingly illustrates the connection between the CUP’s pol-
icy of creating a “national economy” on the one hand and the confiscation of “abandoned”
Armenian property on the other is a circular dated February 1916 and signed by the minister
of the interior himself:
The purpose of the directive about the creation of Muslim enterprises and the aid and
facilities to be granted them to that end was to familiarize Muslims with commercial
activity and increase the number of Islamic commercial companies. It has, however,
come to my attention that this order has been misinterpreted; that, in certain regions,
an attempt has been made to consign all abandoned property to these companies alone;
that all trading firms and stores have been handed over to these companies, while the
rest of the population has not been allowed to take part in the auctions; and that many
of these companies were dissolved immediately after selling, at a price several times
higher [than the purchase price], the assets thus acquired. Aid and facilities should be
granted to Muslims to encourage them to create commercial firms; care should also be
taken to protect individual businesses and special measures should be put in place to
ensure that the aid extended to companies does not lead to commercial privilege or
profiteering. Abandoned goods must be put up at auction and sold off individually. In
particular, the rest of the population must be given the opportunity to participate in
the auctions at the same time as people engaged in commerce. The Minister, Talât.89
The minister’s bitterness no doubt reflects complaints that had reached Istanbul from
individuals who had not been given a chance to take part in the “auctions” of Armenian
property.
Shortly after the temporary deportation order was published, a directive dated 15 June
1915 authorized the creation of local commissions charged with “safeguarding” “abandoned
property.”90 This simple administrative measure provided the basis for the confiscations car-
ried out down to fall 1915. Thus, it can be said that the law that at the administrative level

formalized the pillage of Armenian property was passed ex post facto. It is worth point-
ing out that this “Temporary law on the property, liabilities and debts owed deported per-
sons,” dated 13/26 September 1331/1915 (17 Zilkade 1333),91 was drafted by the Directorate
for the Settlement of Tribes and Refugees, an agency subordinated to the Interior Ministry
and responsible for planning the deportations. It was supplemented by a “Regulation on the
execution of the temporary law of 13 September 1331/1915 about the commissions charged
with the liquidation of property left behind by the deportees, and on their competencies,”
dated 26 October/8 November 1331/1915 (30 Zilhidiye 1333).92 This regulation was the basis
for the creation of the commissions responsible for emvalı metruke (abandoned property); it is
comparable to the decrees that authorize application of a law in the French legal system.
The first article of the law alludes directly to individuals “deported in accordance with
the temporary law of 14/27 May 1331/1915,”93 but does not refer to the directive of 10 June
1915, the provisions of which had certainly proved inadequate. The first phase of the depor-
tations had in reality been nearly completed by the time the law on “abandoned property”
and the corresponding decree of application were promulgated, on 26 September 1915 and
8 November 1915, respectively. It may therefore be assumed that this battery of laws sought
to “legalize” the spoliation of property already in progress and provide for arbitration of the
litigation that might arise in connection with it.
None of these texts mentions the Armenian population. Article 1 of the law, however,
stipulates that “assets and liabilities abandoned by persons physical or moral shall be liqui-
dated by the courts on the basis of mazbata (report) that the commissions created for this
purpose shall draw up separately in each case.”94 The “denationalization” of this property
thus concerns physical and moral persons alike – that is to say, it extends to “inalienable”
national property, the property of religious institutions or wakıfs. This is explicit proof that
the law was designed to despoil the Armenians individually, as well as to “requisition” their
historical patrimony, including hundreds of centuries-old churches and monasteries. Article
2 stipulates, to be sure, that the “officials of the Land Registration Office shall assume the
role of the adverse parties in the event that complaints are brought or other legal proceed-
ings initiated in connection with the aforementioned assets.”95 In other words, provision was
made for the eventuality that “deported” persons might sue in court!
Another clause bore on fraud – specifically, the possibility that proprietors, “in the fort-
night preceding their deportation,” might have “alienated their real estate in bogus sales or
at fraudulently low prices.” This means that a property-owner did not have the right to sell
his property before being deported. Implicitly, the text acknowledges that, in the conditions
in which the sellers found themselves, they could dispose of their property only at very low
prices, an act prejudicial to the interests of the state, which wished to be the beneficiary of
sales of such property.
Article 3 of the law, which applies to the “cash and property left behind by the depor-
tees, as well as their deposits and the debts owed them,” stipulates that the president of the
commission responsible for “abandoned property” is to collect these assets. This was tan-
tamount to freezing all bank accounts (cash was harder to control). The law further states
that “all abandoned property not subject to litigation shall be sold off at public auction and
the proceeds of the sale deposited in the coffers of the Treasury in the name of the rightful
owners.”96 Article 9 provides that wakıf properties “can, in conformity with the regulation on
emigrants, be sold and distributed to immigrants [muhacir] free of charge.”97 In other words,
the displacement of the deportees, albeit “temporary,” was to make room for the muhacir.
One can only conclude that, as those who wrote the law saw matters, such departures were
“definitive.”98
The decree of application promulgated on 8 November 1915 also merits close examination.
It provides that the commissions created in each kaza to administer the deportees’ assets are

to comprise officials from the tax office, land registration office, registry office, and Evkaf
(wakıf administration). The first article stipulates that the fact that an individual has been
deported “shall be confirmed by a written declaration emanating from the highest govern-
ment official in the locality.”99 Article 2 provides for the “urgent” creation of registers of all
property belonging to persons physical or moral, “in the form of buildings or any other form,”
and enjoins the establishment of “lists of the villages that have been completely evacuated in
consequence of the deportation of their inhabitants,”100 after which the documents are to be
transmitted to the “commissions for the liquidation” of “property in default of heirs.” Article
5 spells out that these commissions are to comprise a president “appointed by the Ministry of
the Interior and two members appointed by the Ministries of Justice and Finance.”101 Article
7 stipulates that a record of “the documents [mazbata] relating to the liquidation shall be
registered by the civil courts with jurisdiction over the deportee’s legal place of residence.”102
Subsequent articles establish the procedures by which a deportee’s creditors, in the event that
he has unpaid debts, may submit claims on “the moveable assets or real estate abandoned by
the deportee” to the presidents of the local commissions (Article 12).103
Article 13 is of crucial importance, for it authorizes the commissions both “to take deliv-
ery of the deportees’ cash and merchandise entrusted to the government’s safekeeping, as
well as all other property belonging to the aforementioned deportees,” and also “to demand,
from private individuals, banks and other financial institutions, an inventory of the moneys
and property abandoned by the deportees.”104 Article 16 further enjoins that “an inventory
of the objects, images and holy books found in the churches shall be made and the aforemen-
tioned objects safeguarded. The right to dispose of schools, monasteries and all the material
in these establishments shall be transferred to the Ministry of Public Education.”105
Article 18 recommends that the property be sold at auction “at a price approximating its
real value as closely as possible.” Finally, Article 22 stipulates that the “activities of the com-
missions” shall be supervised by “the central administration.”106 There is no need to examine
the provisions of the law in greater detail in order to grasp what they signified in a country
whose administration, as contemporary observers unanimously agreed, was “infected” by the
virus of a lust for lucre.
Accounts by a number of diplomats show that the formal aspect of these laws masked a
very different reality. In Bursa, home to many prosperous Armenian silk mill owners, the
Austrian consular official L. Trano reported on the deportation of the Armenians and the
liquidation of their estates by the emvalı metrukes on 16 August 1915.107 Three days later, he
noted that the Armenians had been deported in two-tiered cattle cars and that the commis-
sion had confiscated their mills and other assets.108 In late August, the Austrian diplomats
observed that the Armenians’ property had been cornered by members of the local Unionist
club and other Turkish notables in Bursa.109 Late in September, the same source informed
Vienna that the authorities were turning the Armenians’ homes over to muhacir.110
The text of the law on “abandoned property” and the corresponding decree of application
betray the Ittihadists’ economic objectives. The destruction of the Armenians obviously
went hand-in-hand with the wholesale “nationalization” of the economic fabric of their com-
munity – that is, its transfer to Turkish entrepreneurs. Colossal sums also poured into state
and CUP coffers, where they helped finance the eradication of the Armenians.
A historian of the BIO notes, without comment, a sharp increase in the price of food
and basic commodities from August 1915 on. By February 1918, the cost of food was more
than 20 times what it had been before the war.111 This calls for two remarks. Its access to
European manufactured products cut off, the domestic Ottoman market was thrown back on
the production of its own craftsmen, which collapsed in August 1915 after the deportation of
the Armenians. As for the increase in the price of foodstuffs, it originated in the monopoly
on the trade in cereals held by CUP-connected firms. The same historian of the Banque

Impériale Ottomane observes that, beginning in September 1915, the Ottoman state, which
had until then financed the war by borrowing heavily from Germany, no longer needed loans
from the BIO and was even able to pay off its debts.112 This economic historian seems to be
unaware of the source of these funds, which also helped finance the rest of the Turkish war
effort.
We shall leave detailed examination of the operating methods of the emvalı metruke com-
missions in the regions for the fourth part of the present work, where we also name their indi-
vidual members whenever possible. We note it noted here that a rather distinct social profile
emerges from such an examination: local notables, tendentially members of the Ittihad, and
high-ranking civilian officials played a pivotal role in these commissions, and were the first
to amass personal fortunes.

Chapter 5
Turkey’s Entry into the War
Germany’s Status
The secret treaty that the Ottoman Empire concluded with Germany is commonly regarded
as the starting point of the process that led to the empire’s entry into the First World War.
This decision was far from commanding universal assent among the Ottoman elite. Some
even considered the enterprise suicidal. The parliamentary deputy Krikor Zohrab, during a
3 November visit to Cavid, having just resigned from his post as minister of finance, remarked
that the empire’s entry into the war could have terrible consequences for Turkey and that
the Ottomans might even lose their capital city. He was told that “Talât and his acolytes are
supposed to have said that the present war would be ‘winner take all.’ ”1 This comment sums
up the state of mind of the majority of the Ittihad’s Central Committee members rather well:
they considered the war an opportunity to restore the empire’s lost grandeur, this time under
the banner of Turkish nationalism.
In the course of the same conversation, Cavid revealed to the Armenian lawyer that Talât
was the most ardent partisan of going to war. He was convinced “that this war [would] allow
Turkey to become a Pan-Islamic world empire.”2 Indications are, however, that the minister of
war, Enver, was on Talât’s side. He, too, was spoiling for a fight. It is also known that at the war
council convoked on 13 September 1914, in which Admiral Souchon, who had arrived with
the battleships Goeben and Breslau a month earlier, took part, Enver promised his German
colleague to put 800,000 men at the disposal of the new coalition.3 A scrupulous examina-
tion of the sources has convinced Frank Weber that, in October 1914, the Turks wanted to
go to war “at all costs.”4 While Germany’s pledge to provide financial support for the Turkish
war effort probably had something to do with Turkey’s decision, it must be remembered that
the Young Turks were above all motivated by their “national” objectives and their Turkist
ideology. An alliance with Germany was merely an occasion to realize them.
Another point has received less attention than it deserves: the secret German-Turkish
treaty of 2 August 1914 was directed at Russia alone. Not until 11 January 1915 was it
extended to include Great Britain, France, and a possible Balkan coalition.5 In other words,
the Turkish objective had been, first and foremost, to go to war with Russia in hopes of putting
its Pan-Turk plan into practice by establishing a physical link with the Muslim-Turkish popu-
lations of the Czarist empire. We can have no doubt about this when we observe that the
cream of the CUP, including eminent members of the Central Committee, was dispatched
to Trebizond, Erzerum, and Van as early as August 1914, or when we consider the Turks’ mili-
tary preparations in the field, as we shall below. The Ittihadist ministers’ and party leaders’
obstinate denial that the war with Russia had its origins in the 29 November 1914 attack on
Odessa and other Russian localities by the Goeben and the Breslau can only be explained
by their desire to hide their real ambitions. The reaction of the minister of public educa-
tion, Ahmed Şükrü, a member of the Central Committee, before the fifth commission of
the Ottoman parliament in November 1918 shows just how carefully the Young Turks had

striven to mask their main war objective: Şükrü denied that the Young Turk cabinet bore any
responsibility for Turkey’s entry into the war, affirming in the face of all the evidence that
“the Black Sea fleet was attacked by the Russians” (“but everyone knows that it was the other
way around,” the president of the commission shot back).6 It was important to the Young
Turks that their operation appear to be no more than a simple war maneuver.
The question of the precise part played by the Committee in Turkey’s entry into the war
has also been raised. According to Turfan, this was “Enver Pasha’s war,” for it was Enver who
chose the empire’s camp and issued the 25 October 1914 order to attack Russia.7 It is regarded
as an established fact that the minister of war took a decisive hand in initiating both this
attack and the July-August negotiations with the Germans. However, given the way the
Ittihad worked, it is all but impossible that Enver acted all alone. Moreover, at the fourth
session of the Ittihadists’ trial, the party’s secretary general, Midhat Şükrü, reluctantly con-
firmed that the government ministers went to see the Central Committee to discuss Turkey’s
entry into the war.8 In other words, a collective decision was taken on which the Committee
then put its stamp of approval. This seems more in line with its customary practices and
disinclination to play too conspicuous a leadership role.
A great deal of ink has been spilled over another question – that of Germany’s role and
status in the war in the east. We have already taken note of Ambassador Wangenheim’s
skepticism about Turkey’s military capacities, as well as the reservations of the head of
the German military mission, Otto Liman von Sanders, whom Enver had to work hard to
overcome. Does it follow that what was involved was an accord inégal which left Turkey
beholden to Germany – that is, made it a partner of second rank that had to comply with
German demands? This is plausible. However, the thorough studies of German-Turkish rela-
tions conducted by Weber and Trumpener show not only that the Turks never intended
to cede the least authority to foreigners,9 but also that they frequently managed to wring
enormous sums from the Germans that were not always justified by the war effort, that they
hounded the German businessmen working in the eastern provinces, and that they never let
German diplomats or military men meddle in their “internal” affairs. In other words, while
Vahakn Dadrian’s conclusions are not unfounded – Dadrian attributes great influence to
the Germans, making them accomplices in the Young Turks’ crimes, at least to the extent
that they “closed their eyes” to what was happening or declined to intervene10 – they should
not obscure the fact that it was the Young Turk Central Committee that put the genocidal
plan into practice. Weber, for his part, points out that Wangenheim was not as ill-disposed
toward the Ottoman Armenians as is often said, even if people in his immediate entourage,
such as the very influential Hans Humann, naval attaché at the Constantinople embassy, or
certain German Turkophiles, such as Ernst Jaeckh or even Kaiser Wilhelm himself, nursed a
veritable hatred for the Armenians.
These hardly negligible influences were counterbalanced by the German missionary net-
works dominated by Dr. Johannes Lepsius and the leader of the German Zentrum Party,
Matthias Erzberger. The missionaries enjoyed the support of German public opinion, which
was unfavorably disposed toward the alliance with the Turks.11 The history of German-
Turkish relations during the First World War is a long series of successful blackmail attempts
adroitly mounted by the Young Turk Central Committee, which had its prey in its grip and,
blowing hot and cold as circumstances dictated, set to harassing it as soon as the occasion
offered. In view of the intransigent, irredentist nature of early twentieth-century Turkish
nationalism, skilled at negotiation even in the most extreme situations (the manifest weak-
ness of its position notwithstanding), we are inclined to believe that the CUP was always
able to deflect or downplay the accusations or criticisms leveled at it by German diplomats,
employing threats or boycotts when necessary. The fact is that each of the two phases of the
genocide coincided with an extremely tense military situation that left Germany little room

Turkey’s Entry into the War 209
for maneuver. The first was the battle for the Dardanelles, which began in earnest in late
April 1915 and continued until the fall. The second was the surprising capture of Erzerum
by the Russian forces in mid-February 1916, which touched off the campaign to eradicate the
Armenians who had been “resettled” in the Syrian and Mesopotamian deserts and called an
abrupt halt to the efforts of the parliamentary delegation, carefully prepared by the centrist
leader Erzberger, which met with Enver and Talât on 10 February 1916 to demand that the
Turks immediately abandon their policy of “persecuting” the Armenians.12 Plainly, strategic
considerations took priority. The first military operations in the Caucasus, planned by the
head of the Ottoman general staff, Fritz Bronsart von Schellendorff,13 provided for an attack
on Russian Transcaucasia, an objective that could not but gratify Enver and his colleagues on
the Committee. Beyond the military advantage that Germany expected to obtain by tying
down Russian divisions in the Transcaucasus, the Turkists’ “grand design” was at last going to
be put to the test – what is more, with support from a great power. The Turkey of the Young
Turks, by allying itself with Germany, had in some sense attained great power status itself,
and profited from the material advantages that this status brought with it. We are accord-
ingly inclined to believe that the CUP entered the war on the side of the alliance that was
in the better position to advance the Committee’s Pan-Turkist projects.
The Armenians in the Capital: August 1914 to April 1915

In the Ottoman capital, the general mobilization and the arrests of the Hnchak leaders pro-
voked considerable unrest in Armenian circles. It was reinforced by the news that a fire had
ravaged the Dyarbekir bazaar on the night of 19 August 1914.14 Other stories reported by the
press in the capital increased the Armenians’ alarm: for example, the announcement that
Westenenk had been summoned to the Ministry of the Interior and notified of his dismissal
by the minister, Talât;15 the 23 September publication of an imperial irade granting amnesty
to the Kurds who had been found guilty of murder (of Armenians) in the villages of Azım
(Bitlis) and the nahie of Gargar (Van);16 and the closure, on 1 October, of the foreign mail
service in Istanbul, a measure that did a little bit more to isolate the Armenians, who used
this more efficient, uncensured service more often than other groups.17
All this notwithstanding, the Armenians’ sentiments were more a matter of the appre-
hension that people justifiably feel when their country is on the brink of war than the con-
sequence of a precisely identifiable threat. Even the 9 October publication of Czar Nicholas’s
appeal to the Armenians (signed on 28 August) in the CUP’s official organ, Tanin, failed to
give rise to an anti-Armenian propaganda campaign. The Young Turk newspaper went so far
as to express the hope that this appeal would have no influence on Ottoman Armenians –
indeed, the paper noted that the Armenian press in the capital had reacted skeptically to it.18
In this preparatory phase of the war, during which the mobilization was still underway, requ-
isitions were proceeding apace and the ranking Young Turks led by Bahaeddin Şakir were
fanning out through the eastern provinces, the CUP had obviously decided not to heighten
tensions in the capital to no purpose.
News of continuing violence in the provinces or neighboring countries nevertheless
continued to trickle in, creating a very different picture of the government’s intentions. A
16 October attempt on the lives of members of British-Armenian Committee, Noel Buxton
(a British liberal politician and deputy) and his brother Harold (a clergyman) in Bucharest,
where they had gone to attend the funeral of King Carol, was a telling sign of things to come.
Responsible for this act was an Albanian journalist by the name of Hasan Tahsin, a reporter
for the Ittihadist paper Tasfiri Efkiar. Tahsin had only recently come to Bucharest from
Istanbul and Salonika, which suggests that the assassination attempt had taken place on
orders from the Ittihad. Moreover, the Constantinople press did not pass up the opportunity

to point out that the two brothers had just published a book, Travel and Politics in Armenia
(London, 1914), which İktam described as “hostile to the government’s reform plan in the
eastern provinces.” The book unfavorably compared the condition of the Armenians of
Turkey with that of the Russian Armenians.19 The patriarchal vicar, Yervant Perdahjian,
remarks in his memoirs:
Although young Armenians obediently enrolled in the army when the call to serve
came, while Armenian merchants were literally plundered within the framework
of the law on military requisitions, and despite the line of conduct adopted by the
Patriarchate, [Armenian] parliamentary deputies and political parties and their exem-
plary loyalty, we were informed by reliable sources, whose reports were later confirmed,
that the government was in the process of recruiting çetes among convicted murderers
(who were in principle exempt from military service) and dispatching them with spe-
cial orders to the provinces inhabited by Armenians.20
Thus, the first, still vague reports about the government’s machinations had begun to filter
through, even if no one as yet suspected the existence of the Special Organization. The vicar
further observed that the çetes were being sent to all the “provinces that had been promised
reforms, especially the villages.” Here, murders, kidnappings of young women and girls, and
looting were proliferating. Finally, Perdahjian noted that, even before war was declared, “the
Patriarchate was daily receiving reports of new atrocities and murders from the provinces.”21
These circumstances finally led the Political Council to convene a session to discuss the
course of action to follow. A number of outside personalities were invited to it, among them
Krikor Zohrab, Aristakes Kasparian, Hampartsum Boyajian, Mihrtad Haygazn, Tavit Der
Movsesian, Nerses Ohanian, Rupen Zartarian, Hagop Avedisian, Kevork Simkeshian, Aram
Andonian, Sarkis Minasian, Mikayel Natanian, and Bishop Hmayag Timaksian.22 Thus, all
the Armenian currents in the capital were well represented. On 30 October 1914, Patriarch
Zaven, on his way to the palace to extend his best wishes to the sultan on Bayram, in accord-
ance with custom, learned that a naval clash between Russians and Turks had taken place
the previous night.23
In his diary, Zohrab reports that he was promptly informed that the whole cabinet had
met that very day at Said Halim’s residence in Yeniköy. Two days later, after war had offi-
cially been declared, Zohrab encountered Mehmed Cavid, who had just resigned. Cavid told
him that “foreign adventurers are running our country; the press is in the hands of Tatars
and dönmes; we have an Aka Gündüz at Tanin, an Agayev at Tercumanı Hakikat, a Zeki at
National Defense and a dönme of Yunus Nadi’s ilk at Tasfiri Efkiar.”24 Although this was a
surprising remark coming from a man who was himself descended from a dönme family, what
Cavid confided to Zohrab is symptomatic of the rumors that must have been circulating in
the capital at the time. They might be compared with the rumors about the Germans that
began making the rounds a little later: they were blamed for the defeats on the battlefield and
even for the annihilation of the Armenians.
At the Patriarchate, all had clearly perceived the danger. Another meeting of the Political
Council, again with outside participation, took place on 2 November in the church at
Galata where the council usually met. Those invited included Zohrab, Bedros Halajian, Dr.
Seghposian, Manug Azarian, Piuzant Kechian, Hampartsum Boyajian, Tavit Der Movsesian,
Hayg Khojasarian, Vartkes Seringiulian, Diran Kelekian, Hagop Hagopoff, Mgrdich
Manukian, Harutiun Shahrigian, Mihran Muradian, and Bishop Timaksian.25 Let us note
that, even though they rarely frequented Armenian nationalist circles, Halajian, who had
himself been a Young Turk and a minister until the day before the meeting, Diran Kelekian,
the respected editor of the newspaper Sabah and a close friend of Bahaeddin Şakir, and the

senator M. Azarian, had also accepted invitations to attend. They thus served notice that
they were keenly aware of the gravity of the situation. The assembly concluded, after a long
discussion, that it was vital to demonstrate to the government how loyal the Armenians
were. A decision was made to publish a circular to be sent to all the provinces, urging eve-
ryone to renew his fidelity to the Ottoman fatherland and do his duty. The assembly also
resolved to maintain good relations with the government and CUP and to found a field
hospital at the expense of the Armenian nation.26 The task of reviving relations with the
CUP was naturally confided to Halajian. In a téte-à-tête, the patriarch asked him to assure
the Ittihad’s leaders that the Armenians would fulfill their civic duties. On 8 November 1914,
Halajian went to see the patriarch in order to confirm that he had delivered the message and
that the Young Turks had promised that they would continue to display unreserved good will
toward the Armenians.27
The patriarch’s circular of 10 November is worth pausing over, for it reveals how the
Armenians perceived the situation:
Our country has unfortunately not remained unaffected by the generalized war that
broke out among the European powers three months ago. Issuing the call for a gen-
eral mobilization, the imperial government has put the army under arms. All the tel-
egrams and letters that have reached us in the past three months from throughout the
provinces show that our people has obeyed the mobilization order by answering the
call ... to serve in the armed forces, complying with the war requisitions and other gov-
ernmental directives and gladly responding to the appeal for funds to meet the army’s
and the state’s diverse needs. The course of events hitherto shows that the Armenian
nation, as an indivisible part of the Ottoman fatherland, is, as the occasion demands,
prepared to make every sacrifice to demonstrate its loyalty and patriotism.28
The patriarch accordingly exhorted his “people” to “fulfill its duties to the Ottoman father-
land,” as it had been doing “for centuries”; to “respond wholeheartedly to the appeals made
by the government in the name of the fatherland ... to give to the point of sacrificing its life,
even if it was not accustomed to military life”; to “organize charitable societies ... attend to the
needs of the families of mobilized soldiers without other means of support ... and the needs of
sick and wounded soldiers in particular, even sheltering them and caring for them in its own
homes.” “There is of course no need,” the patriarch went on, “to say that acts of compassion
must be performed without regard for an individual’s religious or national affiliation, for all
are children of one and the same fatherland.”
The patriarch also exhorted the
faithful to maintain friendly relations with their neighbors and compatriots; to help them
by giving selflessly and displaying a spirit of sacrifice; to respect their feelings, display
more far-sightedness and circumspection than ever; not to leave the door open to mis-
understandings; and, more generally, to exercise caution in word and deed, for it is well
known that, in circumstances of this sort, people become more nervous and irritable.29
It goes without saying that this appeal to Ottoman patriotism, accompanied by a clear rec-
ommendation to be more careful and avoid provocations, was very well received by Istanbul’s
Young Turk press, which covered it with praise – especially in the daily, Young Turks.30 In
his memoirs, the patriarch stresses that with these initiatives the patriarchal authorities
sought to convince the government of the Armenians’ goodwill. A school offering accel-
erated training courses for future nurses, founded by Dr. Vahram Torkomian and Rupen
Sevag (Chilingirian), was even opened on 29 November 1914 in Pera. In the provinces, the

Armenians undertook to produce warm clothing for the soldiers, including socks and even
the underwear “that they lacked.”31 All these efforts were well received, the patriarch notes,
“yet all indications were that the Turks’ appreciation was just pretence. The mobilization
went forward under increasingly severe conditions.”32
The declaration of jihad, a holy war against the “infidels,” officially proclaimed on
13 November 1914 by the Şeyh ul-Islam, Hayri Effendi – an Ittihadist who had nothing
of the clergyman about him – attested to a discursive radicalization whose import was lost
on no one. To be sure, General Liman von Sanders noted in his description of the “dem-
onstrations” staged in response to this declaration the next day, Saturday, 14 November,
that “the Turkish police organized, as usual, marches in the streets; the usual demonstrators
and a few other individuals who happened to be available received a few piasters by way of
recompense.”33 The press reported that these demonstrators made their way to Sultan Fatih’s
mausoleum, went on to the sultan’s palace and even headed for the German embassy, which
was exempted from religious anathema for the occasion; indeed, Dr. Nâzım34 spoke fervently
of his high esteem for Turkey’s German allies. Zohrab, an old hand at Ottoman politics,
wrote in his diary that on Saturday, 14 November,
A grand comedy was staged. The Turks solemnly proclaimed a jihad against four bellig-
erent states, Russia, France, Great Britain and Serbia. The first to laugh at this farce are
the Turks themselves ... In my opinion, the people of the city took no part in this dem-
onstration [which saw] attacks on commercial firms belonging to a number of enemy
powers and peaked in the demolition of the Tokatlians’ hotels.
Zohrab also observes that the police played “its traditional role, and, this time, smoothed
the way for the work of the vandals. Poor Tokatlian,” he adds, “who had for five years been
selflessly serving all the members of the Ittihad, great and small ... all of whom had been his
honored guests,” was punished despite his pains.35
The head of the German military mission, a witness to these events, remarked that “these
demonstrations were not really taken seriously by foreigners or in Germany, thanks to a ten-
dentious account of them”36 that should probably be attributed to someone on the Istanbul
embassy staff.
We should not, however, underestimate the impact of the Şeyh ul-Islam’s call, which had
Pan-Islamic objectives and probably far-reaching effects in the Muslim world. After a long
introduction of strictly religious inspiration, this document states in a more concrete, frankly
anti-imperialist tone, that,
over the course of the previous century, the band of oppressors known as the Triple
Entente not only robbed the Muslim peoples of India, Central Asia and most of the
regions of Africa of their political independence, their states and even their freedom,
but has for more than half a century now, thanks to the support that each of the three
powers making it up has given the others, been robbing us of the most valuable parts
of the Ottoman Empire.
The text also recalls the traumas of a
more recent past – only yesterday, one might say; during the Balkan War, which [the
Entente] provoked by encouraging and protecting our neighbors, it was the moral and
material cause of the annihilation of hundreds of thousands of innocent Muslims, the
rape of thousands of Muslim virgins and the fanatical desecration of things sacred to
Islam.37

Genuine pain makes itself felt here, despite certain rhetorical excesses: to begin with, pain
occasioned by the loss of the greater part of European Turkey, but also by the semi-colonial
situation which the Turks perceived as theirs.
That said, it is interesting to note the reaction of Constantinople’s Armenian elites to
these demonstrations. Aknuni, the Dashnak leader, confessed during a 16 November visit
to Zohrab that he accepted the consequences of his misplaced trust in the Ittihadists, “those
indefensible adventurers,” and of his rejection of the liberal circles that had sought to save
Turkey.38 Two days later, he informed Zohrab, this time in the presence of the parliamen-
tary deputy Vartkes Seringiulian, that he was hoping to leave the country and intended to
“appeal” to Talât for a travel permit. This disarming naivety earned him only sarcastic com-
ments from his two friends, who recalled the high hopes with which he had come back to
Istanbul. “What can you expect of this country,” Zohrab remarks,
when its leaders are named Talât, Dr. Nâzım, Bahaeddin Şakir, Midhat Şükrü and
Halil, while its ambitious officers, Enver, Cemal, Fethi and Hakık Hösken, were,
only yesterday, greenhorns ... And the second fiddles [are] freeloaders like Ahmed
Agayev, now known as Ağaoğlu, Aka Gündüz or Yunus Nadi, that drunken newspa-
per editor39
Yet, Zohrab observes, precious few Turks had protested against the declaration of war. In a
personal note of rare candor, the spirit of which was probably shared by part of the Armenian
elite, he explains this as a consequence of the fact that
the Turks, who have been raised and nourished on war and have lived on war, are
expecting, in the midst of their current decline, to be rehabilitated by it. They do not
see that sloth has brought them to the brink of extinction and that they can only be
saved by hard work. But work is not for them; they would rather die than work. That is
why they go to war so easily, considering war to be only a matter of courage and a little
luck. It’s an incorrigible gambler’s psychology.40
The whole of the cultural gap and the difference in mentality between Turks and Armenians
is encapsulated in this vehement outburst, written under the immediate influence of the
events of the day.
The general feeling of the Armenian elite at the time was that what it was witnessing
represented the “beginning of the last stage of Turkey’s downfall.” Zohrab even expected
that he would once again have to give sanctuary to some of these leaders in his home, as he
had done for Halil in April 1909, “when they were fugitives.”41 His words bear witness to the
close relations that certain Armenian leaders had with the Young Turks and the tolerance
they showed towards them.
An anecdote related by Zohrab sums up the situation in which the Ottoman Armenian
population found itself at the beginning of the war. A middle-class Armenian came to see
Vartkes Seringiulian to tell him about his apprehensions and ask for advice. Vartkes told him
that nothing could be easier; he had a very good solution that would cost no more than five
kurus: “Keep a white tülbend (turban) in your pocket. As soon as the Turks start the massacre,
pull it out and wrap it around your fez to make a turban. Then declare you’re a Muslim. No
one will harm a hair of your head.” The man replied, “I’ll do no such thing, Vartkes. When
the Armenians of Sasun were massacred, did they abjure their faith?”42
“There’s another solution,” Vartkes answered: “buy a weapon and defend yourself, if need
be.” After a moment’s thought, the man replied, “I’ll do no such thing, Vartkes, because then
they’ll massacre my kith and kin into the bargain.”

Vartkes asked, “What are you going to do, then?” “God is merciful,” the man replied.
Vartkes brought their conversation to an end with the following words: “Everyone says that.
The world is awash in blood and God is merciful. What if God is merciless?” To convert to
Islam or pretend to, to defend themselves, or commend themselves to God’s mercy, such were
the Armenians’ options. Another story doing the rounds in the capital illustrates the reign-
ing mood: a twelve-year-old Turkish schoolgirl in a German school in Istanbul told one of
her Armenian classmates, “After we win the war, we’re going to massacre all the Greeks first.”
Bewildered, the young Armenian asked her, “and what are you going to do with us?” The bell
announcing the lunch break interrupted the conversation.43
In the months following Turkey’s entry into the war, Zohrab frequently encountered peo-
ple in Young Turk circles who were opposed to the war, notably the former finance min-
ister, Mehmed Cavid. Cavid was an invaluable source of information for him now that
an implacable system of censorship had been put in place.44 Thus, Cavid reported on a
4 December 1914 meeting convened in his home; those attending were from an “important
Turkish milieu.” The discussion revolved around the Germans’ policy and the Ittihadists’
criticisms of the ARF, which they accused of organizing groups of Armenian volunteers in
the Caucasus; rumors of pillage and massacre in the Erzerum region were also brought up.45
On 17 December, Zohrab met with Nami Bey, Said Halim’s son-in-law, as well as Cavid, who
revealed that, immediately after the outbreak of hostilities in Europe, the Turkish cabinet
had pledged to take part in the war on the German side. The Christian ministers and even
certain Muslims who were opposed to the Turkish-German alliance had not been invited
to these cabinet meetings. According to Cavid, Said Halim, Talât, Enver, and Halil put the
final touches on the agreement with the Germans. As for Turkey’s entry into the war, it was
decided upon in the course of a meeting of “part” of the Council of Ministers that Halil and
certain members of the Ittihad’s Central Committee also attended. For the former minister
of finance, Talât was “indispensable to the proper functioning of the Committee.” Without
him, its members would tear each other to shreds. Talât kept an eye on everything. Albeit
mild-mannered, he was the most powerful of all.46
The Armenian lawyer had had dealings with the Ittihadists for seven years and had come
to know them well. He observes that they had introduced practices typical of the çetes in
the way they governed, that “in every domain, ‘strong-arm tactics’ were the only method
they ever used,”47 and that this explained their “psychological affinity for the Germans, who
employed similar methods of government. There is a ‘solidarity’48 between the Ittihadists and
the Germans, a kind of ‘complicity’49 that is always stronger than all other bonds.” Zohrab
also noted that the heads of state of the Entente powers were incapable of understanding this
and drawing the proper conclusions from it.50
In a period in which he lacked inside information, Zohrab recalled, upon receiving a let-
ter from Vahan Papazian, who was then in Mush and wrote to inform him of the situation
there, that it had taken three years of effort to convince the ARF to participate in the reform
plan.51 This detail has its importance. It suggests that the ARF had long rejected the plan,
since it had promised to do so in the pact it concluded with the CUP and knew just how
hostile the Young Turks were to the reform scheme.
Among the measures the Ittihad took in the opening months of the war, one must
be singled out for special attention. Although the annual session of the Ottoman parlia-
ment, presided over by Halil (Menteşe), had been inaugurated on 14 December 1914, it
was closed on 1 March of the following year, after the assembly passed on 11 February
1915 an amendment proposed by the Ittihad’s secretary general, Midhat Şükrü, to cut the
session short by a month and a half.52 In his memoirs, Talât does not deny that the sus-
pension of the parliament’s activities was directly related to the measures directed against
the Armenians.53 It should also be noted that the military operations carried out between

December and February, which did not produce the expected results, led to the massacre
of civilian populations in Ardahan, Artvin, Alashgert, Diyadin, Bayazid, Karakilise, and
the eastern suburbs of Van. The murder of the vicar of Erzincan, Sahag Odabashian, also
attracted attention in Constantinople. Odabashian was killed together with his coach-
man on the Sıvas-Erzincan highway, in a place called Kanlıdere in the kaza of Suşehir, on
the morning of 1 January 1915. He had been on his way to Erzincan to assume the post
to which he had just been named. It was soon established that he had fallen victim to a
band of çetes who had set out from Sıvas on 23 December.54 The Patriarchate, however,
refrained from drawing any conclusions from this murder, the more so as the authorities
had obviously decided not to take any action that might alarm the Armenians in the
capital itself. At most, the Agence D’informations Ottomane proffered veiled threats
from mid-December 1914 on. As for the 19 Armenian merchants tried on charges of shel-
tering groups of fedayis, they were acquitted by Constantinople’s Criminal Court after a
brilliant defense by Zohrab.55
The 18 March 1915 appointment of Halajian as the Ottoman delegate to the International
Court of Justice in The Hague was more troubling.56 The attempt to sideline this loyal
Ittihadist, who had often served as a middleman between the CUP and the Armenians in
times of crisis, may be interpreted as part of the arrangements then being made by the Young
Turks to deal with the Armenians. The move eliminated, at any event, one of the Armenians’
regular channels of dialogue with the government. The suspension of the Dashnak daily
Azadamard, on the other hand, did not appear to be a departure from custom, since the paper
resumed publication on 4 April.57
If one had to give a precise date for the opening of the campaign against the “enemy
within,” it would undoubtedly be 21 April 1915, when Tanin published an article entitled
“The Accomplices.” The article reported appalling details of the crimes that it claimed had
been committed against the Muslim population by the Russian army on the Caucasian front.
“The most astonishing thing,” the author of the article wrote,
is that ... the Armenians of the Caucasus, years of persecution by the Russians notwith-
standing, are also playing a part in this masquerade. It is truly stupefying that these
Caucasian Armenians should be collaborating with the bloody hands that, in Siberia,
strangle and silence their brothers who are struggling for freedom and civilization.
How quickly have they forgotten those whose eyes were put out on the gallows with
twisted, pointed iron bars.58
Tanin established a link between the operations in the Caucasus and the murder of a certain
Mahmud Ağa and 14 other people in the village of Perkri (vilayet of Bitlis, kaza of Gargar); it
accused the Russians’ “accomplices” – that is, the Armenians – of the crime.
The battle for the Dardanelles that began in this period naturally also had an impact
on the capital. When the question of transferring the government and the sultan to Konya
was under discussion, the patriarch informs us that the Armenian Political Council and
Armenian chamber decided to follow them if need be. The minister of justice was informed
of their decision and submitted the matter to the Council of Ministers. The council is sup-
posed to have accepted the Armenian proposal and asked for a list of people whom it might
be appropriate to send to Konya.59
As early as 2/15 May 1915, Catholicos Sahag informed the Patriarchate of deportations
that had been carried out in Zeitun, thus confirming rumors that had already reached
Istanbul. However, as the patriarch later wrote, all communication with the provinces had
been outlawed and his requests to be allowed to communicate with them in Turkish had all
been rejected.60

Chapter 6
The Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa on the

Caucasian Front and the First
Military Operations
I
n Chapter 3 of this section, we reviewed the circumstances surrounding the creation of the
Special Organization and saw that its activities were initially focused on the Caucasian
front. We shall now observe what the Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa did in the field from August 1914
to early March 1915, with a view to identifying its leaders and examining the nature of the
actions it carried out during the first military operations of winter 1914–15.
Arif Cemil’s memoirs, which we have already exploited to determine the Special
Organization’s objectives, will prove extremely valuable here as well. They attest to the hast-
ily improvised fashion in which army officers, “Enver’s fedayis,” were sent east without a
precise destination. This momentary indecision was probably a consequence of the strug-
gle between the Central Committee and the minister of war for control over the Special
Organization. The precipitate departure of “Enver’s fedayis” finds its explanation in the fact
that two days previously the Central Committee’s rival organization, led by Bahaeddin Şakir,
had also set out for the east. Cemil, moreover, states that his group had to wait for 17 days
in Erzerum before headquarters in Istanbul issued it the order to move on to Trebizond. In
other words, it was in the latter half of August 1914 that the conflict between Enver and
the Central Committee was laid to rest and the tasks of the Special Organization’s offic-
ers were clearly defined. The arrival in Trebizond two weeks later of Kara Kemal, a Central
Committee member and the head of the party in the capital, was no doubt also related to the
Central Committee’s desire to restore order in the Special Organization. Enver had appar-
ently got a head start on his rivals by sending two of his officers, Yenibahçeli Nail and Yusuf
Rıza Bey, both of them reputable Ittihad fedayis, to Trebizond early in the day.1 Since Talât,
however, had for his part urged Bahaeddin Şakir to go to Erzerum, there sprang up, de facto,
zones of influence: Enver’s partisans controlled the Trebizond region while Talât’s control-
led the region around Erzerum. The two groups nevertheless adopted the same recruitment
procedures, swelling their ranks with brigands and criminals who had been released from
prison on special authorization. This indicates that they were working on the basis of the
same directives. Cemil also informs us that when Kara Kemal arrived in Trebizond, Colonel
Süleyman Askeri of the general staff had just been appointed head of operations. He adds
that the CUP’s leader in the capital was accompanied by two Germans, Louis Mosel and
Captain Oswald von Schmidt. The Germans had been charged with training and supervis-
ing 16 Georgians who had recently returned to the area from Istanbul and were supposed to
conduct operations behind the Russian lines.2
According to Cemil, the groups in Trebizond and Erzerum were not collaborating effec-
tively at this point, while the national leadership was taking its time settling the conflict

between them. The situation was so tense that Süleyman Askeri had to step in and demand
that a meeting be held to discuss coordinating their efforts. The meeting took place in
Bayburt, halfway between Trebizond and Erzerum. It was attended by Şakir and his assistant,
Filibeli Ahmed Hilmi, on the one hand, and on the other, Kara Kemal and Yusuf Rıza. They
decided to summon representatives of their networks in Russia to Trebizond and Erzerum in
order to plan with them, among other operations, the sabotage of ammunition depots as well
as the rebellions the Turks hoped to trigger.3
The Special Organization’s first operations were thus plainly designed to pave the way
for an offensive in the Russian Caucasus that had probably already been decided upon in
principle. War, however, had not yet been declared; hence there were still Russian consuls
in Trebizond and Erzerum and the leaders of the Special Organization had to proceed with
caution. Their first contacts with the Turkish speakers of the valley of Corok were appar-
ently encouraging: these people indicated their willingness to revolt. Using Rize as his base
of operations, Yenibahçeli Nail concentrated on enlisting the leaders of local bands.4 Şakir’s
activities extended as far as Persian Azerbaijan, where he recruited an important local dig-
nitary, Hoca Ali Khan, who was “very influential” in Khoy and Salmast.5 This is an indica-
tion not only of the Special Organization’s military objectives in the region, but also of the
Turkist dimension of its operations. According to information Şakir sent back to Istanbul,
the Georgians were ready to revolt as soon as military operations commenced. His direct
collaborator, Şakir Niyazi, a Russian speaker, regularly moved back and forth between the
border zones, where he met with the Special Organization’s informers. Şakir also obtained
information from the men he had infiltrated into the mass of Greek and Armenian refugees
already making their way to the Caucasus.6
Another incident is worth pausing over – the attempt to murder the last Dashnak del-
egates to leave the Erzerum Congress for the Caucasus. Cemil gives us a precise account of it.
Ahmed Hilmi, in a 3/16 September 1914 letter to his superior, confirmed that he had received
the latter’s encrypted telegram about “the persons leaving Erzerum” and informed him that
“orders have been issued where necessary to ensure that we can apprehend them ... Like the
objectives to be pursued outside the country, there are also people to eliminate in the country.
That is our viewpoint, too.”7 While no definitive decision had yet been made about the fate
to be meted out to the Armenian population, these two eminent CUP members displayed
at the very least a hostile attitude toward the activists who had been the Committee’s most
dependable supporters from 1908 on. Cemil further states that Şakir personally demanded
that the vali of Erzerum expel the last ARF delegates, who had been lingering in the city,
and adds that the Central Committee had instructed Ömer Naci to engage discussions with
them, doubtless because Naci and the Dashnak leaders were old acquaintances. However,
the Caucasian delegates, who knew their Young Turk friends very well, took roundabout
routes on their way out of the city, thus managing to escape Hilmi’s çetes.8
Şakir, in the report he sent Talât in mid-September, described the inspection tours that he
had made in the region of Narman, “whose killers are efficient,” and also in Hasankale. The
main subject of his report, however, was the theft of more than 1,000 sheep and 400 cows
and water buffalos from the Armenian peasants living on the other side of the border. This
operation seems to have delighted Şakir, who deemed these exploits a success even if they
brought on a number of bloody skirmishes with the Cossacks at the frontier.9
According to Cemil commandos were already operating behind enemy lines by September
1914. The leaders of the Special Organization had now taken up their stations in the region:
Şakir, Filibeli Ahmed Hilmi and Şakir Niyazi were at the command center in Erzerum,
Halil Bey had been assigned to Kötek and Narman, and Dr. Fuad Bey and Necati were in
Bayazid. Necati had arrived there the first week of September and recruited his squadrons
of çetes from the local Kurdish population, who had been promised in exchange that they

The Te ş kilât-ı Mahsusa 219
would be granted amnesty for the crimes of which they were accused.10 Another Ittihadist
fedayi, Abdül Gaffar, who had recently been dispatched to the region from Istanbul, met
with Rostom in Erzerum in late August and suggested that searches be carried out in the
villages with all possible speed in order to disarm the population. He asked for money for
this purpose for himself and Ömer Naci,11 who had been working in the Van region as an
inspector for the Ittihad since late August, and he let it be known that he had recruited
the men needed to do the job from among the very cooperative Kurdish tribes. He added
that the Armenians of Van were “gentler than those from Erzerum.”12 Talât consequently
recommended in a 6/19 September 1914 telegram that Naci accelerate the organization of
the Teşkilat-ı Mahsusa in Persia and fan the flames of the revolt that had broken out near
Urmia.13 In the following weeks, a number of Kurdish tribes in Persian Azerbaijan, notably
those led by Seyid Taha, rose up in revolt. They had begun to represent a problem for the
Russian troops already present in the region and for the local Christian populations as
well.14
In Trebizond, the vali, Cemal Azmi, played a significant role in recruiting çetes from
the ranks of brigands living in the mountain districts of the vilayet by obtaining amnes-
ties for them.15 The only factor complicating operations here was the antagonism between
Yenibahçeli Nail and Major Yusuf Rıza Bey, rivals for the position of commander of the
Special Organization’s squadrons in the region.16 Their conflict was finally settled in favor
of Rıza, who was a member of the Ittihad’s Central Committee. Nail nevertheless managed
to assemble 700 çetes by early November, all of them convicts released from prison, and pre-
pared to lead them into the frontier zones via the coast.17
According to Cemil, Şakir was then focusing his efforts on the Olti and Artvin regions,
but he also inspected the Special Organization’s forces in Bayazid. Here, noticing that there
were Armenian conscripts serving among the troops guarding the borders, he suggested that
they be transferred to the garrisons “in the interior.”18 Our eyewitness and participant in
the events, Cemil, affirms that the Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa was operational by late October, and
adds that it was then that the minister of the interior, Talât, proposed to Şakir that he
either accept an appointment as vali of Erzerum or continue to serve as the chief of the
Special Organization.19 In either case, the Ittihadist specialist in forensic medicine would
remain in the important regional center, north of which, at Tortum, the Third Army had
established its headquarters with jurisdiction over the six eastern vilayets. In a 17 November
1914 cable, the minister of the interior, in response to a message of Şakir’s, asked him to
proceed to Trebizond, where he said Yakub Cemil would give him extremely important oral
instructions.20
We do not know the content of the message that Talât transmitted to his fellow Central
Committee member. It is likely, however, that it briefed Şakir on his appointment to the
presidency of the Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa’s political bureau. Cemil says that Şakir was its president
in February 1915, adding that its vice-president was Filibeli Ahmed Hilmi.21 But it is possible
that the decision to give Şakir the post was made earlier.
In the field, the first operations conducted by the Special Organization’s squadrons were
led by Major Yusuf Rıza, who advanced as far as Maradidi, a village dominating Batum. He
and his men were soon joined by the 700 çetes under the command of Nail, who distributed
arms to the Georgians in the village so that they could defend this highland area.22 We
know from another source that in early December 2,000 çetes who had set out from Istanbul
arrived in Bortchka, not far from Maradidi, under Yakub Cemil’s command. The plan was for
these forces to link up with the squadrons that Şakir had concentrated in Artvin, Ardanush
(captured on 3 December by Yusuf Rıza), and Olti.23 By 5 December 1914, Şakir had settled
into Artvin, which had been occupied on 24 November; he considered leading an attack on
Ardahan from there.24 With support from Cemil’s forces and the Eighth Infantry regiment

commanded by Colonel Stanger,25 Şakir’s troops launched a successful attack on Ardahan,

which was defended by Cossacks. They took the city on 29 December,26 but pulled back to
Yusufeli almost immediately thereafter.27
Somewhat further to the southwest the Third Army, commanded by General Hawiz İsmail
Hakkı,28 repulsed a brief attack launched by the Russian forces on Köprüköy, between Kars
and Sarıkamiş, in November.29 It was, however, the offensive that the minister of war person-
ally launched at the head of the Third Army in late December – an operation that Liman
von Sanders described as “extremely difficult, if not altogether impossible”30 – that deter-
mined the outcome of the military campaign. The nearly total destruction of this 90,000-
man army, routed in Sarıkamiş on 4 January,31 left a profound mark on people’s minds. At
Sarıkamiş, Enver lost some of his prestige and influence within the CUP,32 but it was above
all the Ittihad’s ambitions in the region that had now to be scaled down. The vice-general-
issimo’s precipitate return to Istanbul in mid-January no doubt marks a turning point in the
Ittihadists’ psychological development. According to von Sanders, “the extent of this bloody
defeat” was long kept a secret. “Very little information about the event,” he wrote later, “ever
reached Germany.”33
As we have seen, all the operations just evoked were military in nature. To be sure, in the
areas in which the Special Organization had been active, the çetes had perpetrated localized
massacres, abductions, and acts of pillage against the Armenian population. A review of the
reports on these exactions in military and diplomatic German and Turkish sources34 does
not, however, justify the assertion that what was involved were premeditated acts or a pre-
established plan.
The crimes committed in the villages of the plain of Erzerum,35 reported in early
December 1914 by the German vice-consul in the city, Dr. Paul Schwarz – murders of
priests and peasants and attempts to extort money by threats – must be classified, even if
they occurred repeatedly, as excesses brought on by the presence of large numbers of troops
in the region. In contrast, those committed by squadrons of the Special Organization
under Şakir’s command in late November and early December in the villages of Pertus
and Yoruk, near Ardanush and Olti, were more like large-scale massacres. in these two
villages, 1,276 Armenians were mowns down and 250 young women and girls were abduct-
ed.36 The çetes, accompanied this time by Adjars, committed other atrocities in Artvin
and Ardanush. Johannes Lepsius puts the number of Armenian victims in these frontier
zones at 7,000 in the November-December 1914 period.37 The majority of the massacres
took place before Enver launched his offensive. In our view, they reflect the logic of the
twofold objective that we outlined in Chapter 3 of this section. For the time being, prior-
ity was given to the offensive in the Caucasus. The “enemy within,” however, was by no
means ignored.
The exactions perpetrated in the kaza of Başkale, southeast of Van, in December 1914–
January 1915 were similar to those that occurred further north. In the first week of December,
massacres took place in the villages of Paz, Arak, Pis, Alanian, Alas, Soran, Rasulan, and
Avak, which had a combined population of some 3,500 to 4,300 Armenians.38 Their victims
were primarily men.
The targets of the killing, looting, and kidnapping committed in the kaza of Saray-
Mahmudiye, located just north of the kaza of Başkale on the Persian frontier, were the most
remote Armenian villages in this region – Hasaran (15 December), Satmants (20 December),
Akhorig and Hasan Tamran (30 December), and Avzarig (14 January 1915).39 Perpetrated
for the most part by Kurdish çetes, these crimes were very probably the fruit of the work
that Ömer Naci had been carrying out in the area since August 1914 with a view of form-
ing squadrons of çetes for the Special Organization, but they were also related to the offen-
sive that had been launched against Iranian Azerbaijan. They affected isolated Armenian

localities strung out the length of the frontier with Persia, not the big population centers of
the interior.
Desertions of Armenian soldiers from the Third Army during the battle of Sarıkamiş,
attested by Turkish and German sources,40 as well as the fact that two battalions of Armenian
volunteers entered the battle alongside the Russian forces, are commonly supposed to pro-
vide the explanation for these massacres, which are described as retaliatory measures. The
desertions are supposed to have profoundly affected the Ottoman general staff and to have
heightened their mistrust of the Armenian soldiers. Zürcher, however, in his discussion of
the problem of deserters from the Ottoman army during the First World War, points out
that desertion was a widespread phenomenon in all Ottoman armies beginning with the
Third Army,41 and that there were diverse reasons for it, notably the soldiers’ deplorable liv-
ing conditions and lack of food and equipment. While he provides no figures for the winter
offensive of 1914–15, which, it is true, relatively few Ottoman soldiers survived (estimates
have it that some 12,000 escaped death), he notes that, in the wake of the winter 1916 cap-
ture of Trebizond and Erzerum by the Russians, the same Third Army, in which there were
no longer any Armenian troops, lost 50,000 to desertion – more than half of its strength.42
Moreover, substantial numbers of soldiers in the Third Army were captured and interned
in Siberia; these men were very probably counted as casualties or deserters. The Armenian
soldiers held in Siberia with other Ottoman soldiers in similar conditions were, let us add,
freed only in June 1916, after the Catholicos of Armenia had repeatedly interceded on their
behalf with the Russian military authorities. They spent a total of 18 months as prisoners of
war.43 Finally, Enver himself survived the inferno of Şarıkamiş only because an Armenian
officer from Sıvas, a veteran of the Balkan Wars, carried him from the debacle on his back,
something the vice-generalissimo noted in the letter of high praise that he wrote about this
episode to the Armenian primate of Konya, Karekin vartabed (Doctor in theology).44 Cemil,
for his part, reports that there were many desertions even from the ranks of the Special
Organization. One commander of a squadron of çetes, Topal Osman, who would make a name
for himself in spring 1915 thanks to his operations against the Armenians of Trebizond, was
brought before the court-martial of Rize established by Yusuf Rıze and charged with aban-
doning the front along with his çetes. He was condemned to 50 strokes of a stick.45 The Laz
deserters from the Special Organization were also punished: their moustaches were shaved
off, the supreme insult in Laz society.46 When the Special Organization decided to evacuate
Artvin under Russian pressure on 23 March 1915, its interim president informed Şakir that
çetes were deserting en masse.47 Thus, it seems that the accusations of desertion, a widespread
phenomenon at the time, should be treated with caution.
Donald Bloxham observes, in connection with the battalions of Armenian volunteers
engaged in military operations against the Ottoman forces, that most of the massacres of
November–December 1914 and January 1915 took place in the zones where these volun-
teers were fighting on the front – for example, in Karakilise and Bayazid, where by way of
retaliation after the Russian retreat, 18 villages suffered exactions at the hands of the çetes
of the Special Organization.48 This, however, is not enough to explain why there were some
16,000 victims in the frontier regions between November and January. The many massacre
victims in the far northern regions near Ardahan, for example, were killed in areas in which
the offensive launched by the Turkish forces had met with resistance from Cossacks alone.
It seems more probable that these atrocities were an expression of the hostility toward the
Armenians that was deeply rooted in the Special Organization, even if it is beyond doubt
that no plan yet existed systematically to destroy the Armenians.
The demonization of the Armenian population can be clearly seen in the retrospective
discourse of Arif Cemil. He points out that the çetes of the Special Organization, retreating
before the advancing Russian troops at Çaldıran, discovered “a large number of documents”

in the possession of an Armenian pharmacist in Arcış, which “indicated that the Armenians
were planning to conduct their movement in collaboration with the Russians and revealed
how they would go about implementing their extermination policy.”49 Cemil makes a great
deal of these “documents” and does not hesitate to publish them, for they seem to him to
provide material proof of the Armenians’ treachery. “The Armenians of the interior,” he
writes,
tried, with the help of organized commandos, to put the rear of our army in danger
and close off its avenues of retreat. A certain number of important orders regarding the
Armenian çetes fell into our hands. These orders, which had to do with their future
movements, contained absolutely everything, in great detail.50
Although this passage was written more than 15 years after the event and was doubtless
influenced by the discourse on the Armenians’ treason that Istanbul concocted ex post facto,
it reflects a mood that must have been common among the Turks. There can be no doubt
about the fact that Cemil and his companions-in-arms were convinced of the Armenians’
treachery: that is what led Cemil to publish these “important orders” in their entirety.51 A
close reading, however, reveals that they are in fact the contents of a booklet, its meaning
somewhat distorted by the military translator, that originated in Sultan Hamid’s day and was
intended for Armenian fedayis – Rules of Battle, by the celebrated Antranig.52 This, then,
is how Cemil’s precis of the Young Turk perception of the Armenian conspiracy came into
being. One would be hard put to say whether that perception was mere propaganda or genu-
ine conviction symptomatic of a skewed perception of reality.
After the debacle at Sarıkamiş, the Special Organization clearly acknowledged that it
had been dealt a hard blow. The squadrons of çetes were assembled in Melo on the orders
of Filibeli Ahmed Hilmi Bey, while Kara Kemal headed back to Constantinople and Şakir
Niyazi Bey, Bahaeddin Şakir’s assistant, went to Maraş “to rest.”53 On 11 February 1915,
Dr. Şakir himself withdrew to Yusufeli, in the vicinity of Artvin, and began trying to put his
squadrons back in order.54 But, Cemil reports, a typhus epidemic had attained such propor-
tions that Şakir was assigned to create, from his base in Erzerum, a healthcare system out of
whole cloth and to coordinate the efforts of the physicians in the city.55
At the time, the Teşkilat-ı Mahsusa was, despite the desertions, one of the rare forces
still capable of offering resistance to the Russians, who were cautiously waiting for winter
to end before pursuing their advance. Cemil, moreover, voices a symptomatic apprehension:
“There was no doubt that the Russians, if they succeeded in taking back the lands that we
had conquered, were not going to leave a single Turk or Muslim alive.”56 It is not possible
categorically to affirm that this apprehension was a direct consequence of the exactions that
the çetes had perpetrated in these regions, but that certainly seems probable.
Without specifying a date, Cemil indicates that, ultimately, “the president of the Teşkilât-ı
Mahsusa, Dr. Bahaeddin Şakir, left Erzerum for Istanbul in order to save the situation; he
named Hilmi Bey temporary president of the organization.”57 Another military officer
states that the president of the Special Organization left Erzerum for Istanbul on 13 March
1915.58
Hilmi stayed in touch with his superior and repeatedly appealed to him for help, particu-
larly when he was confronted with the army’s desire to incorporate the existing çete units, a
project that in his opinion could only hinder the realization of their objectives. Clearly, the
fact that the Special Organization operated autonomously was not to the military’s liking.
The question was presumably discussed at the highest levels, inasmuch as Avni Pasha and
Kara Vasıf, two ranking members of the Ittihad, were now entrusted with the task of disci-
plining the Special Organization “as if it were a regular army.”59

Cemil’s conclusions should be cited here, for they sum up the Ittihad’s evolution after
Şakir’s return to Istanbul. According to Cemil, the
numerous documents that were discovered [plainly showed] that the domestic enemies
who had organized inside the country were preparing to attack our army from the rear.
After Dr. Bahaeddin Şakir had brought all this to the attention of the Ittihad’s Central
Committee in Istanbul, the Committee worked together with him on defining the
measures to be taken; thanks to them, the Turkish army avoided a great danger. The
result of their collaboration was the deportation law.60
While we cannot be certain that Şakir triggered the Central Committee’s decision to trans-
late words into deeds simply by showing it these “numerous documents,” it is quite certain
that his report did a great deal to bring this decision about. His colleagues on the Committee
were doubtless more inclined than ever to heed his arguments.
It is just as clear that the “many agents [who] were sent to Persia or Batum to create
Organizations there,” as the former minister of public works, Çürüksulu Mahmud Pasha, put
it in his deposition before the fifth commission of the Ottoman parliament,61 had been given
the mission of developing the Ittihadists’ expansionist plans in a Turkish-speaking environ-
ment, whereas Şakir’s activities in the area under the jurisdiction of the Third Army fell
into the category of Ottoman domestic policy in an Armenian-speaking environment. The
failure of the operations outside Turkey obviously accelerated implementation of the plan for
the demographic homogenization of the eastern provinces.

Chapter 7
The First Acts of Violence
Military Operations and Massacres in Iranian

Azerbaijan: September 1914–May 1915
We have already seen that the Ittihad delegated Dr. Rüsûhi and Ömer Naci, a former mem-
ber of its Central Committee and a well-known fedayi, to form squadrons of çetes of the
Special Organization in the region of Van and in Iranian Azerbaijan;1 that Naci was offi-
cially charged with initiating a dialogue with the Dashnak leaders in the area;2 and finally,
that, on 19 September 1914, the minister of the interior instructed Naci to speed up the
recruitment of Kurdish tribal leaders in Iranian Azerbaijan3 for the purpose of harassing
the Russian troops stationed in the area. A 26 September 1914 dispatch from the French
vice-consul in Van, Barth de Sandfort, reported that a printed proclamation calling on
the Muslim population to demonstrate “Islamic solidarity in order to drive the enemy from
our land” was circulating in Persia.4 The French diplomat stated that “the three Turkish
bands” of 150 men each that had “so far been sent” to Persia were “very well armed and
equipped with bombs” and that the “proclamation” given “to the members of these bands
for distribution in Persia [had been] signed by a Persian revolutionary and was intended
to foment rebellion in Azerbaijan.”5 His dispatch further stated that “three thousand four
hundred Kurdish cavalrymen are supposed to be concentrated here under the command of
the former inspector of the vilayet, Abdülkader Bey,” who had been promoted to the rank
of brigadier general. Thus, we see that the leaders of the Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa were extremely
active in the Van region, where they depended on support from local notables, who they
solicited in the name of religious solidarity, and that Van had been assigned a central role
in these maneuvers.
Hostilities began in earnest in November–December 1914, when Russian troops stationed
in Khoy launched an attack on Ottoman territory that directly threatened Van, even though
their own rear was threatened by local Kurdish tribes who had been won over by the Special
Organization. The Turkish counterattack was aimed at Qotur, a fortress near the border. The
attack was carried out by regular forces, backed up by units of the Special Organization and
Kurdish auxiliaries. In mid-December came the news that some 2,000 Armenian refugees
from the Başkale area had arrived in Salmast, as had 200 prisoners of war, mostly Armenians
or Catholic Syriacs who had been captured by the Russians.6 It is, however, the military
campaign waged south of Lake Urmia by the Turkish forces late in December – obviously
coordinated with Enver’s campaign in the north – which interests us here: it forced the
Russians to evacuate Urmia on 2 January, Salmast on 2 January and Tabriz on 5 January.7
The first Turkish contingents were soon reinforced by Cevdet, Enver’s brother-in-law, who
had at last been officially appointed both military governor of Van and commander of the
Turkish troops on the Persian frontier on 20 December.8 A proclamation issued in Tabriz
on 25 January 19159 by İbrahim Fuzi, “commander of the Ottoman troops and the Muslim

mujahid sent from Mosul,” reveals how these “soldiers of Islam” recruited by the Ittihad
planned to deal with the Armenians:
The Armenians, subjects of a foreign power, who are at present resisting and fight-
ing the Armies of Islam, unhesitatingly attack Muslims’ property, life, reputation and
honor: from the religious and legal standpoint, their property is a legitimate target for
the soldiers of Islam. Their business assets are fair prey: the value incarnated in them
must be spent on the wounded or to acquire goods needed by the army. According
to a report we have received, certain inhabitants of the city, certain merchants, are
safeguarding property belonging to the Armenians – foreign subjects – in their busi-
nesses or homes. We hereby inform all these inhabitants of the city that anyone who
has goods from the commercial stock of the foreign Armenians in his keeping ... risks
severe punishment and the confiscation of his own property.
Another proclamation, undated but issued around the same time and signed by Haci
Mirza Abul Hasan, reads: “In the name of God, exalted be He. The aforementioned indi-
viduals must be killed and their property must fall prey to the Muslims. God knows best.”10
These frankly Pan-Islamic appeals were typical of the interventions of the Turkish army
and the Special Organization in Iranian Azerbaijan. They leave no doubt as to the Ittihad’s
intentions in this peripheral region in January 1915. They also show that the Ittihad’s objec-
tives were not purely military. Finally, it should be said that the man who signed the first
of these two texts was one of the propagandists recruited by the Ittihad to promote its Pan-
Islamic campaign.
The Turkish advance naturally sowed panic among Azerbaijan’s Christians, who had only
recently experienced Turkish occupation under Sultan Abdülhamid. On 25 December, there
began a massive exodus of these Christians over the Julfa Bridge toward the Arax river val-
ley in the Caucasus. According to concurring sources gathered by Magdalena Golnazarian-
Nichanian, a total of 53,437 Armenian and 9,658 Syriac refugees had made their way to the
Caucasus by 30 January 1915.11 Not until late April 1915 and the beginning of the Russian
offensive did these refugees begin to go back home. A few hundred Armenians died en route;
the others owed their lives to their flight. As for the economic effects of the Turkish incur-
sion, they were disastrous: all the villages were plundered and then burned to the ground.
The situation was the more difficult in that in the same short period several thousand refu-
gees from the rural areas of Van thronged into Salmast-Dilman, fleeing the bloodbath that
accompanied Cevdet’s withdrawal from Azerbaijan in early April.12
The Pan-Islamic slogans and the license to attack Christians that was issued to the faith-
ful did not, however, suffice to provoke an uprising among the local populations, who were
unaccustomed to the kind of ritual massacre frequent in the Ottoman Empire. The dirty
work was done by the Turkish forces, the çetes, and their local allies. With the 8 January
1915 arrival of the Turkish occupation troops in Tabriz, observers, diplomats, and missionar-
ies discovered, masquerading as a regular army, “a band of Kurds of all ages and conditions,
some on horses, the others on mules and the rest on donkeys. Almost all of these animals
were also loaded down with crates, bundles of clothing, boxes of all sorts and carpets.”13
This is an indication that these irregular troops had seized whatever they happened upon in
the Christian villages on their way. During the three-week occupation of Tabriz, however,
order prevailed; there was no violence and only a little harassment of the Armenians. This
was probably owing to the presence of many foreign observers in the city. The same cannot
be said of Urmia, a point of convergence for peasants from the villages on the plain who
had not been able to flee to the Caucasus in time. More than 17,000 Christians, including
2,000 Armenians, found refuge in Urmiah’s Presbyterian mission compound; another 3,000,

The First Acts of Violence 227
mainly Syriacs, thronged into the Lazarists’ mission early in January 1915. The Presbyterians,
as citizens of a neutral country, escaped the troops’ rage. The Lazarists were not as fortunate;
their residence was attacked on 11 February on the “pretense” that “they were hiding arms
and ammunition in it.”14 Only a very few massacres occurred – the victims were for the most
part elderly people who had refused to leave their homes – but the intention to commit them
was evidently not lacking.
In Salmast, a small town located close to Dilman on a plain just north of the plain of
Urmia, the Armenians were not molested until 14 February, since, in this community with-
out a foreign mission, they were sheltered by their Muslim neighbors. It was here that, in the
latter half of February, the biggest massacres were perpetrated. A stratagem devised by the
commander, Rostom Beg, made it possible to arrest some 800 Armenians and pack them off
to the neighboring villages of Haftevan and Khosrova. After being tortured and mutilated,
they were killed and thrown into wells and cisterns.15 According to a German source, 21,000
Christians fell victim to the Turkish operations in Azerbaijan between December 1914 and
February 1915, especially in the plains of Salmast and Urmia – to say nothing of the women
and children who were abducted and sequestered by Kurdish tribes.16
The last major Ottoman offensive was waged in April 1915 by Halil Bey (Kut), Enver’s
uncle, who had ceded his post as both military governor of Istanbul and as a member of the
executive bureau of the Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa to Colonel Cevad in order to take command of
the Fifth Ottoman Expeditionary Corps, called into existence for the purpose of attacking
Iranian Azerbaijan.17 The outcome of the Turkish offensive was decided at Dilman, where
hostilities commenced on 18 April/1 May, at a moment when resistance in the Armenian
city of Van had already begun. Halil and his 12,000 men, backed up by 4,000 Kurdish irregu-
lars, confronted General Nazarbekov’s Sixth Russian Division, reinforced by Antranig’s First
Armenian Volunteer Battalion.18 The Turkish forces were defeated and retreated toward the
vilayet of Van, where the situation was on the point of boiling over.
Was the violence that marked the first Azerbaijan campaign of the same order as that
being perpetrated more or less simultaneously further north, on the Russian-Turkish frontier?
Here as well, it was due to çetes of the Special Organization, commanded by Ömer Naci, but
comprised Kurdish hamidiyes, Çerkez, and tribal forces from Azerbaijan. It should also be
pointed out that it was legitimized by a Pan-Islamic ideology, as foreign witnesses noted.
The Situation in Van from the Mobilization

Order to the April 1915 Siege
In fall 1914, Tahsin Bey, who had a reputation as a moderate, was still governor of Van.
Throughout the northern part of this vilayet, in which the Armenians were in the majority
and the ARF had considerable political clout, the authorities continued to treat the Dashnak
leaders with consideration. The Dashnaks’ relations with the local Young Turk club, headed
by Colonel Jafar Tayar and Kücük Kâzım, were courteous.19 Aram Manukian, Ishkhan (Nigol
Mikayelian), and the parliamentary deputy Arshag Vramian, who had been elected in spring
1914, had taken care to smooth over the problems that had cropped up since the proclama-
tion of the general mobilization order and the first requisitions. The Armenian leaders were
even invited to the ceremonies organized when the troops left for the Caucasus in October.20
A few incidents did, however, mar the calm reigning in Van – Hoff’s recall to Istanbul on 29
August, which put a semi-official end to the Armenian reforms; the September 1914 murder
in Bayazid of a local Dashnak leader, Aloyan; and the arrest of three Hnchak leaders in the
city of Van. In a private conversation with Vahan Papazian, Vali Tahsin justified this arrest
on the grounds that the three Hnchaks had held secret meetings in Romania and were

plotting against the regime.21 He was, however, careful to point out at the same time how
much the authorities appreciated the ARF’s loyalist political line.
One event provides a barometer of the situation in Van – the general mobilization. It took
place very early there, beginning on Sunday, 9 August, under rather special circumstances.
Troops took up their positions in the broad square in front of Ararots Cathedral shortly
before the end of the church service, and all the men leaving the church as well as all the
merchants who had a stall on the square were detained and led straight to the city’s barracks.
No distinctions of age were observed, so that it took several days to separate the men of
draftable age from the rest. Some of the conscripts soon deserted and were actively pursued
by the authorities. Meanwhile, the army began to requisition carts and draft animals in the
villages.22
As happened elsewhere as well, the mobilization of the peasants interrupted work in the
fields at the very moment that the harvest was getting underway. A substantial rise in the
price of bread was the almost immediate result. To overcome these problems, the prelacy
negotiated an agreement with the local authorities by which leaves were granted to farmers
so that they could bring in the harvest and to schoolteachers so that they could maintain
their classes, at least provisionally. The Armenian deputies and primate instructed the popu-
lation to obey the mobilization order without a murmur.23 An order from the commander-in-
chief of the Third Army, Ahmed İzzet Pasha, the former minister of war, was handed down in
late August: in addition to the tithe, 2.5 per cent of the harvest was to be sent directly to him
in Erzerum. To carry out the order, virtually all the means of transportation still available
were mobilized.24 As in almost all the eastern vilayets, the departure of the men for military
service led to serious security problems in the now undefended villages. The prelate accord-
ingly requested that the vali station guards in the villages. The other problem that became
especially pressing in November had to do with the requisitions for the army. This operation,
which was carried out by the local authorities, did not, needless to say, take place under ideal
conditions. The war offered an excellent occasion to loot Armenian property and acquire
substantial revenues at small cost, and it was not necessarily the army that profited from
these confiscations. On 2 December 1914, the merchants of Van sent a telegram to the
Patriarchate, requesting that it petition the minister of justice in their name. The petition
was deposed at the ministry on 14 December. In it, the merchants complained that the local
authorities had requisitioned goods worth 20,000 Turkish pounds without offering the slight-
est compensation in exchange (in violation of the established rules), with the result that they
were unable to pay the war taxes that had also been imposed on them.25
The situation grew much more tense after the late September arrival of Enver’s brother-in-
law, Cevdet. Cevdet was much more radical than the vali Tahsin Bey. Of Albanian origin, he
was the son of the former vali of Van, Tahir Pasha, and had thus spent part of his youth in the
city. He also happened to be a close friend of Arshag Vramian’s, having been a classmate of
his at Istanbul’s Mülkiye. Thus, he was thoroughly acquainted with the situation in Van and
aware that it would be necessary to maintain friendly relations with the local ARF leaders,
who had long been involved in resolving day-to-day problems in the area.
Turkey’s entry into the war gave rise, among other significant incidents, to the 21 November
1914 expulsion of all the French missionaries from the city. The American missionaries,
however, stayed on.26 In the same period, the first military operations led to the arrival in
the city of refugees who were fleeing the fighting or had fallen victim to the violence that
çetes of the Special Organization had inflicted on the Armenian villages in the eastern kazas
of Başkale and Mahmudiye.27 Those who offered shelter to the survivors listened with con-
sternation to their detailed descriptions of the atrocities committed by the irregulars of the
Special Organization, who, they reported, killed with a “refined cruelty without precedent.”
The preparations that Ömer Naci was making with a view to forming squadrons of çetes did

not, of course, go unnoticed by the Dashnak leaders. Their priority, however, was to avoid all
provocation and maintain their dialogue with the vali and the national authorities.
Several more or less serious incidents occurred in the vilayet of Van between December
1914 and March 1915. Each time, the Armenian leaders had to step in to pour oil on trou-
bled waters. In Pelu/Pılı, a village straddling the border between the kazas of Ğarzan and
Gevaş, the telegraph cable was severed early in December. The villagers were accused of
the act by the kaymakam, who arrived accompanied by gendarmes and ordered that the
whole village be burned to the ground, although most of the inhabitants managed to flee.28
Another incident took place in mid-February in Gargar, on the border between the vilayets
of Van and Bitlis. Here the young men riposted when the gendarmes attacked. The village
was ultimately looted by Kurdish çetes, while the inhabitants fled to the kazas of Moks or
Gevaş.29 Ardzge, in the kaza of Adilcevaz northwest of Lake Van, a village whose Armenian
kaymakam, Bedros Mozian, had been dismissed in August 1914, was the scene of a third epi-
sode.30 Members of the Kurdish Çato tribe, who had already in December wrought havoc in
Melazkırt, Erciş, Perkri, and Arcak, attacked the village of Kocer on 25 February 1915, loot-
ing, raping the women, and abducting the girls and cattle. A self-defense group of some 50
young men was immediately formed to defend the other villages in the area. On 26 February,
when the same Kurds attacked two neighboring villages in the kaza of Adilcevaz, they were
met with gunfire and left a number of dead behind. A final incident took place on 24 March
in the kaza of Timar, northeast of Lake Van, where soldiers and gendarmes encircled the self-
defense group that had come from Adilcevaz. Aram raced to the scene to restore calm and
forestall a confrontation.31
These events kept tensions running high. Evidently, they were interpreted in diametri-
cally opposed ways by the local authorities and the Armenians’ representatives. In March,
Vramian sent a memorandum to the minister of the interior about the massacres that had
occurred in the kazas of Başkale and Mahmudiye and, more generally, the insecurity reign-
ing in the region. This document is of special interest because it expresses the Armenian
leaders’ viewpoint on the events of the winter of 1914–15 and considers the validity of the
charges leveled by the military and civilian authorities. Vramian began with the observa-
tion that 150 hamidiyes of the Kurdish Mazrik tribe, led by Sarıf Bey, took part in the attack
on the Armenian villages of Başkale. Turkish military sources, he went on, pointed to the
Armenian resistance to the successful Turkish attempt to recapture the little town to justify
this intervention, while simultaneously criticizing the Armenians for ostensibly following
the retreating Russian troops. Vramian pointed up this contradiction, asking whether it was
conceivable that the Armenians had abandoned their families and fled with the Russians.
He added that
the local authorities in Başkale report[ed] only that they ordered the arrests of eleven
men whose names are cited in their report. These men were ordered to go to Van and
murdered on the way. This was why I made a number of personal appeals to Mehmed
Şefik Bey, the interim vali, requesting that he authorize a local inquiry with a view to
compiling a list of the killed and missing and providing their poverty-stricken families
with aid.
Vramian remarked that his appeals had fallen on deaf ears, as had his proposal to transfer to
Van a few “of these unfortunates, who could have given us information about the situation.”
He noted that he had gradually received confirmation of the fact that hundreds of women and
children remained “in the ruins and ashes of the villages,” clad in rags and dying of hunger.32
Turning to the massacres in the villages of the kaza of Saray – Akhorig, Hasan Tamran,
Kharabsorek, and Dashoghlu – which occurred late in December, the Armenian deputy

recalled the pretext on which the gendarmes of Saray, led by Abdül Gadir and Yaver Rasim,
turned up in Akhorig. On orders from the kaymakam, the male inhabitants of Akhorig were
instructed by the gendarmes to go to the little town of Saray to rebuild the barracks there
that had been destroyed. The day before, they had been told not to leave Akhorig until they
received further orders. “This [was] proof,” Vramian wrote, “of premeditation.” These men
never arrived at Saray, he continued: they were killed in two groups by the Kurds at Avzarig.
The very same day, 100 Armenians were slaughtered at Hasan Tamran. The kaymakam then
ordered that the 300 survivors of the massacre be expelled to Persia. Unable to cross the
mountains, which were buried in snow, they turned back and sought refuge in Ingize and
Tarkhan. The gendarmes, however, denied them access to those two villages. Some 70 or
80 of them ultimately managed to make their way to Salmast. Vramian provided all these
details in order to apprise the minister of the interior of the violence being visited on the
Armenians. To the same end, he described the fate of a priest named Vartan, whose nose and
ears had been cut off and whose eyes had been gouged out before he was shot to death, while
his wife was forced to marry a porter.33
The Armenian deputy next described the massacres and looting that took place in
Hazaren on 15 December: “Five thousand six hundred ten animals (sheep, oxen, cows,
calves, water buffalos and horses), grain and all the farm implements were taken from this
village,” whose church was then demolished. The same thing happened at Setibeg, where,
Vramian observed, “an inquiry has established that there were gendarmes among the Kurds.”
“Similar scenes,” he wrote, “are being repeated everywhere; well organized massacres and
looting, razed villages.” After listing all the acts of violence committed in November and
December, again on 9 January 1915 in Kangar and still later in Nordüz, Erciş, Ardzge, and on
the northern shores of Lake Van, Vramian asked why the “local authorities” encouraged such
acts. He noted that his demands for an explanation had met with the following responses:
1) the Armenians of Başkale were spying for the enemy; 2) some Armenians were supposed
to have looted the Turkish army’s depots when the Russians invaded the country; 3) some
men had joined the Russian army; 4) others had mounted an armed resistance after the
Russian retreat; 5) if hundreds of women had left, they had done so of their own accord, out
of a desire to go to Salmast to join their husbands; and 6) the Kurds were fired up against the
Armenians.34 After assuring Talât that all these accusations were baseless, Vramian wrote:
An anti-Christian policy will not help save the country ... The government must cease
to consider the Armenian elements in the empire as enemies ... If the government is
at present incapable of guaranteeing the Armenian people the exercise of its sacred
rights – its life, honor, religion and property – then it ought to authorize them to
defend those rights by itself; if it is to be presumed that low-level government officials
have misinterpreted the central government’s orders and understood nothing of its
policies, then these officials must be punished and forcibly set back on the right path.
After emphasizing that it was in the interests of the country to put a stop to this violence,
the parliamentary representative suggested 1) sending a commission of inquiry to the area
and gathering up “the abandoned women and children with no source of support in all the
ruined villages; the women who have been converted by force ...”; 2) restoring to the peasants
of the razed villages their herds and their property; 3) collecting “the rifles that were issued
to the sedentary Kurds on the government’s initiative”; 4) arming militiamen only after they
had been enrolled in the army; and 5) returning to the Armenians “the weapons that were
taken from them by force.”35
The foregoing summary of Arshag Vramian’s long memorandum sheds light on the terror
campaign waged by the local authorities; it also affords us a glimpse of the strange dialogue

that he established with the national government. The Armenian leaders apparently had
no other choice than to believe that what they were witnessing were deviations by the local
authorities. Another important phenomenon may be observed here – the institution of a dis-
course collectively incriminating the Armenians of the border provinces and simultaneously
justifying the violence perpetrated against them by portraying it as retaliation. We should,
however, note that this was still a local discourse that had not yet appeared in the press of
the capital. Thus, one has the impression that the Ittihadist government was provoking the
Armenians of the provinces in hopes of bringing them to abandon their publicly professed
loyalty and rebel. It is indeed symptomatic that Vramian himself drew up a catalogue of the
various charges leveled by the local authorities – which in the aggregate tended to show that
the Armenians were traitors to their country – in order then to redefine the problem as that
of the security of the civilian population. In a document addressed to the minister of the
interior, Tahsin Bey wrote: “Rather than deporting the Armenians in the middle of a war, I
suggest, for my part, that they be maintained in their present situation until further notice
and not be spurred to revolt by the illegitimate use of force. The condition of our army is
well known.”36 Coming from a man who was eminently familiar with the local situation, this
statement leaves little doubt about the government’s desire to “spur a revolt by the illegiti-
mate use of force.” The behavior of the authorities in Van reflected this logic, which could
only have been inspired by instructions from the national government. The replacement of
Tahsin Bey by a radical partisan of the regime, Cevdet Bey, the minister of war’s brother-
in-law, was probably calculated to make it easier to implement such a policy of provocation.
There is even every reason to believe that it was at the instigation of Ömer Naci, CUP
inspector in Van and the head of the Special Organization in the region, that Tahsin was
transferred to Erzerum in February 1915.
Referring to the “revolt” at Van that broke out on 19 April 1915, Tahsin Bey wrote:
There would have been no revolt at Van if we had not ourselves created, with our own
hands, by using force, this impossible situation from which we are incapable of extricat-
ing ourselves, and also the difficult position in which we have put our army on the east-
ern front. After enduring this painful experience and its deadly consequences, we are,
I fear, making the mistake of putting our army in an untenable situation, like someone
who has poked out her own eye while trying to apply mascara to her eyelids.37
In other words, the strategy adopted by the CUP was an error that only plunged the Turkish
troops into greater disarray – the more so, Tahsin Bey insisted, in that the Armenians
“ensured, with their grain and means of transport, our army’s food supply.” “This is a point,”
he insisted, “that ought to be duly considered, for, today, we are just barely able to main-
tain the food supply at the price of a thousand difficulties,” to say nothing of the fact that
“Armenians comprise 90 per cent of the artisans that are absolutely essential to the popula-
tion and army. One or two grocers and butchers aside, there are no craftsmen among the
Turks. This, too, has its importance.”38 Vramian, in a 26 March 1915 telegram addressed to
his friend Cevdet, who was still at the Persian border, reminded him that he and his com-
rades had done everything in their power to avoid violence; criticized him for failing to take
the measures needed to prevent the excesses that the militia and gendarmes had perpetrated
against “property and persons” on the pretext of looking for deserters; noted that he had
therefore had no choice but to refer the matter to Talât; and complained that the authorities
had not reacted to the killing of 15 people in the village of Aghchaveran by Edhem Bey and
his militiamen. Finally, Vramian demanded that a number of villages that had been burned
down – Erer, Dılmachen, Adnagants, Payrag, and so on – receive compensation so that they
could rebuild and, in closing, asked Cevdet to pay his respects to Naci Bey.39

Cevdet, in the answering letter that he wrote on 26 March in the monastery of

St. Barthoghemeos, where he was stationed at the time, informed Vramian that the two of
them would soon be able to discuss these matters in person, since he was leaving for Van the
following day at the head of a large force. “Rest assured,” he added, “of the government’s fair,
honest stance and inform the populace of it.”40
On 30 March 1915, Cevdet was received by a delegation of government officials and local
dignitaries who had gone out to meet him, Aram Manukian and Vramian among them.
Vramian observed that he was wearing the khaki uniform “of a çete” and had 600 “elite”
Çerkez equipped with three canons at his command. As soon as Cevdet and Vramian
reached the konak, they disappeared into the vali’s office. The Armenian deputy left this
meeting with the feeling that he had clarified matters and laid Cevdet’s “apprehensions” to
rest. On Easter Sunday, 4 April, Cevdet, in turn, paid a friendly visit to Vramian; they spent
two hours together. The same day, however, 800 çetes who had returned from Persia arrived
in the city.41
As soon as the vali returned from Azerbaijan, where Cevdet and Ömer Naci had per-
petrated massacres on the plains of Salmast and Urmia, he demanded that 3,000 more
Armenians be mobilized. He seemed adamant about this subject. The Armenian lay and
religious leaders were reluctant to accede to this new demand. Everyone knew that Armenian
conscripts were no longer sent into battle, but were in the best of cases assigned to military
labor battalions, mistreated, and sometimes killed. “Accepted one day, [the propositions]
were rejected the next.” These negotiations dragged on until mid-April 1915, without yield-
ing tangible results.42
In the meantime, Cevdet made certain that he could count on the cooperation of the
commander of the gendarmerie, Ahmed, and Captain Uskudarli Arab Yaşar. He also armed
the Çerkez tribes of the Van region, notably the tribe of Topal Rasul,43 and appealed to sev-
eral tried and true killers of the Ittihad for support: Çerkez Ahmed, Çolak Hafez, Selanikli
Şevki, Çerkez İsmail, Çerkez Raşid, and Bandermali Haci İbrahim, who had once served as
Talât’s chauffeur.44
On 11 April, a revealing incident occurred in Shadakh, a kaza south of Lake Van: Hovsep
Choloyan, a schoolteacher and Dashnak leader living in the administrative seat of the kaza,
was unexpectedly arrested, together with five young men. The next day, the shops in the lit-
tle town remained closed. People were surprised by the news. Until then, the Dashnaks had
never been molested and had often played the part of conciliators. Everyone knew that the
men could not have been arrested if Cevdet had not been informed beforehand. Vramian
went to see him and they made a joint decision to send a peacemaking party to Shadakh. The
Joint Armenian Council, which dealt with situations of this sort, also thought it best to cool
tempers and “play for time.”45 Ishkhan was assigned the mediator’s role. On the afternoon of
16 April, he set out for the village, accompanied by three experienced party activists,46 Vafik
Bey, and three gendarmes; they were escorted for a few miles by an honor guard provided by
the vali. The eight men stopped for the night in the village of Hirj (in Hayots Tsor). Ishkhan
and his men stayed in the house of a Kurdish friend of theirs, Kârimoğlu Raşid. That night,
a group of Çerkez surrounded the house and killed the four Armenians.47 There is every rea-
son to believe that none other than Cevdet, the superior of these Çerkez, had ordered these
killings. He had probably come to the conclusion that he could accomplish nothing in a city
with an Armenian majority unless he first got rid of the three Dashnak leaders. His behavior
the following day tends to confirm this suspicion. Early in the morning, he summoned two of
the leading Armenian citizens of Van to the konak along with Aram and Vramian. He placed
two separate telephone calls, although the men lived in the same neighborhood. Vramian
promptly took up the invitation, but left Aram a message recommending that he ignore
an invitation from the vali should he receive one.48 Vramian was never seen again, except

when someone caught a glimpse of him that evening guarded by 50 gendarmes at the port
of Argants, where the parliamentary deputy was put aboard a vessel bound for an unknown
destination.49 He was murdered shortly thereafter in Arapu Tsor, not far from Bitlis.50
Aram did not go to the konak. Like the rest of the city, he very soon learned that Ishkhan
had been murdered. The news shocked and dismayed the population.51 The American mis-
sionaries in Van, Dr. Clarence Ussher and Miss Grace Knapp, who were eyewitnesses to
these events, provide us details that leave little doubt as to the vali’s intentions. On 18 April,
Ussher himself went to see Cevdet in order “to see if there was any way of quieting the appre-
hensions of the people” awakened by “rumors of massacre.” While the American physician
was in the vali’s office, a colonel from the “Vali’s Regiment” came in; Cevdet himself had
baptized it Kasab Taburi, the “butchers’ battalion.” The colonel was given the order to “go to
Shadakh and wipe out its people.”52
On 17 April, the vali stationed 150 Çerkez53 in the Hamut Ağa barracks, which was
located in Van’s Armenian quarter and had remained empty until then. The Armenians
interpreted this move as yet another threat. The next day, the primate Eznig vartabed, and
two Armenian notables, Kevork Jidechian and Avedik Terzibashian, went to see Cevdet,
who spoke in a threatening tone for the first time.54 That same day, 18 April, generalized
massacres broke out in the Armenian villages of the vilayet, beginning with Hirj, the village
in which Ishkhan had been assassinated on the previous day. The following day, a Monday,
they took a systematic turn throughout the area south of Van known as Hayots Tsor, “the
valley of the Armenians.” Systematic violence also broke out on that Monday to the north
of Lake Van, in the kazas of Erçis/Arjesh and Adilcevaz/Ardzge;55 to the east, in the region
of Perkri; and to the south, in the kazas of Karcikan, Gevaş/Vostan, Şatak/Shadakh, and
Moks.56
Rafaël de Nogales, a Venezuelan officer attached to the Third Army, arrived in Adilcevaz
on the evening of 20 April. He beheld a Dantesque scene: fires were raging all around Lake
Van. The next morning, he was informed that “the Armenians had attacked the town.”
Leaping onto his horse, Nogales rode through the city, where he discovered a very different
spectacle: the shops had been sacked and Turks and Kurds were hunting down Armenians in
the Armenian quarter. “The assassins penetrated into the houses,” he wrote, and “knif[ed]
the defenseless victims.” When Nogales ordered the mayor, who was leading the “mob of vil-
lains,” to stop immediately, the mayor told him that he had received an “unequivocal order
emanating from the governor-general of the province ‘to exterminate all Armenian males of
twelve years of age and over.’ ” “At the end of an hour and a half of butchery there remained
of the Armenians of Adil-Javus [Adilcevaz] only seven survivors.” Returning to the konak,
Nogales was nonplussed by the “effrontery” of the kaymakam, who “thanked me effusively for
having saved the town from tremendous Armenian attack.”57
On Saturday, 17 April in Van, the commander of the gendarmerie had already asked
Ussher to authorize him to station, for “ten days,” around 50 soldiers and a cannon in the
“[American] mission compound, which was on a hill dominating the Armenian quarter of
Garden City [Aykesdan].” Officially, the aim was to “protect [the Americans],” for “trouble
between the Kurds and the Armenians” had broken out and the Kurds, the man told Ussher,
“might injure you.”58
Ussher and the Italian vice-consul, Sbordoni, now went to see Cevdet. They told him
that the news about Ishkhan’s murder and the massacres in the villages that had reached
the city had “excited” the Armenians, who would never agree to the stationing of sol-
diers and a cannon on a height overlooking their neighborhood.59 The next day, Sbordoni
explained to the vali that “the course he was taking was calculated to arouse opposition and
not allay it.” According to Ussher, Cevdet had apparently changed his mind on 19 April
and even urged the Armenians to open their shops, but had also ordered that Aykesdan,

one of the city’s Armenian quarters, be surrounded as soon as evening fell. It was precisely
on 19 April that the city learned that thousands of “defenseless men” had been massacred
throughout the province.60
On 20 April 1915, Aykesdan was attacked at dawn. Aram Manukian, however, had
already made preparations to ward off an attack and was able to prevent the Turkish troops
from entering the quarter. In the next few days, nearly 15,000 peasants found refuge in
Aykesdan. On 21 April, the outbreak of an “Armenian revolt” in Van was front-page news
in the Istanbul papers. Several months later, an official publication of the Interior Ministry
presented matters this way:
In March, again, an Armenian rebellion broke out in the kaza of Timar, administra-
tively attached to Van. The movement then spread to the kazas of Gvash and Shatak.
In the city of Van itself, the insurrectional movement was still more violent: large areas
of the city were burned down and hundreds of people, both civilians and military per-
sonnel, were murdered ... After a short-lived resistance, the Russians and Armenians
occupied the city of Van. The Muslim population remaining in the city was ruthlessly
slaughtered.61
This is virtually the only official version of the “revolt” of Van that we have. The “revolt”
is described in the same pamphlet as one of the reasons for which “the commander of the
Imperial army, observing that the Armenians had made common cause with the enemy
forces, felt compelled, so as to protect its rear, to order the transfer of the Armenian groups
settled in areas regarded as military zones to the south.”62
The Situation in Mush: September 1914–May 1915

Like the region of Van, the sancak of Mush was an area with a majority Armenian popula-
tion in which, in 1915, the ARF was by no means a negligible political factor. As such, Mush
constitutes another exceptional point from which to observe and assess the evolution of
the political situation in the eastern regions of the empire from the beginning of the war to
May 1915. As was the case elsewhere, conscription took place amid the greatest imaginable
confusion, but in the absence of significant conflicts. Around the middle of October 1914,
however, the local authorities began circulating rumors that the Dashnaks were organizing
bands of çetes in the region and that these irregulars were preparing to join the Armenian
volunteers from the Caucasus in attacks on Muslim villages.63 To be sure, these rumors were
officially denied at the insistence of the primate of Bitlis,64 but they engendered an abiding
malaise.
When the parliamentary deputy Vahan Papazian arrived in Bitlis “on the day war was
declared” (2 November 1914), he learned that Şeyh Said Ali Hizan’s revolt had just been put
down, and saw that one of the main moving spirits behind the revolt, Şeyh Selim, was still
dangling from a gibbet in the middle of the city’s central square. He also observed that the
center of town was filled with squadrons of Kurdish hamidiyes who had been summoned to
Bitlis by the authorities.65 Their presence aroused the suspicions of the Armenian leaders.
Here, too, the military requisitions paved the way for what can only be called the pillage of
businesses and stores, while the treatment of draftees who were put to work repairing roads
occasioned vociferous protest.66
Papazian was charged with presenting the grievances of the Armenian population to
the local authorities. As soon as he arrived, he was received by the vali of Bitlis, Mustafa
Abdülhalik, Talât’s brother-in-law, “an educated, well-bred man.” Papazian describes in par-
ticular the plight of the families who, because one of their members had tried to dodge the

draft, had seen their property confiscated, their houses burned down, and their parents taken
hostage.67
Toward mid-December 1914, Papazian reached Mush. He was welcomed by the Dashnak
club, which met in the dispensary founded by Dr. Zavriev in 1912. The head of this club was
none other than Ruben Ter Minasian.68 In the small town of Mush, Armenians and Kurds
lived side by side. Among the Kurds, one clan, the Kotans, dominated the local CUP club.
The head of this clan, Hoca Haci Iliyas Sâmi, a deputy from Mush, had an Armenian mother
(she had been abducted and had converted) and spoke fluent Armenian. He was the lead-
ing personality in the city; the Young Turk mutesarif, Servet Bey, “a well-bred young man”
“educated by Filibeli [Ahmed] Hilmi,”69 was obliged to take his opinions into consideration.
Another figure of note, the military commander Vasıf Bey, also had a certain importance
in Mush; he was distinguished by the fact that he was not affiliated with the Young Turk
party.70
The plain of Mush and its hinterland, the Sasun district, had a revolutionary history that
was still present in everyone’s mind. The 1894 resistance and the exploits that the Armenian
fedayis performed in Sultan Abdülhamid’s day helped give the Armenians of Mush a well-
deserved reputation for bravery. Even if the ARF activists had mutated into teachers and
responsible politicians after 1908, they still arouned a certain suspicion among high-ranking
Turkish officials in Mush. We have a nice illustration of the phenomenon in the account
that the bishop of Mush, Nerses Kharakhanian, gave Patriarch Zaven of his conversation
with the German consul in Mosul, Hosten, who had been traveling through the region in
1914. The consul told him that the government did not trust the Armenians at all, adding
that the Kurdish bandits in the Sasun district – in Hoyt/Khoyt and elsewhere – had been
summoned to Mush and displayed frank hostility to the bishop’s people. “There are clear
signs,” the bishop wrote, “that the government is seeking a pretext to bring a catastrophe
down on the heads of the Armenians of the region.”71
As in Van, these apprehensions by no means prevented the authorities from maintaining
normal day-to-day relations with the Armenian leaders. On 25 November, a meeting took
place between Papazian and the two leaders of the local Ittihadist club, Dido Reşid, the
responsible secretary delegated by the CUP, and Paramaz, a relative of Ilyas Sâmi’s. All three
men reaffirmed the need to work together to organize the army’s rear and collect and trans-
port food and supplies. There was, however, also a discussion of the Armenian volunteers
from the Caucasus, whose cooperation with the Russians enraged the CUP.72 In his capacity
as parliamentary deputy, but also as a leading ARF member, Papazian in fact played the role
of an intermediary; he dealt as best as he could with controversial matters such as the draft
and the requisitions, which by early December were proceeding apace.73 Mush had become,
by the beginning of the war, a training and recruitment center into which conscripts from
Dyarbekir, Harput, Gence, and Hazo poured. However, the city lacked the basic services and
structures required to accommodate these soldiers, who were therefore lodged in mosques,
schools, and khans. News of the rout of the Caucasian army in January spawned a semi-
anarchic situation in the town as well as the mass desertion of the hamidiye battalions, which
had to be laboriously patched back together. According to Papazian, Haci Musa, a brother of
the deputy Haci Iliyas Sâmi, had instigated these desertions.74
Turkish distrust of the Armenians in Mush did not, however, lead the ARF to alter its
strategy of collaborating with the authorities. The Armenian deputy even accepted the mute-
sarif’s proposal that he serve as president of the eight-member commission, which included
two officers, that was responsible for organizing supplies for the front. In his memoirs, Papazian
remarks that this put him in a position to establish rules governing the way draftees were
used for transportation, the main means of transport at the time being men’s backs. The rules
set maximum load levels and provided for mandatory rest periods.75 However, as the winter

wore on, the region’s particularly harsh climate made such transportation increasingly ardu-
ous, while the Armenian soldiers in the labor battalions were increasingly exposed to risk:
they were often murdered in the villages through which they passed. Papazian observes that
discontent was growing rapidly but that the Armenian representatives continued to recom-
mend that the government’s demands be met as fully as possible. To be sure, the Armenians
did not appreciate the fact that the mutesarif of Mush had organized a splendid reception for
the chiefs of the Kurdish Jibran tribe, even though these çetes had just pillaged the villages of
the plain.76 The Armenian deputy complained about this to the mutesarif, pointing out that
the authorities only encouraged the brigands to maintain the prevailing anarchy by adopting
such an attitude, and emphasizing the risks of destabilization of the Ottoman rear that such
anarchy entailed.77
After this stormy meeting, a conclave of all the Armenian leaders was held at the arch-
bishopric. Here it was decided “not to cede to the provocations, but to put up with them ... and
not to voice [Armenian] discontent in too demonstrative a fashion.”78 The 1915 New Year’s
festivities provided an occasion to re-establish friendly relations: the mutesarif, military lead-
ers, judges, and notables of Mush all came to wish a happy New Year to their somewhat
skeptical Armenian counterparts.79 The authorities’ cynicism came to the fore even more
clearly in January, when the mutesarif suggested to Goriun, a well-known ARF official from
the Daron district, that he agree to head an Armenian-Kurdish militia that the mutesarif
wished to create in order to meet “the security needs of the plain of Mush.” Goriun’s response
was quite as absurd as the suggestion itself: he proposed creating an all-Armenian militia that
would be equipped by the army. The mutesarif prudently promised that he “would submit the
proposal to the vali of Bitlis.”80
The Armenian leaders had of course evaluated the situation and considered organizing
their own defense. By February 1915, fairly serious discussions were being devoted to this
question. They are rather precisely described by Papazian, who informs us that the first to
raise the issue were former fedayis who lived in the villages on the plain and complained that
they were under close surveillance. The deputy and others who were of his mind pointed out
that there were not enough men capable of fighting and that they lacked arms: they had at
best 700 to 800 hunting rifles and 150 to 200 rifles that were “more or less suitable, but for
which they had little ammunition.” In other words, they had just enough arms and ammuni-
tion to put up a brief self-defense. However, various epistolary exchanges with the commit-
tees of Erzerum and Van, as well as the bureau in Istanbul, convinced them that they would
do well to take steps allowing them to defend themselves if necessary.81 It is obvious that the
Armenian leaders were not much inclined to credit the authorities’ good intentions.
The tour through the villages of the region that Ruben and Goriun made in February
was undertaken with a view to applying their party’s directives. Their departure, however,
did not go unnoticed. According to information that reached the Dashnak club of Mush,
seven or eight Kurdish gendarmes had been rushed off to Goms, Goriun’s native village.
Papazian, who was summoned to the konak the following morning along with Archbishop
Kharakhanian, was told by the mutesarif that the previous evening Goriun and Ruben had
burned alive a corporal named Mustafa Fakhi, together with a few gendarmes. Servet Bey
threatened to burn down the village where this had happened if the two Armenian leaders
did not turn themselves in. He announced that he planned to hold the Armenian deputy
hostage until they did.82
These threats must, however, be put in perspective. Thus, Papazian notes that the mute-
sarif invited him to dinner at his house, where he was “put under the surveillance of the
chief of police,” and also that he agreed to allow the deputy to go to the village where
the incident had occurred to conduct an investigation together with the military com-
mander of Mush, Vasıf Bey. It would seem to follow that in this odd face-off the two camps

were both still trying to avoid a final break. Papazian and Vasıf Bey set out without delay,
accompanied by the kaymakam of Bulanık, Esad Bey, the mudir of Hazo, Süleyman, and
an escort of seven or eight policemen. Upon reaching Goms, they discovered hundreds
of Kurds from the surrounding area in the process of methodically pillaging the houses
in the village and carrying off the herds. These hamidiye units had taken around 50 male
and female villagers hostage and let the others escape. The refugees were questioned in
front of Papazian, who tried to put them at their ease and asked them to speak freely. The
villagers then said that the gendarmes had arrived the evening before “to collect taxes.” In
accordance with tradition, Goriun had seen to it that they were lodged and fed. Shortly
thereafter, one of the Kurdish gendarmes, an old acquaintance of Goriun’s, came to see
him at this house and warned him of the “evil intentions” of Corporal Fakhi, who was
planning to murder both him and Ruben, “on the orders of the Ittihadist club in Mush.”
Goriun thereupon set the stable in which the gendarmes were spending the night on fire,
after blocking the exits from it; the gendarmes who managed to get out of the stable alive
were shot down. According to Papazian, the inquiry culminated in the conclusion that a
“trap” had been set, and the hostages were freed a day later.83 After Papazian and Vasıf had
returned to Mush, the mutesarif listened to the results of their inquiry “without batting an
eyelid.” Papazian even says that he was surprised by Servet Bey’s objective attitude, con-
fessing that he did not understand until later that the mutesarif’s behavior was dictated by
the fact that he was hoping to bring the two main military leaders of the region, Goriun
and Ruben, to return to Mush so that he could take them prisoner.84 A few days later, the
police searched the ARF club. However, before the club was closed down and the doors
sealed, the party militants managed to spirit away both the weapons that had been hidden
there and the party archives.85
Among other signs of rising tension was the fact that in February the soldiers who had
been drafted into the amele taburis (worker battalion) and assigned the task of transporting
supplies from the plain of Mush to the front began to disappear, one by one at first, and then
in whole groups. When their families and friends sought information about them, the mute-
sarif invariably answered either that the roads were blocked by snow or that the men had had
“to cover greater distances than they had in the past in order to keep up with the advance of
the Ottoman army” (apparently no one was aware that the army had retreated). Moreover,
notables from the villages on the plain were being arrested on various pretexts – for example,
that they had refused to turn over crops required by the army – and detained in the prison in
Mush. The mutesarif remained courteous, however, declaring in response to Papazian’s com-
plaints that he lacked the forces he needed to restore order in a country that had settled into
anarchy; that it was necessary to be patient and to help him accomplish his task; and that
Ruben’s flight had angered the Muslim population.86 At the same time, he continued to draft
more and more men to serve as porters. Papazian turned down none of his requests. To meet
the mutesarif’s demands, he now had to turn either to peasants who were often 50 or even
60 years old or adolescents of 15 or 16. One of these new conscripts, a 60-year-old man, later
testified that his battalion of 250 porters, all of them Armenian, had left Mush in January
1915 in the company of 20 gendarmes on horseback. Despite abundant snowfall, he got as far
as Hasankale, after enduring a thousand difficulties. By that time, the group counted only
100 men, whose powers of resistance surprised the gendarmes. The others had perished en
route, succumbing to exposure or exhaustion.87
As in Van, the situation did not truly deteriorate until March. In the region of Mush, it
was the recruitment of the famous Kurdish chief Haci Musa Beg, who had gained notoriety
in the 1890s for the atrocities he committed on the plain and in Sasun, which marked the
beginning of the campaign of harassment directed against the sancak’s Armenian villages.
Haci Musa was specifically responsible for an attack on Mushaghshen, in which he killed

several villagers and burned down houses,88 and for the murder of members of the family of
the mayor of Avzud, Reis Malkhas, who were burned alive in their barn.89 In response to
these depredations, the veteran fedayis demanded that their leaders allow them to take to
the mountains. Some 30 of them withdrew to the Monastery of the Apostles overlooking
the city, without waiting for instructions from the party. When the mutesarif was informed
of this, he immediately dispatched Lieutenant Çerkez Ahmed and a few dozen horsemen to
capture or kill these men who were defying his authority. On the very steep road that led
toward the monastery, the first shot fired threw the horses into a panic. The lieutenant tum-
bled into the abyss at the side of the road.90
Notwithstanding the tension caused by this incident, Papazian continued to meet reg-
ularly with Servet Bey, with whom he sometimes spoke French. The courteous relations
that still prevailed did not prevent the Armenian doctor from demanding that the mutesarif
establish law and order on the plain and put a stop to the looting of the villages if he wanted
to prevent men from taking to the mountains.91
A fact reported by Papazian allows us to pinpoint the moment when Servet Bey was
ordered by his superiors to move to a more repressive phase in the treatment of the Armenian
population of his sancak. Late in March, Servet was summoned to Bitlis by the vali Mustafa
Abdülhalik.92 Although we do not know the precise nature of their conversations, the period
in which they occurred coincided more or less exactly with the week in which, as we shall
see, the Ittihad’s Central Committee arrived at a decision to “deport” the Armenians. In
early April, Papazian learned almost by accident that the Russian army had advanced as far
as Bulanık, in the far northeastern corner of the vilayet of Bitlis, 60 miles from Mush,93 and
that the campaign to recruit squadrons of Kurdish hamidiyes had now been extended to the
sancak of Hakkari and was being supervised by German officers charged with training these
recruits.94
The patriarch, Zaven Der Yeghiayan, cites a “report drawn up by a high-ranking official”
on the results of a meeting that began on 25 April 1915 and ran for two or three days. At the
meeting, which took place on the road between Bitlis and Siirt, were Dr. Nâzım, a member
of the Special Organization, the vali Mustafa Abdülhalik, and the commander of the bat-
talion of the gendarmerie in Siirt. It would seem that the first reports to the effect that the
Armenians had risen up in rebellion in the isolated mountain region of Hizan were diffused
in the wake of this meeting. As a result, several hundred mounted gendarmes, as well as
irregulars recruited from the Kurdish tribes living in the area, were sent to Hizan. An inquiry
later revealed that these “rebels” were in fact some 20 Kurdish bandits who had been wreak-
ing havoc throughout the region. The minister of the interior nevertheless spread the news
of an Armenian revolt in the Hizan district.95 The Istanbul press echoed this official version
of events, which was transformed in turn, in the pamphlet put out by the Interior Ministry
a few months later, into an assault on gendarmes carried out by “armed men in Mush and
Hizan.”96 Clearly, the local authorities had not succeeded in prodding the Armenians of the
vilayet to “revolt.” Even Dr. Nâzım’s personal intervention had failed to produce a credible
pretext for future “acts of retaliation.”
A conversation between Papazian and the mutesarif that took place late in the evening of
10 April marked a crucial stage in the evolution of the relations between the government and
the Armenians. According to the physician’s account of it, Servet Bey, who was carrying a
pistol in the back pocket of his pants, had been intending to arrest him personally. However,
in this tense face-off, Papazian conspicuously advertised the fact that he, too, was armed, and
let the Turkish official know that his friends were waiting for him outside.97 The moment of
the break was drawing inexorably closer, but Servet probably did not yet feel that he was in
a position to liquidate the last Armenian representative of the region – and a parliamentary
deputy at that.

Thus, when Papazian contracted typhus in mid-April, the mutesarif contented himself
with having him watched, while noting that Dashnak activists were carefully monitoring
the condition of their bedridden leader. Servet even took the trouble to visit him twice
while he was ill in order to inquire personally about the state of his health. At their second
meeting, which took place in May, the mutesarif confided to him that, during a brief stay
in Bitlis, he had encountered Arshag Vramian, who had just returned there from Istanbul
– even though Vramian had in fact been executed one month earlier.98 This lie, which
was intended to reassure Papazian, shows how isolated the region was. In his memoirs,
the Dashnak leader remarks that he had heard vague reports of generalized massacres in
the neighboring vilayet of Van, yet was aware that he would be arrested as soon as his
physical condition was deemed satisfactory. In mid-June, as he was recovering, he received
a laconic message from the head of the Mush telegraph office advising him to change his
place of residence. That very evening, he was invited to a meeting of local ARF lead-
ers at Hayg Mirijanian’s house, at which the measures to be taken to protect the 100,000
Armenians of the plain of Mush were discussed. All agreed that it was necessary to organize
the Armenians’ self-defense, but that it was very late in the day and that the Sasun district,
which could be more easily defended than the plain, could not support and provide shelter
for so many people.99 At the time, there were very few regular troops in Mush and the mute-
sarif probably preferred to wait for more to arrive before proceeding to arrest Papazian and
his companions. Among the Dashnaks opinions diverged as to the proper course to steer
– whether the Armenians should try to take control of the city before the troops arrived
or withdraw to the mountains of Sasun with the men who were capable of fighting. The
shortage of arms and ammunition convinced them to choose the second alternative. On 20
June, some 15 policemen occupied the house where, officially, Papazian was recuperating
from his illness.100 This marked the beginning of the operations against the Armenians of
the plain of Mush and the mountains of Sasun. Papazian and his companions now took to
the maquis,101 leaving the plain and city to fend for themselves.
In Bitlis on 20 April, the day the Armenians of Van entered into resistance, the “cream of
the youth of Bitlis” – Armenag Hokhigian, Kegham Basmajian, and Hovhannes Muradian –
were arrested on orders from the vali Mustafa Abdülhalik. They were paraded through the
city in chains and subjected to the “insults of the Turkish population” before being led out-
side the city, where gallows had been set up. Their bodies were left hanging for two weeks
and were partially devoured by dogs.102
Judging the crimes committed in the vilayet of Bitlis, General Vehib Pasha would later
write that “Mustafa Abdülhalik Bey, the former vali of Bitlis, a man without fault and
endowed with civic virtues, was not able to put a stop to these events, of which I shall never
be able to approve.”103
A number of lessons can be drawn from our review of the events that occurred in the
vilayets of Van and Bitlis down to spring 1915. To begin with, it appears that the Armenian
leaders and local authorities maintained almost daily contact until the government decided
to have done with the Armenians. It can be seen as well that the Armenians patently sought
to defuse the situation and tried to avoid provocations; that the information that the local
authorities communicated to Istanbul in an attempt to portray the Armenians as traitors
conspiring with the Russian foe was hastily seized on by the Ottoman government, which
never sought to verify it; that the much ballyhooed Armenian “revolts” were merely – in the
rare cases in which Armenians were involved – acts of self-defense carried out in extremis, as
in the case of the city of Van; that local acts of violence did not, down to the month of April,
have the systematic character they later assumed, except perhaps in Iranian Azerbaijan;
that the massacres perpetrated in this period were concentrated in border areas and were
thus bound up with military offensives and also, albeit to a lesser extent, with defensive

operations; and that most of these crimes were committed by çetes associated with the Special
Organization and recruited above all among the Laz, Çerkez, and Kurds, some of whom were
acting as “gendarmes,” or at any rate wore the uniform of the gendarmerie.
The maintenance of a kind of cordon sanitaire that blocked all communication between
regions, together with a strategy centered on concealing the CUP’s true objectives, were the
two indispensable conditions for the success of the plan to liquidate the Armenians without
provoking resistance.
The Mobilization of Armenian Soldiers: Between

the Front and the Labor Battalions
In earlier chapters, we saw that the mobilization of men between the ages of 20 and 45
rapidly came to constitute a bone of contention in the eastern provinces between the local
authorities and the Armenian leaders. We noted as well that conscription spawned violence
in the rural zones and that, from March 1915 on, the theme of the Armenians’ desertion and
treachery became one of the arguments regularly put forward by the authorities to justify
retaliatory measures. The official pamphlet of the Ministry of the Interior, published in win-
ter 1916, sums up the authorities’ position as follows:
Most of the young Armenian men who were inducted into the army to fulfill their mil-
itary obligations not only deserted but, after securing weapons distributed by Russia,
joined the enemy forces in attacks on their own motherland. These young Armenians
massacred the Muslim populations of the border regions into which the enemy had
succeeded in advancing.104
These grave accusations, leveled by the authors of a propaganda brochure in time of war,
reflect an official position that to the present day remains central to the discourse with
which the Turkish authorities legitimize the violence perpetrated against the Armenians.
An examination of the structure of this discourse is therefore worthwhile.
Obviously, conscription did not proceed in linear fashion everywhere. Draftees from the
capital or western Anatolia (under the jurisdiction of the Fourth Army) were mobilized
under relatively good conditions, whereas conscription in the eastern provinces (under the
jurisdiction of the Third Army) suffered from insufficient preparation and a lack of proper
structures needed to lodge and train recruits. The socio-economic level of the population
from which the first group of recruits was drawn was distinctly higher: many young men in
the western part of the empire paid the bedel (tax of exemption) and thus legally avoided the
draft, or else found themselves serving as officers thanks to their educational level. Because
of the lower standard of living of the group from the east, the young Armenians there were
less frequently able to avoid conscription; vilayets such as Van and Bitlis, which had dense
Armenian populations, provided soldiers in large numbers. Thus, the province of Bitlis alone
furnished 36,000 men during the first wave of mobilization. Of the men between the ages of
20 and 45 who were called up, 24,000 were Armenians. All of these 24,000 Armenians were
sent to Erzerum and from there to the Russian front. During the battle of Sarıkamiş, at least,
not all of them served in labor battalions. Many were in combat units, and more often than
not on the front lines.105 We have, moreover, already seen that several hundred Ottoman
Armenian soldiers captured by the Russians remained in captivity in Siberia for 18 months
along with their Muslim companions-in-arms.106
The draftees from the vilayet of Van, for their part, formed no fewer than 20 battalions,
in which the Armenians “represented up to two-thirds of the total.” Stationed in Berkri
(Fourth Battalion), Adılcevaz (Fifteenth and Sixteenth Battalions), Hoşab (Seventeenth

and Eighteenth Battalions), and Başkale, they were about to be sent into battle against the
Russian forces near Köprüköy when an order came down to disarm Armenian soldiers and
assign them to amele taburis, charged with maintaining the roads, digging trenches, and
transporting supplies.107
Thus, the Armenian conscripts were not systematically assigned to labor battalions, even
if some of them were disarmed very early in the day. We can even affirm that, in the regions
in western Anatolia under the jurisdiction of the Fifth Army, a fair number of conscripts
were assigned to combat units. While it is true, as Zürcher emphasizes, that the 70 to 120
amele taburi units that traditionally made up this auxiliary service of the army responsible
for transport and road construction essentially comprised Christians – one document even
states that 75 per cent were Armenians108 – this did not become the general rule in the First
World War until after the first Caucasian campaign. That said, there can be no doubt that
Christian soldiers – Armenian, Greek, and Syriac alike – were from the outset suspected of
disloyalty.
Thus, when Enver decreed on 25 February 1915109 that Armenian soldiers were to be
disarmed, only a few thousand of them were likely to have been affected by the order, mostly
recruits who were serving in the Third Army. Ultimately, a limited contingent was involved,
for it seems quite clear that Armenians from Istanbul, Adabazar, Ismit, and elsewhere fought
in the ranks of the Ottoman army during the Battle of the Dardanelles, which began in
earnest in mid-April 1915, and on the Palestinian front until 1918,110 well after the decree
was issued. Thus, the order to disarm the Armenians has, in our view, greater symbolic
than practical value. It was designed, in a certain sense, to substantiate the charge that the
Armenians were traitors, which could hardly have been leveled at amele taburis since they
necessarily served behind the lines. It also offered, perhaps, a welcome opportunity to hold
the “traitors” accountable for a military disaster for which all observers agreed Enver person-
ally was to blame.
On the account of an Armenian soldier from Mush who served in the regular army,
Hayg Aghababian, five, ten or even 20 Armenian soldiers in his Erzerum-based unit were
taken from their cantonment nightly and never seen again. The primate of Erzerum, Smpad
Saadetian, appealed to Vali Tahsin Bey to rectify the situation. The vali acknowledged that
such things had indeed happened, but added that instructions had been issued to put a stop
to them – “Yet it went on until all the Armenian soldiers had disappeared.”111 We have in
fact scant information about the fate of the soldiers who served in combat units. This one
account does not allow us to draw general conclusions, yet it does at least seem to indicate
that the combatants disarmed after 25 February on the Caucasian front were not enrolled
in labor battalions but were rather quickly liquidated in small groups. A similar occurrence
took place in early December. At Köprüköy, after a clash between Russians and Turks and
the retreat of the Ottoman troops to the village of Eğan, 50 Armenian soldiers were executed
for abandoning their posts. This was, to be sure, more a disciplinary measure than evidence
of a general strategy. Yet the fact is that the Armenian soldiers alone were punished for the
disbandment of an entire brigade.112
Another phenomenon has also rarely been studied – the successive mobilization waves
and the gradual change in the nature of the missions assigned to each wave.113 After men
between 20 and 45 had been called up – they had all been inducted by early November at
the latest – the authorities gradually recruited men from other age groups, especially from
January 1915 on. The second phase of the mobilization took in men over 45; they were to
be employed as “soldiers attached to the gendarmerie.” There existed, however, two types of
battalions, stationary and mobile. Most Armenians were assigned to the latter, which were
subject to much harsher conditions since the conscripts in these battalions had to serve far
from their homes, whereas the farmers remained in units close to where they lived.114

Several different accounts indicate that the newly mobilized units of the amele taburis,
which as we said in the previous chapter were used to transport supplies and equipment (for
instance, from Mush to Hasankale), comprised on average 250 men each. These were, as
a rule, peasants well advanced in years or 16-year-old adolescents. The weight of the loads
they carried was not as strictly regulated as Papazian liked to think. Every week, convoys of
this kind left Mush for Khnus. Apparently, it was from these units and those assigned to do
roadwork that the greatest number of desertions occurred,115 although probably not at a rate
much higher than the Ottoman average.
Can we, in light of the above, interpret Enver’s order on 25 February as one of the first
manifestations of the Ittihadist government’s intention to liquidate the Armenians? This is
Vahakn Dadrian’s view of the matter,116 which we have also endorsed elsewhere.117 Zürcher
notes, for his part, that although the document cited by Dadrian suggesting such a view –
better known as the “Ten Commandments” – is “of extremely doubtful provenance,” it is
nonetheless “undeniable” that the state of affairs to which Enver’s order gave rise proved an
effective tool for implementing the policy of persecution that the government adopted vis-
à-vis the Armenians.118
As for the accusations that the Young Turk cabinet leveled against the Armenian vol-
unteers who fought side by side with Russian troops against the Turkish forces during the
winter 1914–15 campaign, it must be said that the contribution of the four Armenian vol-
unteer battalions – a total of 2,000 to 2,500 men – to the Russian successes on this front
has been largely overrated. Let us add that there were virtually no Armenian soldiers in the
Russian army of the Caucasus, since the 120,000 Armenians who fought for the Czar served
on the Galician front against Austria-Hungary. As for the 75,000 “Asiatic” (Ottoman)
Armenians denounced by Austro-Hungarian sources in February 1915 for going over to
fight for the Russians, this was obviously deliberate disinformation.119 Even if one counts
women and children, 75,000 Armenians cannot have left Turkey for Russia in this period,
since the Russian forces had not yet advanced far enough into Ottoman territory to make
that possible. A-To, who had official Russian sources at his disposal, observes that after the
Russian retreat from the Pasın region in early December, the Armenian population of the
region left with the Russian forces for Kars and Sarikamış, followed on 29 December by
the Armenians of Alaşkırt, Tutak, Karakilise, Dyadin, and Bayazid. The Russian statistics
on the Ottoman Armenians who had found refuge in the Caucasus by late January 1915
identify their places of origin as follows – kaza of Pasın, 12,914 refugees (1,551 households);
Narman, 655 refugees (84 households); Bayazid, 1,735 refugees (224 households); Dyadin,
1,111 refugees (130 households); Karakilisa, 6,034 refugees (781 households); Alaşkert, 7,732
refugees (956 households); and Başkale, 2,897 refugees (385 households). This makes a total
of 33,078 refugees (4,111 households).120 Among these Armenians, people in a condition or
of an age to be drafted were rare, since the majority were women, children, and old men.
The draftable men who had succeeded in avoiding conscription by paying the bedel were
few and far between.
More generally, the measures taken by the Turkish authorities were aimed directly at the
vital forces of the Armenian population, which found itself isolated and particularly vulner-
able: the men left behind a population that was entirely at the mercy of hostile tribes and
authorities who were rarely well disposed toward Armenians. This no doubt explains why
there were precious few “revolts” or, to put it differently, why the Armenian capacity to organ-
ize self-defense efforts was sharply limited, if not practically non-existent. The precautions
that the local authorities took to restrict the activity of the handful of official Armenian
representatives, such as the parliamentary deputies or political leaders who had constantly
to be putting out fires – that is, defusing provocations – proved effective, all in all. The one
possible exception was Van, distinguished by the fact that it abutted the border regions.

Chapter 8
Putting the Plan into Practice, and

the “Temporary Deportation Law”
T
he historian who has to deal with a subject as sensitive as mass crime longs to unearth
the irrefutable document(s) that will allow him to pinpoint the precise moment
when the decision was made, as well as those elements of the executioners’ discourse
mobilized to justify implementing it. He is also aware, however, that the criminals in ques-
tion have carefully cloaked their crime in the guise of a legal act mandated by the higher
interests of the state. In other words, the historian hardly has illusions about his chances
of discovering “the” document he wants. Yet, in the Armenian case, a document of this
sort has been circulating for some 20 years now. It was sold in January 1919 by the head of
the intelligence service of the Criminal Investigations Department of the Ottoman interior
ministry, Ahmed Esad, to Arthur Calthorpe, a British officer working for the British High
Commissariat in Constantinople.1 Dubbed the “Ten Commandments” by the British, it is a
digest of the ten measures to be taken in order to eradicate the Ottoman Armenian popu-
lation. This document was in fact published in the Istanbul press2 as early as March 1919.
Even then, an opposition journal asked whether it was a forgery.3 Sold for £10,000 sterling,
the “Ten Commandments” also allowed Ahmed Esad to avoid legal prosecution for his part
in the mass crimes organized by the Ittihadist government.4 If the document is a forgery, as
is highly probable, the fact remains that it was forged by a Young Turk whose functions gave
him access to secret documents and who knew exactly what the British were looking for. In
other words, the forger probably fabricated an “authentic fake” that summed up the measures
for liquidating the Armenian population actually decided upon by the highest echelons of
the CUP.
There can be little doubt that the Ittihadist Central Committee perfected its genocidal
scheme in a series of meetings. As we have seen, the CUP envisaged, beginning in January
1914, a “plan to homogenize” Anatolia, and considered ways of “cleansing” it of its “non-
Muslim” “tumors.” According to the “plan,” however, the operation was to have begun with
the Greeks of western Anatolia; subsequently, the Armenian population was to have been
transferred to Syria and Mesopotamia. This “secret” plan was in fact made public in a late
January 1914 article published in the Russian newspaper Kolos Moskoy that did not go unno-
ticed in Turkey. Indeed, the article came in for so much attention that the Turkish daily
İktam felt obliged to issue a disclaimer in its 17/30 January 1914 issue. The Young Turk journal
denied that there existed a plan “that aimed to remove the Armenians from the provinces
inhabited by them and deport them towards Mesopotamia [in order to] people Armenia
with Muslims who, obviously, could unite with the Muslims of the Caucasus and put up
serious resistance to encroachment by the Slavs.” İktam added, rather naively, “the Ottoman
government has no need to do anything of the sort, for, in the regions inhabited by the
Armenians, Muslims constitute a majority.” The most interesting point in the article is the

conclusion: “Indeed, is it possible to expedite several hundred thousand Armenians toward

Mesopotamia? Even if the Armenians agreed to go, [such a plan] would be impossible to put
into practice. What point is there in publishing things as incoherent as this?”5
Thus, there was a radicalization of the CUP after the Ottoman Empire entered the
war. The Armenians were now no longer to be sent elsewhere, but rather to be liquidated.
Taner Akçam has detected that the Ittihad’s Central Committee held a number of meetings
around the middle of March 1915 in order to “evaluate” the development of the Armenian
“menace.”6 According to Cemil, it was at these meetings, which took place after the painful
Turkish defeat in the battle of Sarıkamiş, that the Ittihadist leaders familiarized themselves
with the contents of a report drafted by Bahaeddin Şakir, who had returned to Istanbul after
spending six months in Erzerum and on the Caucasian front. Şakir’s report focused on the
“domestic enemies” who were “preparing to attack [the Ottoman] army from the rear.” Cemil
also points out that the chief of the Special Organization worked together with the Central
Committee after returning to the capital – he had left Erzerum on 13 March – to define “the
measures that had to be taken, thanks to which the Turkish army avoided a great danger; the
result of this collaboration was the deportation law.”7 At these famous meetings, which must
have taken place from 20/22 March 1915 on, Şakir probably demanded that “measures” be
taken to eliminate the “Armenian menace.” In other words, the CUP decided not to confine
itself to the simple “displacement” to the Syrian and Mesopotamian deserts provided for by
the plan drawn up early in 1914, but to undertake a campaign of extermination that was to
unfold in several stages.
Jay Winter attempts to explain the CUP’s radicalization by pointing to the situation of
“total war” that obtained during the First World War. If this situation was not enough by
itself, he writes, to produce “genocide, it created the military, political, and cultural space in
which it could occur.”8 He thus draws a connection between the Battle of the Dardanelles,9
which was shaping up by late March, and the decision made by the Young Turk Central
Committee. He further notes that the first utilization of deadly poison gas by the Germans,
which occurred in April 1915 during the battle of Ypres, in Belgium, may have helped dis-
sipate the last reservations in the Young Turk ranks.10 There can indeed be no doubt that
“total war” engenders a predisposition to commit atrocities, including genocide, and spawns
a “cultural preparation of hatred” in society that may be likened to an “infectious disease,”
while considerably reducing tolerance and legitimizing violence.11
These rather innovative approaches to the question are by no means to be dismissed, but
in our view do not suffice to explain the radicalization of the Ittihad that came about late
in March 1915. They neglect the ideological dimension of the genocidal act and more par-
ticularly its Turkist aspect, which we have already discussed. In the case at hand, it was the
Young Turk conception of control over the Turkish national space that was directly at issue,
together with the Ittihadists’ desire to Turkify the eastern regions by eliminating “foreign
bodies.” To be sure, this ethno-demographic concern of the Young Turks already informed
the decisions on basic principles reached in early 1914. Yet it took a more radical turn dur-
ing the meetings of late March 1915, probably under the impact of “total war.” Indeed, the
indictment read out by the chief public prosecutor Haydar Bey at the first June 1919 session of
the trial of the members of the war cabinets points out that “the slaughter and destruction of
an entire community and the confiscation of its property can come about only as a result
of bloodthirsty measures taken by a secret association ... All this came about as a result of the
coded dispatches that have been seized.”12
The fact that the “temporary deportation law” was not adopted until late May13 indicates
either that it took time to implement the measures adopted by the Central Committee or
that the CUP felt the need to create a legal cover for its plans. It is also significant that
official publication of this governmental law-by-decree came one month after its adoption

Putting the Plan into Practice 245
and that it was released even then in bowdlerized form.14 Five of the eight paragraphs of
the law – those bearing on the confiscation of Armenian property and the settlement of
muhacirs in Armenian homes – seem to have been censored.15 Not until passage of the Law
of 26 September 191516 did the Ottoman government give presentable legal form to the
confiscation of Armenian property, at a time when the deportation process was virtually
complete. Although the Armenians were never mentioned by name, the wording of the
censored paragraphs of the “temporary law” was no doubt too explicit; it must have seemed
to go too far toward revealing the Ittihad’s true objectives. Publishing rules for the immediate
installation of muhacirs in Armenian homes came down to admitting that the “displacement
toward the interior” of the Armenian population had nothing “temporary” about it, but that
it was meant to be permanent.
The mass of documents that came to light during the 1919 Constantinople trials, con-
firmed by local observations of events, show that the deportation orders were issued well
before publication of the temporary law-by-decree.17 Hence the two laws about the deporta-
tion and the confiscation of Armenian property must be deemed tools designed not to estab-
lish rules to regulate a situation but to legitimize actions that were often already in progress,
if not indeed already complete. The compulsion to legitimize or justify these acts plainly
makes itself felt in the pamphlet distributed by the Ministry of the Interior in 1916: “The
Armenians who remained in various parts of the Empire,” we read there,
carried their audacity to the point of engaging in revolts and fomenting disorder. The
commander of the Imperial army, observing that the Armenians were making com-
mon cause with the enemy forces, felt compelled, so as to protect his rear, to order
the transfer of the Armenian groups settled in areas regarded as military zones to the
south.18
As for the way the temporary deportation law was applied, the order to appear before a
court-martial that was rendered public in June 1919 stresses the crucial role that the CUP
“played during the implementation of the law on the deportations.” Conducted in “a uniform
manner,” these operations “were supervised by the delegates and responsible secretaries of
Union and Progress” under the direction of Bahaeddin Şakir, “who had been appointed head
of operations in these regions, the eastern vilayets, by the Special Organization, made up of
the leaders of Union and Progress. Thus all the atrocities of which these regions were the
theater were conceived and prepared by Union and Progress.”19 One could hardly state any
more clearly that the CUP not only decided on the genocidal measures but that its members
were also directly implicated in their implementation at the local level. As for the argument
about the security of the Ottoman army’s rear that the Ittihadist government invoked to jus-
tify the deportations, it does not hold up under attentive examination of the real situation of
the Armenian population. The long telegram that the vali of Erzerum, Tahsin, addressed to
the minister of the interior on 13 May 1915 illustrates the reticence of certain high-ranking
government officials, who were aware of the disadvantages that this measure would bring in
its wake and knew that it served no useful military purpose. Tahsin suggested that the gov-
ernment abandon the idea of deporting the Armenians, who did not represent a danger, since
“they work mainly in trade and industry, and many of them understand the consequences
that a movement initiated by themselves could have.”20 Tahsin also observed that “Erzerum
is a fortified city and a powerful garrison. Hence the Armenians cannot create problems. As
for the [other] districts [of the vilayet], they are inhabited by Armenians in small numbers
living in miserable conditions.”21
We are provided with another important piece of information by Tahsin Bey, who
reminded Talât that the former commander of the Third Army, Hafız İsmail Hakkı, had

himself voiced his “fears” of what might happen if the Armenians were deported from the
vilayet of Erzerum. This shows that the idea of deporting the Armenians from the region
was already being discussed in February 1915, at the moment of Tahsin’s transfer from Van
to Erzerum.22 The vali says so explicitly in his telegram: “At the time, I had assured Your
Excellency that if we decided to deport the Armenians to the interior, we risked creating pre-
cisely the kind of danger for the army that we wished to spare it ... These considerations are
more valid than ever today.”23 Can we affirm that the government and military authorities
were already weighing the possibility of extirpating the Armenian population on the pretext
of carrying out a “deportation to ensure security”? The claim can certainly be advanced. It
is, however, eminently possible that the Ittihad had not yet considered implementing such a
measure elsewhere than in the eastern vilayets.
After receiving the order to deport the Armenians of his vilayet, Tahsin Bey informed
the minister of the interior that the commander-in-chief of the Third Army kept insist-
ently raising the issue “of the deportations” and that he, Tahsin, “had explained to him that
the question was not as simple as he supposed ... and pointed out the dangers with which it
was fraught ... One can’t deport sixty thousand people from the borders of the Caucasus to
Baghdad or Mosul with mere words.”24 Tahsin thus joined the ranks of the valis, mutesarifs,
and kaymakams who displayed a degree of reluctance to apply the deportation orders because
they were perfectly conscious of what these implied for the people involved. Tahsin also
wondered “who would protect [the Armenians] and take charge of their goods and lands”?
He even suggested that, “if the military authorities are capable of successfully carrying out
the operation, then the responsibility should be given to them.”25 Here we are afforded a
glimpse of another problem that the Ittihad had to face when the deportations commenced –
the conflict of competencies between the military and civilian authorities. It was resolved by
the responsible secretaries who the Central Committee had sent to the provinces, for they
had authority in everything touching on “Armenian affairs.”
The creation of the Teşkilat-ı Mahsusa and the treatment of Armenian recruits, impor-
tant matters in whose light we can study the evolution of the decisions made by the Ittihadist
Central Committee, have proved much more complicated than they appeared at first sight.
The elements we have assembled here do not allow us to affirm that the decision to effect
the plan to liquidate the Armenian population was reached before late March 1915. On the
other hand, it may be said that, notwithstanding all the efforts on the part of the Armenian
authorities to avoid all provocations and demonstrate their loyalty to the Ottoman gov-
ernment, the Teşkilat-ı Mahsusa began conducting operations to cleanse the border zones
of Armenians very early with no real military justification. As for the fate meted out to
the Armenian draftees in the winter of 1914–15, it varied from region to region. One can-
not, in any case, speak of a generalized extermination policy in this connection. Even the
25 February 1915 decree ordering that Armenian soldiers be disarmed, which as we have
seen had more symbolic value than anything else, seemingly cannot be taken as a sign that
the final decision had already been reached, for it is not a sufficiently clear indication of this.
It reflects at most the Ottoman general staff’s deep distrust of its Armenian soldiers.
There are, in fact, much more telling signs. One is the dismissal or transfer, beginning in
late March 1915, of many high-ranking officials in the provinces that were affected by the
CUP’s genocidal plans and their replacement by “hard-core” Young Turks. The most signifi-
cant and most symbolic example is provided by the vilayet of Dyarbekir, where, on 25 March
1915, one of the CUP’s historic founders, Dr. Mehmed Reşid, was named to replace Hamid
Bey (Kapancı), a man who was in his successor’s opinion much too kindly disposed.26 Other
valis suffered the same fate in the following weeks, such as Hasan Mazhar in Angora, who
was replaced by the man who stripped him of his post, Atıf Bey, the CUP delegate in the
vilayet of Angora; Atıf had observed that Mazhar refused to apply the deportation order.27

Also dismissed were a number of mutesarifs, such as Cemal Bey, the mutesarif of Yozgat,
whom the responsible secretary of the vilayet of Angora, Necati Bey, evicted from his post
by means of a simple directive sent to Istanbul. Sometimes a firm order sufficed to overcome
nascent resistance: in Kastamonu, the local responsible secretary successfully brought the
vali, Reşid Bey, to expel the handful of Armenians living in his vilayet.28 There were, how-
ever, much more extreme cases. One was the murder by the vali of Dyarbekir, Mehmed Reşid,
of the kaymakam of Behşiri and native of Bagdad, Naci Bey, and the kaymakam of Lice,
Nesimi Bey. Both had refused to massacre (rather than merely deport) the Kurdish-speaking
Armenian populations of their kazas.29
The 18 March 1915 appointment of Halajian as the Ottoman delegate to the International
Court of Justice in The Hague30 can serve as another chronological guidepost and confirma-
tion of the party leaders’ change of tack. In removing him from the political scene, the CUP
rid itself of the sole Armenian member of the CUP’s General Council, to which Halajian
had been elected in November 1913.31 At the same stroke, it effectively banished the only
influential intermediary capable of maintaining relations between the Patriarchate and the
Young Turk Committee.
Another revealing sign of the CUP’s radical decision may be discerned in an apparently
anodyne measure – the April 1915 “removal” of the Armenian inspectors working in the
Post and Telegraph Office,32 which employed a great many Armenians. This decision may
be interpreted as a measure aiming to render communications between the capital and the
provinces “safe” at a time when the government was getting ready to transmit confidential
instructions.
To round off our discussion of the decision-making process, we should also mention infor-
mation published by two journalists of the day. Both refer to one or more secret meetings
of the Young Turk Central Committee or, at any rate, of its members present in Istanbul
in February or March 1915. Let us begin by making it clear that neither of these two
authors identifies the precise source from which he draws his information. In 1920, Sebuh
Aguni, a former editor of the Istanbul newspaper Zhamanag, published at the request of the
Armenian Patriarchate his Documented History of the Massacre of One Million Armenians,
the first work of its kind. The author, one of the members of the Armenian elite deported
on 24 April 1915, reveals that his work is based “on a large number of documents available
to the Patriarchate.”33 In other words, Aguni was able to utilize materials assembled by the
Information Bureau of the Armenian Patriarchate in Constantinople,34 whose staff had until
March 1919 had access to the files of the accused at the Istanbul trials. The other journalist,
Mevlanzâde Rifat, was a liberal who had briefly flirted with the Ittihad before becoming one
of its principle detractors.35 Rifat affirms that he had access to the famous documents seized
during a search conducted by Constantinople’s police chief at the house of Ahmed Ramız
Bey, Bahaeddin Şakir’s son-in-law, in Pera. These documents came from the CUP’s Nuri
Osmaniye headquarters and included a file containing the minutes of the secret meetings of
the party’s Central Committee.36 Rifat’s account contains elements that seem plausible, but
also approximations37 that make it less than credible. It nonetheless constitutes one source
among others. Published in 1929 in Syria under the French mandate, in a period in which
the Armenian question had been shrouded in silence and Kemalism was triumphant, the
journalistic essay does not have the ring of a settling of scores, but it is muddled and therefore
unusable. Aguni’s exposé is distinctly more rigorous, but the author contents himself with
the statement that he is publishing the minutes of one of the Ittihad’s secret meetings “based
on solid information specially obtained for the purpose”; the only date he gives is the first
three months of 1915.38 It is therefore with reservations that we here provide a translation
of the minutes of this meeting, supposed to have been held at the Nuri Osmaniye headquar-
ters under the joint chairmanship of Mehmed Talât and Ziya Gökalp. Present were Midhat

Şükrü, Bahaeddin Şakir, and Mehmed Nâzım. Şakir and Nâzım were in favor of systematic
eradication of the Armenians, whereas “Hüseyin Cahid, Kara Kemal and Halil [Menteşe]
proposed restricting [operations] to the three border provinces of Erzerum, Van and Bitlis,
whose Armenian populations, they maintained, should be deported westward.”
Talât: I would like to point out to my brother Cahid that we entered the war in the
absolute certainty that we would emerge from it as victors. In their own interests,
the Germans are today appealing to us for help, but what assurances do we have
that, after winning the war, they will not abandon us and stretch out their hand to
the Armenians and Greeks? For we must not blind ourselves to the fact that they
comprise the vital forces in this country, by virtue of their intelligence and, in equal
measure, their ingeniousness and business acumen – indeed, in everything. We, on
the other hand, are civil servants or officers.
Ziya Gökalp: We must bear in mind that Greece is always suspect and that it is sooner
or later going to go to war against us. By giving the Armenians a good knock on
the head, we will, by the same stroke, silence all our adversaries, and the policy we
adopted toward the Armenians will become a nightmare for Greece, which obvi-
ously will not care to see the more than 2 million Greeks in Turkey suffer the same
fate as the Armenians.
Kara Kemal: I grant that both Talât’s point of view and yours may be right, but we also
have to consider the opposite. If, God forbid, we should lose the war, we will simply
have helped bring on our own destruction with our own two hands. I know the
Armenians much better than you do: if we treat them with a little consideration, by
fulfilling one of every five demands that they are likely to make, it is still possible to
win them over to our side. Yes, to be safe, let’s organize their deportation, but let’s
not massacre a group from which we’ll be able to profit some day, after converting
it to Islam. Don’t forget that, according to one of the provisos of the statutes of our
party, we can’t force our responsible delegates in the provinces to carry out a deci-
sion made here if they refuse to. Let’s first find out what they think; we’ll make the
important decisions thereafter.
Dr. Bahaeddin Şakir: I can already assure my brother Kemal that our delegates in the
provinces will approve of our decision, as long as we maintain an internal system of
decentralization.
Dr. Nâzım: I’m surprised to hear that some of our comrades are still standing up for
the Armenians, when it is precisely the Armenians who are making life unbearable
for our army in the border region and preventing us from advancing onto Russian
territory. In Russia, besides the regular forces, thousands of volunteers are joining
the fight against us, while thousands of Armenian deserters have simply upped and
disappeared. We have to attack the Armenian question at the root, by wiping this
nation out without a trace. I believe that I may speak for Beha Bey as well: the two
of us can finish this job. You have only to make the decision.
Halil: Don’t forget that this war is a game of poker in which you also have to con-
sider the possibility that you may lose. Bulgaria has still not clarified its position.
Tomorrow, it may turn against us and the Triple Entente will be able, thanks to
the communication routes that Bulgaria possesses and the means it can put at the
Entente’s disposal, not only to put us under pressure, but also, using the road to
Constantinople, to open the road to Berlin and win the war. What is to be gained
by wiping out the Armenians? The radical elimination of the Armenian question?
But isn’t it true that, if the Entente carries the day, Anatolia will fall into Russian

hands? I think that, by eliminating the Armenians, we’ll only make the post-war
situation of our country harder to bear, and that even harsher conditions may be
forced on us as a result.
Ziya Gökalp: Germany has given us every assurance that Bulgaria will be fighting along-
side us; I’m not worried on that score. But what if the Armenians are manipulated by
the Russians into causing internal disorders and making our task more difficult?
Talât: In my capacity as minister of the interior, it is my personal responsibility to
use what I consider to be the appropriate means of dealing with the Armenians.
It’s true that, so far, they seem to be loyal, but the Dashnaktsutiun can change its
tactics tomorrow. When that party was on the point of adjourning its congress in
Erzerum, we asked it whether, if we went to war with Russia, it was going to march
with us against her. The answer we received did not give us much reason for hope.
The Dashnaktsutiun responded categorically that it wasn’t in a position to foment a
rebellion against Russia in the Caucasus. As for its role in Turkey, it was to consist
in advising the Armenians to enlist in the army and help our government in every
way it could. However, the same Dashnaktsutiun was secretly sending volunteers to
the Caucasian front under the command of its principal leaders.39
Attested by Turkish sources, the evolution of the position of certain members of the Central
Committee – such as Ziya Gökalp, Midhat Şükrü, and Kara Kemal – who opposed “the form
taken by the Armenian deportations,” but also that of Halil (Menteşe) and Said Halim,40 seems
to be reflected in the exchanges supposed to have taken place at this meeting. If what is involved
is a fabrication, its author was, at the very least, well acquainted with his protagonists.
The Intensification of the Anti-Armenian Measures and

the Reactions of the Patriarchate in March–April 1915
A careful examination of the violence perpetrated outside the war zones in March–April
1915 is another important way of gauging the evolution of the Ottoman authorities’ policy
towards the Armenians. Most significant in this regard is the special treatment meted out to
Zeitun, a city that had never retreated from its fighting tradition. The first intervention of the
army in Zeitun took place on 13 March; the official motive was to bring deserters from the
town to heel. These deserters did not just defend themselves but also killed several soldiers.
On 12 March, the army occupied another celebrated Cilician town, Dörtyol, which put up
very stiff resistance during the 1909 “events.” A number of adult men were arrested and
enrolled in Aleppo’s amele taburi. They were never seen again. Thus, it seems that around
mid-March the authorities had opted as part of their gradualist strategy to neutralize before
all others the two Armenian localities with a reputation for rebelliousness. An examination
of the facts reveals an intensification of the repression accompanied by rather skillfully dosed
threats. The catholicos of Cilicia, Sahag Khabayan, consequently had no other choice than
to pressure the leaders of Zeitun into complying with the authorities’ demands. In other
words, Zeitun was asked not to resist so as not to jeopardize Cilicia’s Armenian population as
a whole. A new stage began on 31 March, when Turkish forces entered Zeitun and arrested a
number of local notables and teachers.41
Another telling sign of the intentions of the Ittihadist authorities appeared when one of
the principal CUP leaders, Ömer Naci, left the Van region for Cilicia. Here he organized
several public meetings, notably in Adana and Aleppo, at which he exhorted the Muslim
population to mobilize against “the enemy within.” The next stage opened on 29 March,
in Aleppo, where Ahmed Cemal condemned the “revolt” of the Zeitun Armenians and

announced that he had demanded that the military authorities take measures to “punish”
them. Several brigades were dispatched to the Armenian city, where Turkish forces had
already been stationed in January–February 1915. The people of Zeitun, respecting its prom-
ise to Catholicos Sahag (who was later criticized for asking them to disarm) surrendered
without a fight. Beginning on 8 April, 22,456 women and children from the town and its
environs42 were deported to central Anatolia, in the environs of Konya/Sultanieh43 or, in the
case of those who left later, to Aleppo and Der Zor, in the middle of the Syrian desert. Were
these first deportation measures a consequence of the decisions that the CUP had reached
late in March? We think that they were. The destination chosen for the men, Der Zor, is
itself an indication that leaves little doubt about the fate in store for the mountaineers of
Zeitun. Although the CUP continued to veil its intentions by presenting these operations as
ad hoc interventions, it is clear that it was first and foremost seeking to crush the localities
that were likely to resist when the party’s goals became manifest.
For the Young Turk authorities, the first half of the month of April 1915 was in some
sense an interlude, during which they took the preliminary measures required by their plan
to liquidate the Armenians. They took care, however, not to give them too conspicuous a
form. Among the events falling into this framework were doubtless the 3 April arms searches
conducted in Armenian homes in Maraş and Haçin, followed by the arrest of many local
dignitaries; the 8 April arrival of muhacirs from Bosnia in villages around Zeitun; and, the
same day, the fire that raged in the famous monastery perched on the heights overlooking
the city.44
As April wore on, the number of violent acts occurring in the vilayet of Sıvas steadily
rose, including arbitrary arrests of political leaders and methodical looting of villages by
bands of çetes.45 The impression that this spiral of violence was an integral part of a policy of
provocation orchestrated in the capital becomes a certainty when one considers the events
occurring at the same time in the vilayets of Erzerum, Van, and Bitlis.
At any rate, such was the feeling that prevailed in the Armenian Patriarchate, which
was receiving increasingly alarming reports from its dioceses in the provinces. It demanded
explanations from the authorities or looked to the Germans to provide them. Among the rare
foreign interlocutors of the Armenian leadership was the dragoman at the German embassy,
Dr. Mordtmann, who was in charge of Armenian affairs; he often met with Patriarch Zaven
in order to gauge the Armenians’ mood. During one of their conversations, Mordtmann
asked the patriarch why the Armenians sympathized with the Triple Entente.46 On another
occasion, he suggested that the patriarch publish a bull urging the Armenian volunteers in
the Caucasus to refuse to fight in the Russian ranks.47 The most revelatory action undertaken
by Mordtmann came, however, on 24 April, when he paid a visit to Zaven in the Armenian
chamber in Galata in order to propose that the patriarch send a Turkish-Armenian-German
propaganda committee into the provinces to work toward a rapprochement between Turks
and Armenians.48 This might seem to indicate that Mordtmann was still unaware of the
intentions of the minister of the interior, Talât Pasha, who was making preparations to arrest
the Armenian elite of the capital that evening. A German diplomatic document, however,
reveals that a conversation took place at the German embassy in Constantinople on 24 April
between Mordtmann and General Passelt, military commander of the garrison in Erzerum.
The general affirmed that the Armenians could remain in their homes “if the Turks did
not put pressure on them,” since their attitude was “irreproachable.”49 That is, the drago-
man already knew of the government’s deportation plan and was doubtless trying to decide
whether this measure was justified when he put his proposal to the patriarch and Zohrab.
Should his intervention be interpreted as a final attempt to save the Armenians? This seems
doubtful. It is more likely that he wanted to test the good will of the Armenian leadership or
else find out how much they knew.

The “incidents” occurring in Cilicia and elsewhere led the patriarch to summon Bedros
Halajian on 1 April 1915 and ask him to intercede with the Young Turk party leadership so
as “to spare the civilian population.”50 We can deduce from this that the patriarch already
knew, albeit perhaps not exactly, what was being plotted in the offices on Nuri Osmaniye
Street. On 9 April 1915, Halajian came to see the patriarch again in order to report Talât’s
response: the interior minister had said that he would confer with Enver about the proper
policy to follow vis-à-vis the Armenians. On 13 April, Halajian called at the Patriarchate
one more time. He had new information: he had seen Talât again. The minister, who had, he
said, discussed the matter with Enver in the interim, had told him with a good dose of cyni-
cism: “massacres cannot take place in the provinces, because the government does not con-
done them.”51 However, as the patriarch later wrote, the information that the Patriarchate
was receiving through different channels (if somewhat belatedly) despite the strict censor-
ship told a very different story. Yet the Armenian population continued to provide the army
with clothing and supplies of various kinds while also offering it medical assistance and
helping to care for the wounded. At the same time, violent requisitions akin to looting were
on the rise.52 The interview with the minister of the interior that the patriarch had requested
took place a few days later, on 21 April 1915. Talât assured Zaven that the CUP did not have
a policy toward the Armenians as such, that Armenian soldiers had been disarmed as the
result of a hasty decision, and that he had no information about the murders committed in
the Erzerum region.53 These reassurances did not convince the prelate, who on 23 April 1915
convoked a meeting of the Mixed Council, to which the parliamentary deputies and sena-
tors Zareh Dilber, Krikor Zohrab, Vartkes Seringiulian, Harutiun Boshgezenian, and Hovsep
Madatian were also summoned. The patriarch reviewed all the violence that had occurred
recently in Kayseri, Mush, Bitlis, Van, Dortyöl, and Zeitun pointing out that it was evidence
of patent ill will and that it bespoke the government’s mistrust of all Armenians. All those
present reaffirmed that it was necessary to continue to offer the government, as the patriarch
already had, guarantees of unswerving allegiance to the Ottoman fatherland. Zohrab invited
those present to do all they could to mitigate the government’s hostility to the Armenians.
He suggested that they draw up a memorandum, to be signed by all the deputies and senators,
which would summarize the most recent events with supporting documentation. At the end
of the day, Zohrab and Dilber were assigned to write this text.54 Submitted at a meeting held
on 26 April 1915 in Galata, the document they produced begins by citing the arrests that had
just taken place in Istanbul. “The Armenian nation,” it declares, “does not understand why
the government is so suspicious of it,” adding that “it is a mistake to attribute political sig-
nificance to the desertions of Armenian soldiers” and that the Armenians “fear that all the
violence inflicted on them is paving the way for a general massacre.”55 It should be pointed
out here that the press campaign against the Armenians had not yet really begun, even if
the Ittihadist government’s accounts of the problems occurring in the provinces are marked
by undisguised partiality.
The 24 April 1915 Arrests of the Armenian Elite

The round-up of Constantinople’s Armenian elite that took place during the night of 24/25
April affected several hundred people – not only Dashnak, Hnchak and Ramgavar politi-
cal activists, but also the most prominent Armenian journalists, as well as writers, lawyers,
doctors, secondary school principals, clergymen, and merchants.56 A handful of individuals,
including Sebuh Aguni and Yervant Odian, slipped through this vast dragnet – but they
would be arrested later. Two eminent Armenian leaders, the parliamentary deputies Zohrab
and Seringiulian, were left at liberty. Early in the morning of Sunday, 25 April, the two
deputies, who had been informed of the arrests made that night, in particular those of the

Dashnak leaders Aknuni, Rupen Zartarian, and Garabed Khan Pashayan, went together to
Talât’s house to ask their close acquaintance for an explanation. Talât temporized. Zohrab
wrote with some bitterness in his diary that “the ARF, after working side by side with the
Ittihad and in its interests, has now been dealt a heavy blow by it.”57 He claimed to know
why he himself was still in freedom, but did not state the reason. We are inclined to think
that, with his colleague Vartkes, he was being held in reserve because the government feared
that the course of events might take an unfavorable turn for the empire: on 25 April, French
and British forces had begun disembarking in the Dardanelles at Gallipoli, and preparations
to transfer the government to Eskişehir, in the interior of the country, had been accelerated.
After maneuvering and concealing its real aims for several weeks in order to forestall the
possibility of an Armenian reaction, the Ittihad had at last decided to act. The first step was
to neutralize the Armenian elite.
Quite obviously, this operation, which mobilized several hundred state agents, had
been carefully prepared. According to reports that the Patriarchate’s Information Bureau
gathered after the Mudros Armistice, the minister of the interior had, at an unspecified
date that we can put around February–March, created a special committee responsible for
overseeing all those aspects of the Young Turks’ plan that touched on administrative and
police-related matters in the capital as well as the provinces. This committee was under
the CUP’s direct control.58 It included eminent members of the CUP leadership – İsmail
Canbolat,59 general director of the Office of State Security and later governor of the capital;
Aziz Bey, the head of State Security at the Interior Ministry; Ali Münîf, an undersecretary
in the same ministry; Bedri Bey, the police chief in the capital; Bedri’s assistant, Mustafa
Reşad,60 from early 1915 to June 1917 director of the national police force’s Department of
Political Affairs; and another close collaborator of Bedri’s, Murad Bey,61 assistant police
chief in Constantinople. It was these officials who were responsible for compiling lists of
the members of the Armenian elite to be arrested on 24 April. The Armenians had in
fact been spied on for weeks. According to the memoirs of the journalist Yervant Odian,
arrested a few weeks later, rumors to the effect that the police were putting together a “list
of Armenians to be exiled” had already been making the rounds in Istanbul’s Armenian
community.62 Odian also reports that when he learned of the arrests of the Dashnaks,
including the editorial board of Azadamard, he assumed that these were “isolated cases.”
He gradually lost his illusions in the course of the following day, Sunday, 25 April, when he
learned that among those arrested the previous night were well-known personalities such
as Teotig, Barsegh Shahbaz, Daniel Varuzhan, Sarkis Minasian, the parliamentary deputy
Nazaret Daghavarian, Dr. Torkomian, Piuzant Kechian, Diran Kelekian, Aram Andonian,
Sebuh Aguni, Aknuni, Khazhag, Mikayel Shamdanjian, Dr. Jelal, Dr. Boghosian, director of
the psychiatric ward at Surp Prgich Hospital, Hayg Khojasarian, Father Krikoris Balakian,
Father Gomidas, and others.63
On 26 April 1915, the Mixed Council examined the memorandum prepared by Zohrab. It
appealed to the government to treat the Armenians less severely, “out of respect for the mem-
ory of the thousands of Armenian soldiers who [had] died defending the Ottoman father-
land.” The Council then chose four delegates to call on the grand vizier, Said Halim – the
patriarch, Zohrab, Dr. Krikor Tavitian, president of the Political Council, and Archbishop
Yeghishe Turian, president of the Religious Council.64 Responding to protests from the
Armenian leaders, Halim declared that arms and ammunition had been discovered in vari-
ous localities, notably Van, and that the government, taking alarm, had decided to neutralize
the political activists. Zohrab retorted that it was unjust to treat Armenians in this way when
the community had since the general mobilization demonstrated that it was deeply conscious
of its duties; that the Armenians had fulfilled their obligations as citizens and as soldiers; that
they had often chosen not to protest despite the abuses they had suffered; that it was unwise

to make the civilian population suffer the consequences of minor faults; and that these peo-
ple should not be unnecessarily humiliated.65
Directly following this exchange with the grand vizier, the delegation met with Minister of
the Interior Talât, who received the Armenians in the company of the president of the Senate,
Rifat Bey. Talât struck a firm tone. “All those Armenians,” he said, “who, by their speeches,
writings or acts, have worked or may one day work toward the creation of an Armenia, have
to be considered enemies of the state and, in the present circumstances, must be isolated.”
When the delegates replied that among those deported on 24 April were people who had
never had anything to do with the national question, the minister answered that he did not
know if “errors had been made,” as in the case of the hapless cook of Senator Abraham Pasha,
but that the matter would be looked into and the innocent released. He took pains to add
that he continued to have confidence in the Armenians and that “only members of political
parties had been affected by the measures taken.” “Clearly,” he said, “we have no indications
of the existence of a real movement directed against the state, but, in the interests of state
security, the decision was taken to isolate the party activists and dissolve the parties.” The
Armenian delegates pointed out that “it was pointless to examine the case of each individual
deportee in the absence of evidence that the political parties had conspired against the state”
and that, consequently, they favored the “return of all of them.” At this point, the patriarch
writes, Talât called the police chief in the Armenians’ presence and was told that no further
arrests were to be made.66
It has been established that the arrests were not as well prepared as they might have been,
and that among those detained were people who happened to have the same names as the
real targets of the repression, as well as others who had no connections with Armenian activ-
ist circles and were arrested and deported for no reason. Moreover, the list of those arrested
included a number of very well-known personalities who could be described as being above
all suspicion – for example, Diran Kelekian, the editor-in-chief of the Turkish-language news-
paper Sabah, which, as we have seen, had, in collaborating with Bahaeddin Şakir, provided
great service to the CPU/CUP when the party was in the opposition.67 As for the declara-
tions that the minister of the interior made to the Armenian delegates, they illustrate the
classic strategy of the CUP, which sought to carry out its plan without “tipping its hand,” so
as to reassure its victims or leave them guessing.
Once the Constantinople Armenians had been arrested and banned, they were trans-
ferred to two places of internment. One, Ayaş, was in the vilayet of Angora, 12 miles west of
the city; the other was in Cankırı, 60 miles northeast of Angora in the vilayet of Kastamonu.
These operations unfolded in several stages – arrest, at home or at the workplace, by agents
of the State Security Office and the Political Department of the police; an identity check
at State Security headquarters; internment for 24 hours or more in Istanbul’s central prison;
transfer under police escort to the Haydar Paşa railroad station in the Asian part of the capi-
tal; and rail transport to Angora at the deportee’s expense.
In Angora, the banned Armenians were divided into two groups: the “political prisoners”
or those considered to be such (some 150 people) were interned in Ayaş; the “intellectuals”
(also about 150 in number) were kept under surveillance in Çankırı, but allowed to circulate
freely in the city on the condition that they report daily to the local police station. People
as important as Aknuni, Rupen Zartarian, Harutiun Shahrigian, Hayg Tiriakian, Levon
Pashayan, Khazhag, Murad (Boyajian), Harutiun Jangulian, and Nerses Zakarian – Dashnak
and Hnchak leaders – as well as the parliamentary deputy Nazaret Daghavarian, were
interned in Ayaş. The internees were quartered in an immense barracks divided into “dor-
mitories” by means of a few separating walls. According to what one of the few survivors from
the Ayaş group, Piuzant Bozajian, seems to affirm, a delegate of the Ittihad was sent to Ayaş
to confer with the Dashnak leaders Aknuni and Pashayan. Their conversations remained

secret, but Bozajian reports rumors that the Young Turk delegate once again proposed to the
Armenian leaders that they collaborate with the Turks against the Russians. Aknuni is sup-
posed to have replied that they had to be set free before all else. This information is, however,
contradicted by another internee, Dr. Boghosian. In his view, what was involved was a simple
interrogation, the purpose of which was probably to verify that the internee was indeed the
Dashnak leader Aknuni.68
To provide a clearer picture of the circumstances surrounding the arrest of the Armenian
elite of the capital, we shall take the case of Dr. Boghosian, a psychiatrist arrested in his
home on 25 April around two o’clock in the morning. Three “policemen” “hauled him in,”
escorting him to the offices of the “police chief” on the pretext that he was ill and needed
emergency care (such stratagems, designed to veil the real objectives of the police, were
often employed in the course of these arrests). In the face of Boghosian’s reluctance to leave
the house with them so late at night, the arresting policeman finally served notice of their
intention to use force. Boghosian’s arrest involved an Ottoman subtlety. Since he held the
rank of an officer in the health services, he was taken to the prison of the Ministry of War at
Sultan Bayazid Square and detained in a building reserved for officers, where he was joined
by Dr. Bardizbanian, the chief managing editor of Azadamard (the men would see each other
again at Ayaş). Later, Boghosian was brought before İsmail Canbolat, the general director of
the Office of State Security and a man who struck Boghosian as a “born criminal.” When
the psychiatrist protested about his arrest, which was perfectly illegal because no charges had
been brought to justify it, Canbolat flew into a rage:
If I killed you right here, like a dog, who would come looking for you? If I exterminated
the entire Armenian race, as I aspire to do, who would call me to account? I used to
think your people were intelligent. You’re all stupid, one stupider than the next. Do
you imagine that Europe is going to call me to account? Not at all: Europe’s not as hare-
brained as you are. Get out of here.
Boghosian, apparently not unduly troubled by these words, retorted: “You can kill me and the
whole Armenian people as well. But rest assured that, in a certain way, you will be killing
Turkey if you do.” 69
This conversation, apparently authenticated, certainly provides an accurate summary of
the mood of the Young Turk leaders in late April 1915. Long obliged to bridle their emotions
in order to allay the Armenians’ suspicions, it seems they now felt that the time had come to
vent frustrations that had been accumulating for years on their victims.
In the fourth part of this study, we shall see the fate that was reserved for the provincial
Armenian elite as well as all those deported to Ayaş and Cankırı. Let us here content our-
selves with noting that on 1 May 1915, “secret” information arrived at the Patriarchate from
the provinces: there had been a massive wave of arrests there. Zohrab, who was not deported
until 2 June, wondered, “What date has been reserved for the massacre of the Armenians?”70
Ibranosian and Brothers, one of the biggest firms in Turkey, suddenly discovered around
9 May that the directors of all its branches in the provinces were under arrest.71 This was an
indication that the Ittihad had now also begun to put its “economic” plans into practice.
The Trial of the Hnchaks, or the Armenians’ “Guilt”

On Patriarch Zaven’s account, all the precautions taken by the government to avoid alarm-
ing the Armenians of the capital were thrown to the wind with the announcement of the
“rebellion” in Van.72 If we were asked to name the event that convinced the Ittihad to put
its genocidal program into practice precisely on 24 April, we would have to answer that the

“rebellion” it had programmed at Van constituted the ideal alibi for it. In other words, the
CUP chose what it deemed the propitious moment to resolve the problem that the Armenian
presence in Turkey represented in its eyes. To that end, it had accumulated material enabling
it to accompany its acts with an intense propaganda campaign. This propaganda comprises,
even today, the heart of the “Turkish version of the story,” which others call revisionist
history.
The first sign that the authorities intended to demonstrate that “the Armenians” were
guilty of wrongdoing and play up the outcry over the desertions and the Van rebellion came
on 28 April 1915, when the presiding judge of the court-martial in Istanbul announced that
the Hnchak leaders, most of whom had been behind bars since late July 1914, had been
indicted for “disturbing public order and for subversion.”73 In a certain sense, this was the
trial of all the Armenians. It lent the actions of the authorities judicial legitimacy while also
providing them with the opportunity to give formal expression to their criticisms of the
Armenian nation.
Shortly before noon on 11 May, the 28 accused – two of whom, Stepanos Sapah-Giulian
and Dr. Varazdat, were “fugitives from justice” and therefore tried in absentia – were brought
before the court-martial conducted by General Nafiz Bey. Two Armenian-speaking interpret-
ers had also taken their places in the room, Sureya Bey and Mustafa Reşad Bey himself, the
head of the national police force’s Department of Political Affairs.74 The presence of a “per-
sonal judge” (teharri memüri) surprised the accused: this was Arthur Esayan, alias Arshavir
Sahagian,75 the man who had revealed the secret decisions of the Hnchaks’ December 1913
Constanza Congress to the minister of the interior. In his opening statement, the presiding
judge regretted that the accused had had to wait in prison for ten months to be judged. He
also made a point of reminding them that, “since the Ottoman government had conferred
on all Ottomans the right to choose their political party freely, I declare that we do not
consider the mere fact of belonging to the Hnchak party to be [grounds] for indictment.”
Combining courtesy with an insistence on the letter of the law, he also promised the accused
that they would have the right to explain their actions and defend themselves and that they
would be given a fair trial. The Hnchak activists responded with the observation that the
charges brought against them were largely based on the content of their statutes and program
in the form they took prior to the July 1908 restoration of the Constitution.76 During the
second session of their trial, however, held on 15 May, some extremely compromising docu-
ments were read into the court record: they revealed that certain members of the SDHP had
planned to organize self-defense efforts among the Armenians and that they had also sought
to overthrow the Ittihadist government.77
The indictment, which was read out during the fifth session of the trial, included the fol-
lowing counts: 1) a separatist conspiracy; 2) a plan to create an “autonomous or independent
Armenia”; 3) a conspiracy to stage insurrections; and 4) terrorist plots elaborated in complic-
ity with “traitors” (an allusion to Colonel Sadık and General Şerif Pasha). However, at the
sixth session of the trial, held on 26 May, important information about the opposition of
the Hnchak Central Committee of Turkey to the decisions of the Constanza Congress was
entered into the court record. At its Third General Assembly, held in Istanbul from 24 July
to 8 August 1914 with the participation of 31 delegates from local committees, the SDHP of
Turkey declared that the Constanza Congress had been illegal. It had not attained a quorum,
since only 17 of the SDHP’s 64 branches in the Ottoman Empire had been represented at it.78
One might, of course, suppose that the positions adopted at this Third General Assembly,
which were made public in August 1914 and once again served notice of the desire of the
Hnchaks of Turkey to operate within the bounds of the law, were motivated by the mid-
July arrests of the party’s activists. But that would be to ignore the fact that the Constanza
Congress clearly excluded most of the Turkish branches of the party and tried to ram through

positions to which, as it was well aware, the Ottoman activists would be opposed. The court
acknowledged these facts while also observing that some Turkish branches of the party had
endorsed the Constanza positions.
The last session of the Hnchaks’ trial is particularly noteworthy, for it provides a perfectly
clear illustration of the nature of the antagonism between “Turks” and “Armenians.” In his
opening statement, the vice-president of the court-martial, Çerkez Hurşid, said that he was
moved by the “boundless patriotism” of the accused, yet could not understand what had
impelled men “who were full of life and energy” to set off down “a dead end.” “You have,” he
added, “suffered for the sake of the struggle against injustice; we, for our part, have always
thought that particularistic tendencies have to pay their tribute to the onerous obligations
that govern the world. That is where our ways part.”79 This striking formulation nicely sums
up the two logics that clashed here: that of the state or those who control it is always the
logic that “has to be respected.”
The homage that the court thus paid to the accused did not leave them unmoved. In his
response, Paramaz, who came forward as the leader of the Hnchaks in the dock, confessed
that he had been touched by Hurşid Bey’s words. He also pointed out how hard he and his
comrades had struggled “for the happiness of this poor country,” how much blood they had
shed and how many sacrifices they had made “to make the brotherhood between Turks and
Armenians a reality” and “foster mutual trust between them.” However, he went on,
you have, by your indifference, condemned our enormous effort to sterility and delib-
erately pursued [the goal] of exterminating us, forgetting that the liquidation of the
Armenians is tantamount to the destruction of Turkey. It is you who have encouraged
crimes and pillage and sought to silence every expression of our protest. For centuries,
you lived off our lifeblood, but were never willing to give the fountain from which it
sprang the right to stand firm and produce. You oppressed us when, as weak-willed
rayas [members of a subjugated group], we endured all this servility with the patience
of the wretched. You terrorized us the day we decided to demand from our masters the
means of living half an existence. You flew into a rage when we sought to cultivate the
seeds of Western civilization in the East, with a view to securing our future and yours.
You began massacring us when, one day, we decided to assume a position that would
allow us our self-respect. You excluded us from the protection of the law when we
sought to benefit from the rights granted by Midhat’s truncated constitution. Among
the groups making up Turkey, we were the most dedicated and productive, and we were
the ones you forced to suffer the most. Even today, brandishing the charge that we seek
to create an independent Armenia, you want to crush us.80
It would be hard to produce a better description of the nature of the relationship between
Armenians and Turks in the final years of the Ottoman Empire, a combination of close
attachment and mutual exasperation. But the eloquent exchange between the judge and the
Hnchak leader also resembled a last exchange before the divorce imposed by the Young Turk
Central Committee. Twenty of the accused were condemned to death for “high treason and
separatism.” Around half past three on the morning of 15 June 1915, they were hanged in the
courtyard of the War Ministry amid the greatest possible secrecy. The death sentence was,
moreover, not officially announced until 17 June.81
While the Hnchaks’ trial was in progress, an intense press campaign was set in motion –
spearheaded, of course, by the Young Turk daily Tanin. Magisterially conducted by Hüseyin
Cahid, it sought to expose the danger represented by the Armenians as a group. On 9 May,
Tanin began publishing a series of articles entitled “The Grand Conspiracy.” The “con-
spiracy” revolved around a plan woven by the leader of the opposition in exile, General

Şerif Pasha, and his partisans to overthrow the Ittihadist government and assassinate the
Young Turk ministers. The article contended that this “conspiracy” had been hatched on
the initiative of prominent anti-Turkish Europeans who wanted to “drive a wedge between
Turkey and Germany.” Above all, it indicated that Armenians were heavily involved in the
plot: the Hnchaks Stepanos Sapah-Giulian, Paramaz and Varazdat were supposedly key play-
ers, alongside the famous Colonel Sadık, the organizer of the July 1912 coup d’état and the
Ittihadists’ bête noire.82 Aram Andonian notes that the publication of these articles accusing
the Hnchaks – “the Armenians” – of complicity in a plot against “state security” engendered
smoldering hostility toward the Armenian population of the capital, poisoning the atmos-
phere. The articles charged Sapah-Giulian in particular with having dispatched terrorists to
Istanbul, at Şerif Pasha’s request, in order to assassinate the Ittihadist leaders and seize power.
In “return for services rendered, he was to be given the portfolio of economy and finance in
the new government.”83 It is not hard to guess the objective of these articles, teeming with
improbable details: the Young Turks were trying to discredit both the opposition and the
Armenian “conspirators” by exposing a vast “plot” directed against their party. The simul-
taneous publication in the same daily of several articles by one Mehmed Midhat (in fact a
pseudonym used by the “traitor” Arshavir Sahagian) that insisted on the Hnchak leaders’
complicity with Şerif Pasha84 probably had no other aim than to underscore the key role
played by the Armenian activists in this affair.
For his part, Sapah-Giulian, who was one of the main targets of these accusations and
was condemned to death in absentia by the Istanbul court-martial in May 1915, affirms that
after the 1913 attempt on Şerif Pasha’s life in Paris, which was very probably engineered by
the Ittihad, Prince Sabaheddin made a rapprochement with the Ittihadists, and was allowed
to live since he was regarded as a possible alternative to the reigning sultan. Most import-
antly, Sapah-Giulian also reveals that in spring 1915, at a time when the Ottoman Empire
was plunged in crisis, Talât summoned Sabaheddin and Şerif Pasha to Vienna, where it was
agreed that Sabaheddin and his supporters would take power if the Entente succeeded in
taking control of the capital. Sapah-Giulian even spells out that it “was their Arab friend
Nazir Azuri” who informed them of these behind-the-scenes maneuvers.85
We have no other sources of information on these negotiations. In view of what we know
about the Young Turks’ usual operating methods, however, Sapah-Giulian’s account is plau-
sible. Let us add that the assassination attempt against Talât and Enver was conceived in late
1913 or early 1914, after the attempt on Şerif’s life, but that the war broke out before it could
be put into practice. In other words, the Ittihad launched a press campaign around an affair
that was more than a year old. The objective was, without a doubt, to bolster the propaganda
effort that aimed to make the Armenians out to be “domestic foes” while providing a con-
text for the Hnchaks’ trial, the legal component of the Ittihad’s campaign. The Young Turks
found it harder to stage a courtroom spectacle that would help it rid itself of its Dashnak
“allies.” The Dashnaks had consistently sought to defuse the provocations orchestrated by
the Ittihad’s representatives in the provinces; thus the Ittihad had to fall back on less “legal-
istic” methods in order to eliminate the ARF leaders, such as ruses or thinly veiled murders
amid the confusion of the war.
Of the long list of charges officially leveled against the Armenians by the Ottoman
Ministry of the Interior, let us, by way of example, mention the ostensible facts cited to
justify what was undoubtedly the most appalling of the large-scale massacres perpetrated
in summer 1915 against the Armenians of the kaza of Boğazlian and the surrounding area,
including the vilayet of Angora. “Sizeable Armenian bands attacked Muslims. Before they
were relocated, the Armenians attempted to destroy the houses and cities that they were
leaving behind by setting huge fires.”86 The author of these lines obviously did not strain
his imagination. At the trial of those responsible for this slaughter, during which more than

65,000 people were killed in the space of a few days (this trial began in February 1919 and
was thus less constrained than were those that took place in the days of the “national move-
ment” in Anatolia) an important witness gave testimony on Friday, 21 February 1919 that
shed considerable light on the “Armenian revolt.” When one of the judges asked Colonel
Şahabeddin, the commander of the Fifteenth Division, assigned to this area, how many sol-
diers he had sent to put down the insurrection after learning of it, Şahabeddin admitted that
he had sent 200. When the presiding judge went on to ask about the nature of this rebellion
and the number of rebels involved, Şahabeddin needed a recess before he could bring himself
to concede that “there were five or six Armenian insurgents, who had taken refuge in the
mountains.”87 The rest of the interrogation showed, moreover, that the “revolt” of five or six
individuals occurred only after the “displacement” of the Armenian population.88
Another grave accusation bore on the Armenians of the Kayseri region, where, according
to the official propaganda account:
The Imperial authorities discovered bombs, arms, gunpowder, and codes for encrypting
secret correspondence destined for the revolutionary bands, along with other docu-
ments. It has been proved that the Armenian primate was at the head of the move-
ment; moreover, the accused have confessed that the confiscated bombs were intended
to obtain independence for Armenia.89
However, the information assembled during the pretrial investigation of the “vicar” in ques-
tion, Bishop Khosrov of Caeserea, was not quite as categorical. In early summer 1914, Khosrov
had gone to Holy Etchmiadzin to be consecrated bishop by the Armenian catholicos. It was
on these grounds – travel to an enemy country, as the indictment put it – that nearly one
year later, in spring 1915, “the Armenian bishop of Kayseri, Khosrov Effendi,” came under
suspicion of “complicity with the revolutionary movements.” The court martial feared that
its “jurisdictional prerogatives” were too narrow to allow it to try the case – that Khosrov
could not be arraigned because of his status as a clergyman.90 However, while waiting for
the opening of the procedure against the bishop, the military commander of Kayseri voiced
apprehensions that the prelate would use the time at his disposal “to sow disorder and make
propaganda.” He therefore suggested that Khosrov be exiled.91 The bishop’s rather summary
trial ended one week after his arrest. It revealed that the “the Armenian bishop of Kayseri,
Khosrov Effendi, had been apprised of [the] revolutionaries’ preparations,”92 which is to say
that he had not found himself “at the head of the Armenian revolutionaries,” as government
propaganda put the matter several months after his trial. On these grounds, the court found
“that there were extenuating circumstances” in the bishop’s case and “condemned him to 13
years of detention in a fortress.”93 Oddly, when the commander of the Fifth Army informed
the minister of war of the verdict rendered in the case of the Armenian bishop Khosrov
Effendi, he depicted the bishop as “one of those who inspired the preparations for a revolu-
tion and the revolutionary movement that had set out to create a future Armenian state,”
contradicting the terms of the judgment delivered against the clergyman.94 This supplemen-
tary judgment was surely designed to satisfy the minister of war, since he had transformed the
sentence into a death sentence shortly after the trial, before the Council of Ministers, on 20
July 1915, finally commuted the bishop’s punishment to life in prison.95 In any case, Khosrov
was one of the large numbers of clergymen murdered in the following months.96
The Kayseri revolutionaries mentioned in the official brochure of the Ministry of the
Interior were themselves Hnchak activists. According to an account by Manuel Mgrian, a
pharmacist in Everek, some 300 of these Armenians were being held in Kayseri’s civilian
prison in April–May 1915, where the feet of most of them were beaten to a pulp with trun-
cheons. Sometime in May, Mgrian had also been sent to Kayseri’s military prison to treat a

prisoner with serious injuries. There he discovered the parliamentary deputy and Hnchak
leader Murad (Hampartsum Boyajian), who had been recently transferred to Kayseri from
Ayaş, where the “political” prisoners deported from Istanbul were being held. Murad refused
to submit to a new round of questioning from the mutesarif, pointing out that he had already
told Talât everything he had to say. For this outrage, he was tortured with a red-hot iron. The
pharmacist provides us with a detailed description of the effects.97 Boyajian did receive some
treatment before being hanged at night some time later.98
One may well wonder about the capacity of the Armenians of Kayseri, a tiny Turkish-
speaking minority surrounded by Muslims, to transform itself into a subversive force and go
on to struggle “for the independence of Armenia.”
The formulations employed to describe the resistance put up by some of the Armenian
inhabitants of Şabinkarahisar also have a certain flair:
Early in June of this year, the Armenians attacked the city of Sharki Karahisar, suddenly
and for no ascertainable reason, burning down the Muslim neighborhoods. The 800
rebels who barricaded themselves in the city’s citadel refused to listen to the fatherly
advice and conciliatory proposals of the Imperial authorities. They were responsible for
the deaths of 150 people, including the commander of the gendarmerie.99
We will come back to the fate of these people who are said to have attacked their own city
by entrenching themselves in its citadel.
To conclude, the Young Turks’ campaign to present the Armenians as collectively guilty
often exploited old facts – sometimes dating back to before the 1908 revolution – that were
revamped when necessary to suit present purposes. It also used all available means to exploit
the least little detail capable of proving Armenian “treachery.” Thus, the Ittihad succeeded
not only in painting a plausible picture of the “enemy within” but also in whipping up the
population against the “traitors,” thus preparing them to stand by and watch the mass vio-
lence to come without qualms, or even to participate in it.
On 22 April and 6 May – that is, twice in the space of some two weeks – a decree was
promulgated ordering that arms be requisitioned from the civilian population. The decree
also stipulated that everyone possessing arms had to turn them in to the military com-
manders within five days, with the exception of those individuals holding special permits
issued by the military authorities.100 This constituted the true beginning of the campaign of
persecution of the Ottoman Armenians. With the requisition order, which officially applied
to the entire population, a pretext had been found for legalizing violence, as it were. Police
raids now mushroomed in the capital as well as in the provinces. Once again, the Ittihad
had shown great imagination in hiding its objectives behind what might appear to be almost
normal wartime measures.

PART IV
In the Vortex of the War: The First


c k Kura
B l a S e a
Kevorkian_261-622.indd 263
Kastamoni R U S S I AN
Constantinople Samsun E M P I R E
Ismit Merzifun Unieh N
Adabazar Trebizond
Kirason okh
k or
J
ma Amasia T R É B I Z O N D
l Ir
Kizi
Bursa Shabin-Karahisar Araxe
Sak Tokat Bayburt
arya
Eskişehir Erzerum
Angora
Yozgat Sıvas Erzinjan
Kemakh
E R Z E R U M at
es
Terjan
r
S I V A S es
phrat
Euph
te rn E u
Wes tern
Eas
PER
KANGAL AZIZZ
Salt Lake
UL
T Mouch Lake Van
E Harput
Kayseri Van
R
B I T L I S
SIA
Bitlis
U
TRIPOLI
MALATIA V A N
BAALBEK NEBEK Hacın tes
MAM
ra
KONIA Zeitun Siirt
ph
BEIRUT
Eu
ZAHLE Adiyaman DYARBÉKIR Tigris
Mediterranean Eregli
Sea DUMA BOZANTI Marash
n D Y A R B E K I R
n
DAMASCUS ha
Sis Jey
yh a
KAHDEM Mardin
Se MAMURA URFA Gr
eat
KUNEITRA INTILI Birejik Za b
Adana ISLAHIYE
Lake Jerablus
Tiberias Mersina KATMA AZAZ
IZRA RAS UL-AIN
RAJO AKHTERIM Kh Hasiche
HAIFA DERAA BAB MUNBUJ JIRJIR abu
r
Alexandretta
KARLIK TÉFRIDJÉ
JERICHO MOSUL
JEBEL ALEPPO LALÉ
DRUZE SEBIL RAKKA Sheddadiye
JAFFA SALT
JEBEL SINDJAR
toward SULEIMANIYE
AMMAN SEBKA
M e d i t e r r a n e a n S e a MESKENE KHASERJI
DIPSI
SUVAR KIRKUK
Orontes
JERUSALEM HAMAM
ABUHARAR
Dead boundaries of the eastern provinces
Sea DEIR-ZOR MARAT
KARAK rail lines
HAMA BUSARA
Cyprus principal routes of deportation
Eup
hr
a
HOMS MEADIN te
s
concentration camps
ABU-KEMAL
TRIPOLI principal destination points
ANA
0 100 200 km principal points of transit
MAAN
see inset (left)
2/25/2011 12:31:31 PM
Chapter 1
The Armenian Population of the

Empire on the Eve of the War:
The Demographic Issue
T
he immediate pre-war distribution of the Armenian population in the Ottoman
Empire presented a variegated picture. Although most Armenians still lived on the
Armenian high plateau – then known as the eastern vilayets – communities of greater
or lesser density had long since been implanted in western Asia Minor, European Turkey, and
Constantinople. The capital of the empire had naturally attracted people from the provinces
for centuries, but the wars between the Ottomans and the Safavids and, later, between the
Ottomans and the Russians, also contributed to altering the demographic situation on the
Armenians’ lands. At the turn of the seventeenth century, the deportations carried out by
Shah Abbas and the Jelali revolts resulted in major demographic shifts and the emergence of
virtually depopulated areas, particularly in the crescent stretching from Erzincan to the plain
of Ararat. The events gradually brought on a division of the Armenian habitat between its
two historical poles, north and south. It was accentuated by the division of the high plateau
into Persian and Ottoman spheres. The general tendency was an almost constant westward
drift of the population. Furthermore, communities materialized in the seventeenth century
to the east and southeast of the Sea of Marmara in historical Bythinia, which had itself sus-
tained unprecedented demographic losses the century before.
Thus, there sprang up sharply contrasting situations within the Armenian world: peas-
ants living on their ancestral lands contrasted with city-dwellers present in large numbers in
the capital. The ways of life and cultural foundations of these groups were radically different.
Indeed, one might even speak of mutually foreign worlds had the rural exodus not unceasingly
replenished the Armenian population of the capital with people from the countryside who
maintained familial ties with the regions from which they came. Until the 1878 Congress of
Berlin, which not only hastened the end of the Ottoman presence in Europe but also put the
Armenian high plateau on the political map, the existence of these Christian populations
on the eastern confines of the Ottoman Empire had apparently not been a matter of concern
to the Ottoman rulers. However, when the Europeans, especially the Russians, began to be
“preoccupied” by the fate of the eastern provinces, the sultans reacted in short order. As was
shown at length in the second part of this study, the question of the territorial integrity of
the empire gradually became an obsession for the Ottoman elites, with every fresh territorial
loss only intensifying the dominant group’s trauma and humiliation. The process of radicali-
zation was a long time in coming, but it was no less powerful for that.
The obsession with the empire’s territorial integrity, which was obviously bound up with
the question of its demographic composition, haunted the Young Turk movement as much
as it had Sultan Abdülhamid’s regime. Their modernization plans for the empire were not

radically different. In any case, demographic considerations helped shape the sultan’s policy
vis-à-vis the Armenians, even if the massacres committed between 1894 and 1896 have often
been presented as punishments meted out to “insurgents.” The proof, we would suggest, is
provided by the complementary Hamidian policy of very plainly encouraging emigration.
The destruction of work tools, looting of stores and businesses, growing tax burden, and
constant insecurity due to the bands of hamidiyes organized by the sultan drove hundreds of
thousands of people into exile, depopulating both town and country.
From the day the Armenian question was posed, the Armenians’ demographic weight in
the population became a political problem and was treated as such. Thus, it is not surprising
that the Ottoman authorities systematically falsified their own censuses. Their goal was to
show that there was no Armenian question because the Armenians were only a tiny minor-
ity in an ocean of Turks. To attain this goal, they set up barriers that made it difficult to make
a precise assessment of population trends in the empire. One of the most frequently used
methods consisted in constantly redrawing the administrative boundaries of the Armenian
vilayets. The result was that successive censuses bore on different regional entities. This
makes it harder to study the demographic evolution of a region, the impact of massacres, and
the consequences of emigration.
The Administrative Divisions

At the administrative level, under the cover of the tanzimat (reforms), the eyalet of Erzerum –
the former governorship of Ermenistan – was in 1864–6 subdivided into seven mutesarifliks
(department governed by a mutesarif) (Erzerum, Çaldıran, Kars, Bayazid, Muş, Erzincan, and
Van). They included almost all of the Armenian plateau. Notably excluded from the eyalet
were the regions of Harput, Arğana, Palu, Agn, and Arapkir, as well as the Sasun and Şirvan
districts and Hizan, which were all incorporated into the eyalet of Dyarbekir. A European
diplomat offers an instructive comment on these administrative boundaries:
In Asia, the major [administrative] divisions corresponded to the territorial divisions

as they had been at the time of the conquest and, like the European provinces, bore
the names of the communities that originally inhabited these territories: for instance,
the eyalet of Ermenistan (Armenia) or the eyalet of Kurdistan. These names survived
down to the reign of Sultan Mahmud II. From that period on, however, the policy
pursued by the Divan, which wanted to efface the names of the aforementioned major
subdivisions because they provided too stark a reminder of the vanquished nationali-
ties’ historical importance, [consisted in] ... chopping up the eyalets.1
The 1864–6 administrative divisions, however, left too high a proportion of Armenians in
a single region. Istanbul accordingly decided to divide up the vilayet of Erzerum in 1878 – that
is, immediately after the Congress of Berlin, which ratified the loss to Russia of the regions of
Batum, Kars, and Ardahan – by removing entire districts from it and adding others. Four new
vilayets were now created: Erzerum, Van, Hakkari, and Muş. The following year, the Ottoman
authorities created the autonomous sancaks of Dersim and Harput. In 1880, they attached
Dersim to Harput and Hakkari to Van. The effect was to dilute two Armenian regions in two
zones populated by Kurds. Later, in 1886, the Ottomans decided to divide up the Armenian
Plateau once again, this time into smaller administrative units. The Euphrates Basin now found
itself cut up and assigned to the new vilayets of Erzerum, Harput (Mamuret ul-Aziz), Dyarbekir,
and Sıvas, to which the Dersim district, the Hakkari district, Bitlis, and Van were attached.
The last important division took place in 1895, on the eve of the great massacres. The
eight existing vilayets were now condensed into six new administrative units – Van, Bitlis,

Armenian Population of the Empire 267
Dyarbekir, Harput, Sıvas, and Erzerum. The Dersim and Hakkari districts disappeared, “to
the benefit of” Harput and Van.
With these manipulations in mind, we must now come to grips with the problem of the
censuses and the other statistics on the Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire. The
specialists who have treated this question all agree on certain points: the best known – Vital
Cuinet,2 Gustave Rolin-Jaequemyns,3 and Abdolonyme Ubicini4 – unhesitatingly speak of
“the Turks’ indifference to the demographical sciences,” the dubious methods utilized by
Ottoman government officials, the extreme difficulty with which they managed to obtain
vague figures, and finally, the subjective nature of the standards of measurement used. In one
instance, the number of households was counted; in another, Armenians were accurately dis-
tinguished from Greeks or Syriacs, and Catholics, Protestants, and Orthodox were separately
counted, while the census-takers studiously avoided distinguishing Turks from Turcomans,
Kurds, Kızılbaş, Zazas, Yezidis, and other sects. Thus, Muslims were set against the various
Christian denominations as a monolithic block. Demography was here harnessed to purely
political ends; the Ottomans produced statistics for the consumption of international public
opinion alone.
The Pre-1895 Censuses

The first attempt to conduct a census in Turkey was made in 1844 by Rıza Pasha, the minis-
ter of war. It showed that there were some 2 million Armenians in Asiatic Turkey.5 In 1867,
the Turkish government commissioned publication of a volume on Turkey for the Universal
Exposition in Paris. It, too, indicated that there were 2 million Armenians in Asia Minor and
another 400,000 in European Turkey.6 On the eve of the Congress of Berlin, the Patriarchate
drew up a preliminary balance based on the empire’s official Salname for the year 1294 of
the Hegira (1878). It put the number of Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire in this
period at 3 million:7 400,000 in European Turkey (primarily in Constantinople, Thrace,
Bulgaria, and Rumania); 600,000 in western Asia Minor (the vilayets of Angora, Aydın/
Smyrna, Konya, Adana, Aleppo, the mutesariflik of Ismit, etc.); 670,000 in the vilayets of
Sıvas, Trebizond, Kayseri, and (southern) Dyarbekir; 1,330,000 on the Armenian plateau –
that is, in the vilayets of Erzerum (excluding the regions annexed by Russia) and Van – as
well as the northern part of the vilayet of Dyarbekir, comprising the districts of Harput, Eğin,
Arapkir, and Arğana on the one hand and, on the other, the northern part of the sancak of
Siirt, comprising the Sasun, Şirvan, and Hizan districts.
Population Erzerum and Van Dyarbekir (North) Total
Armenians 1,150,000 180,000 1,330,000

Turks 400,000 130,000 530,000
Kurds 80,000 40,000 120,000
Greeks 5,000 – 5,000
Chald.-Syriacs 14,000 8,000 22,000
Zazas 35,000 2,300 37,300
Yezidis 13,000 2,000 15,000
Gypsies 3,000 – 3,000
Total 1,700,000 362,300 2,062,300
Oddly, the “official” census results published by Kemal Karpat provide radically different
estimates for the years 1881/82–93,8 a period during which the administrative organization

of the Armenian provinces was considerably modified: almost all the former mutesarifliks of
Chaldir, Kars and Bayazid now came under Russian rule, while the boundaries of the eyalets
of Erzerum and Dyarbekir were redrawn. According to these documents, the Armenian
population was distributed as follows: there were 179,645 Armenians in European Turkey
(156,032 of them in Constantinople, 270,183 in western Asia Minor – the vilayets of Angora,
Aydın, Konya, Adana, and Aleppo, the mutesariflik of Ismit, and elsewhere); 227,202 in the
vilayets of Sıvas, Trebizond, and Dyarbekir (not including the northern part of the Dyarbekir
vilayet) and the sancak of Kayseri; and 371,113 in Erzerum, Bitlis, Van, Harput, and the
northern part of the vilayet of Dyarbekir. The Armenian population of the five vilayets was
divided up as follows:
Erzerum Bitlis Dyarbekir Harput Van Total

Arm. 107,868 106,306 22,464 75,093 59,382 371,113
Muslims 445,548 167,054 101,065 300,188 54,582 1,068,437
Greeks 3,356 812 543 4,711
Total 556,772 273,360 124,341 375,824 113,964 1,444,261
Alongside these figures, we may range two other sets of statistics obtained in the same
period. First, those of the Armenian Patriarchate, which date from 1878/79:9
Erzerum Bitlis Dyarbekir Harput Van Total

Arm. 280,000 250,000 150,000 270,000 400,000 1,350,000
Second, Cuinet’s statistics, culled around 1890 from the Salname and other documents
furnished by the Ottoman administration:10
Population Erzerum Bitlis Dyarbekir Harput Van Total

Armenians 135,087 131,390 83,226 69,718 80,000 499,421
Muslims 500,782 257,863 388,644 504,366 241,000 1,892,655
Gr. and Syr. 3,725 210 53,420 650 99,785 157,790
Total 639,594 389,463 525,290 574,734 420,785 2,549,866
An examination of the figures presented above reveals wide disparities. Thus, from 1844
to 1867, official Turkish sources affirm that there were 2,400,000 Armenians living in the
empire, with 2,000,000 of them in Asiatic Turkey. In the census carried out between 1881 and
1893, however, the number of Armenians suddenly falls by one-half, to 1,048,143 (156,032 of
them in Constantinople). Unless we assume that these figures resulted from political manip-
ulation, it is hard to explain so great a difference from one census to the next, even if we take
into account the 1878 loss of Kars and Ardahan and the exodus of several tens of thousands
of Ottoman Armenians to Russia.
The Salname of 1294/1878 that the Armenian Patriarchate presented to the Congress
of Berlin was a no less official Ottoman document. Produced for economic purposes before
these “adjustments” had been made, it would seem to reflect the demographic evolu-
tion of the region much better: it puts the number of Armenians in Turkey at 3 million.
This figure indicates a 25 per cent population increase over 30 years, as opposed to the

decrease of 50 per cent reported in the other official Ottoman statistics. Similarly, for the
Armenian plateau as we have defined it above, the Ottoman census of 1881–93 gives fig-
ures of 1,068,437 Muslims and 371,113 Armenians out of a total population of 1,500,000,
whereas the statistics published in the 1294/1878 Salname presented by the Patriarchate
in Berlin are quite different: they show 1,330,000 Armenians, 650,000 Kurds and Turks,
27,000 Greeks and Christian Syriacs, and 55,300 Zazas, Yezidis, and Gypsies. If we put
Turks, Kurds, Zazas, Yezidis, and Gypsies in the same category – although the Gypsies were
often Christians – as the Ottoman administration probably did, then we arrive at a figure
of 705,300 out of a total 2,062,300 inhabitants. But we still fall far short of the total, even
when we compare the Ottoman census to that conducted by the Patriarchate in 1882. The
Patriarchate’s census, which takes into account the fact that the Armenians of Kars and
Ardahan had come under Russian rule in 1878, indicates that 1,350,000 Armenians were
still living in the eastern provinces in this period. Attentive examination of Salaheddin
Bey’s statistics throws some light on this question. They state that a total of 13,223,000
Muslims lived in all of Asiatic Turkey out of a total population of 16,383,000.11 Of this
total, 10,907,000 people lived in western and central Anatolia and Cyprus – 1,000,000
were Greek, 80,000 Jewish, 700,000 Armenian, and 9,127,000 Muslim. In Syria and Iraq,
2,650,000 Arabs, Turks, Druze, and Kurds lived side by side with 100,000 Christians, while
900,000 Arabs inhabited the Hejaz and Yemen. If we add up these figures, it appears that,
of the 13,223,000 Muslims said to be living in Ottoman Asia, 12,677,000 lived outside
the boundaries of the “Anatolian East,” which, according to Salaheddin Bey, had a total
population of 1,906,000. Subtracting, we find that this province, comprising the vilayets
of Van, Erzerum, Kurdistan, and Harput, was inhabited by 1,300,000 Armenians, 60,000
other Christians, and 546,000 Kurds, Turks, Turkomans, Çerkez, and so on. The Ottoman
statistics in the 1294/1878 Salname submitted by the Armenian patriarch to the Congress
of Berlin differ only slightly from these figures. They show a total of 1,330,000 Armenians,
650,000 Kurds, Turks, and so on, as well as 82,000 people belonging to diverse other groups
(taking only northern Kurdistan in the vilayet of Dyarbekir into account). The census car-
ried out by the Patriarchate in 1882 arrived at a similar result: it indicated that 1,350,000
Armenians were living in this region.
Once again, the official Salnames vouch for the credibility of the Armenians’ censuses.
The 1298/1882 Salname published the state budget figures for 1296/1880 as established by the
Council of Ministers. This document indicated that the tax known as the bedeli askeri, paid
by all non-Muslim males between the ages of 15 and 60, showed an annual yield of 462,870
Turkish pounds for all of Turkey. However, the Council of Ministers estimated, according to
the same document, that this tax should have yielded twice as much.12 Implicitly, the state
thus acknowledged that it collected this tax from only half of its non-Muslim population –
the half reported in its census.
While it is an established fact that the official statistics were falsified, it is important to
determine the extent of the falsification. In the case to hand, only an examination of all
the regions concerned would allow us to establish the actual dimensions of the fraud. Such
an examination could, for example, provide irrefutable evidence of a substantial Armenian
population, which the 1891–93 Ottoman census ignores or minimizes. Among the obvious
falsifications, we can cite the Ottoman figures for Scutari, which indicate that no Armenians
lived in the area,13 even though it is known that entire neighborhoods were inhabited by
these Christians and that there were many churches and schools there.14 In Mersin, in
the heart of Cilicia, the Ottomans counted 438 Armenians and 19,737 “Muslims.”15 In
the kaza of Zyr, near Angora, the Turkish census put the number of Armenians at 2,214,16
although the village of Stanoz alone, inhabited exclusively by Armenians, had a population
of 3,000.17

The Post-1896 Censuses

In the present chapter on demography, we have chosen to distinguish the pre-1895 and post-
1895 periods for an obvious reason: such a distinction makes it easier to assess the direct
consequences of the 1894–96 massacres, which particularly affected the population of the
Armenian high plateau.
Shortly before these massacres began, in 1894, an Ottoman census arrived at figures simi-
lar to those given for 1881/2–83 (with differences well under one hundred individuals). By
and large, the statistics utilized for 1894 were the same as those cited from 1881 to 189418
in both official publications and the documents transmitted to foreign governments or spe-
cialists such as Cuinet. The demographic evolution of the Armenian high plateau is only
perceptible in an official document said to have been produced in 1897, but is in fact based
on results obtained in 1895, on the eve of the biggest massacres.19 Interestingly, this docu-
ment reveals radical changes that had supposedly come about in a single year: in the vilayet
of Erzerum, the number of Muslims jumped from 445,648 to 509,948; in Van, the figure of
60,448 Armenians established by both the 1894 census and earlier censuses fell to 59,433,
while the number of non-Christians soared from 59,412 to 80,773. Nothing about the events
that the populations of the area lived through in 1895 allows us to explain this 36 per cent
increase in the number of Muslims over a 12-month period. Thus, it is quite obvious that no
serious census had been carried out for decades. Rather, the old figures were regularly recy-
cled; the number of Muslims was methodically inflated and the number of Christians just
as methodically reduced. We must, however, distinguish the way the Ottoman authorities
handled statistics for European Turkey and western Anatolia from the methods it employed
in the case of the Armenian high plateau: there were, it seems, fewer distortions in its figures
for the former regions, whereas the census figures for the Armenian plateau were subject to
careful manipulation.
The Ottoman census of 1906/07 is hardly more explicit. It indicates that the vilayets
of Erzerum, Bitlis, Van, and Mamuret ul-Aziz had an Armenian population of 354,577
(352,035 in 1895) and a Muslim population of 1,194,778 (1,139,041 in 1895).20 According
to these figures, then, practically no demographic change had occurred in 11 or 12 years:
this was tantamount to affirming that the massacres of 1895 had never taken place except
in the Armenians’ imagination, and in the Western newspapers that claimed to have
described a slaughter organized by Sultan Abdülhamid. In fact, the Census Bureau of the
Ministry of the Interior resolved the problem by reissuing the figures for previous years,
which had already been reduced, on our estimate, by 200 per cent. Given the importance
of the demographic weight of a given group in the resolution of a territorial conflict – con-
sider the example of Bulgaria, Romania, and Greece in 1878 – it was simply not possible
to obtain figures accurately reflecting the real situation from the states concerned. It was,
no doubt, because the Armenian Patriarchate was aware of this fact that it carried out
censuses of its own.
In the preceding pages, we have already discussed the patriarchal censuses for 1878/82,
which, it should be added here, generally assessed only the overall Armenian population,
without giving precise information as to how it broke down by kaza. Moreover, it is clear
that the Armenians adopted a low profile under Abdülhamid. There could be no question of
their conducting a census of any kind in the period. Thus, it was only with the Young Turks’
assumption of power in 1908 that it became possible to engage in an undertaking of this
sort. In 1912, the Patriarchate produced a preliminary assessment, hardly more precise than
that of 1878/82, of the number of Armenians living in the vilayets of Van, Bitlis, Mamuret
ul-Aziz, Dyarbekir, and Erzerum, arriving at a figure of 804,500.21 Probably because it was
dissatisfied by the imprecision of this document, the Patriarchate methodically carried out

a second census, necessitated by the plan to reform the eastern provinces. According to
Vahan Papazian, who was, as we have seen, executive director of the Security Commission
directly responsible for the question of the Armenian reforms,22 the Commission took the
initiative23 of organizing the 1913 census.24 Of course, the government and the Patriarchate
were in this period fighting a fierce battle around population statistics, since the future
of the reform plan was inseparable from the number of Armenians living in the eastern
provinces.25 The main argument advanced by the Young Turk cabinet to justify its rejec-
tion of the principle of reforms in “Armenia” was that the Armenians represented a tiny
“minority” there and that there was therefore little reason to make changes in the local
administration, and even less to give the Armenians responsibilities in the management
of local affairs. Papazian says that, while he was waiting for the results of the census then
in progress, one of the best sources of information at his disposal was a census carried out
under the sultan’s authorization with a view of collecting “one per cent more” from each
Armenian family in order to pay off the colossal debt of the Jerusalem Patriarchate. The
records of this census, with lists of the sums collected, were preserved in the archives of the
Patriarchate in Istanbul.26
On 20 February 1913, the offices of the Patriarchate sent a circular and the required forms
to all the dioceses in the empire: the dioceses were charged with distributing these docu-
ments to the parish councils, collecting and synthesizing the results, and forwarding them to
Constantinople. The census was supposed to be completed by May. In summer 1914, forms
countersigned by the primates and the members of the diocesan councils were still arriving
in Constantinople.27 Most of the work, however, had already been done by then.28
Based for the most part on community structures, and especially the thousands of par-
ish councils in the empire, the census was carried out more carefully in some regions than
in others. Despite imperfections and lacunae, however, the document that resulted is of
crucial importance, since no other one like it was produced in the period that interests us.
It is the only source to reveal the real weight of the Armenian population, particularly that
of the Armenian plateau. Furthermore, this census was taken precisely in a period when it
was assumed that the reforms in the eastern vilayets would be supervised by two European
inspectors. The Patriarchate accordingly had no interest in doctoring its figures, which it
knew would be promptly verified by the two officials in question.
In light of the figures we have just given, it appears very plainly that the Armenian
population of the high plateau, far from growing between 1874 and 1914, sharply dimin-
ished. Indeed, without adjustment for probable population growth under normal con-
ditions, the Armenian statistics show a drop of more than a million individuals in the
37 years between these two dates. This drop cannot be explained by the massacres of
1894–96 alone. The 300,000 “émigrés” registered in this period also have to be taken into
account,29 together with the many villages forcibly converted to Islam.30 It must further
be noted that the representatives of the dioceses who conducted the censuses did not
always have access to all the areas inhabited by Armenians, especially when Kurdish tribes
controlled them. Consequently, not all Armenians were counted. This was particularly
the case for the vilayet of Dyarbekir, from which the Turk authorities deported, to their
surprise, 120,000 Armenians in spring 1915,31 although there were only 106,867 in the
vilayet according to the Patriarchate’s 1914/1914 statistics and only 73,226 according to
the 1914 Ottoman census.32 The figures on tax revenues in 1914–16, published by the
empire’s Ministry of Finance, are no less significant. They indicate that, overall, the five
eastern vilayets contributed diverse fees and taxes totaling more than 110 million piasters
to the Ottoman budget: 64,683,935 piasters in 1915 and nothing in 1916.33 Even if the war
obstructed the collection of these taxes in the combat zones, it is hard to understand why
the regions to the south, although spared by the fighting, contributed nothing to the war

effort – unless we agree that the massacres and deportations of the Armenian populations
of these vilayets, which was significantly underestimated in the statistics, brought on the
financial ruin of these regions and their Muslim inhabitants.
The Armenian Presence in The Ottoman

Empire on the Eve of the War, According to
the Patriarchate’s Census
Although the Patriarchate’s census is organized by diocese, the statistical tables provided
below reflect the administrative organization of the empire as it stood at the beginning of
the First World War.34 In other words, we have regrouped the localities identified in the
Patriarchate’s census according to kaza, with, it must be admitted, some doubt in the case
of villages located near the boundary between two kazas. Some of the figures given here are
not to be found in the documents housed in the Bibliothèque Nubar in Paris; they have
been taken from those collected by the Constantinople Patriarchate’s Information Bureau
and are now housed in the archives of St. James Monastery in Jerusalem or other diocesan
sources (such sources are indicated in the footnotes to the table). In the following chapters,
our evaluations of the relevance of information on the number of deportees found in other
sources are based on the statistics given below.
Churches/
Administrative Unit Localities Armenians Monasteries Schools
1. Constantinople 43 161,000 47 64 (25,000)
– Gelibolu/Dardanelles 6 2,670 6
Total 49 163,670 53 64 (25,000)
2. Thrace
– Edirne and W. Thrace 5 7,948 7 6 (565)*
– Tekirdağ and E. Thrace 4 22,368 7 9 (1,873)*
Total 9 30,316 14 15 (2,438)*
3. Sancak of Ismit
– Ismit 12 25,399 14 18 (3,000)
– Adabazar 6 15,169 8 16 (2,000)
– Kandira/Kandere 9 3,652 8 7 (480)
– Geyve 7 8,628 10 6 (1,000)
– Karamürsel–Yalova 8 8,827 11 6 (1,000)
Total 42 61,675 51 and 1 53 (7,480)
4. Vilayet of Bursa/
Hüdavendigar
A. Sancak of Bursa 16 (2,078)*
– Bursa 4 10,000 6
– Bazarköy 6 22,209 11 –
– Gemlik 3 12,100 2 –
– Muhalic 6 3,218 1 –
– Kirmasti 1 1,016 1 –
Edrenos/Atarnos 3 4,225 1 –
Continued

Churches/
B. Sancak of Ertuğrul/ 10 (1,263)*
Bilecik
– Bilecik 5 13,110 5 –
– Yenişehir 3 4,750 3 –
– Inegöl 2 5,350 2 –
– Şögüt 5 6,872 5 –
C. Sancak of Kütahya 5 (1,174)*
– Kütahya 5 3,578 6 –
– Uşak 1 1,100 1 –
– Eskişehir 3 4,510 3 –
D. Sancak of Afion– 3 7,448 3 7 (850)*
karahisar
E. Sancak of Karasi/ 8 20,006 4 8 (1,334)*
Balıkeser
Total 58 118,992 54 50 (6,699)*
5. Vilayet of Aydın/
Smyrna
A. Sancak of Smyrna 8 13,679 17 –
B. Sancak of Manisa 5 5,875 6
C. Sancak of Aydın 2 1,043 2 1
D. Sancak of Denizly 1 548 1 –
Total 16 21,145 26 1 27 (2,935)
6. Vilayet of Konya
A. Sancak of Konya 6 11,650 6
B. Sancak of Niğde 5 5,727 4 1
C. Sancak of Isparta/ 2 2,600 2
Burdur
D. Sancak of Tekke/Elmaly 2 761 2
Total 15 20,738 14 1 26 (4,585)
7. Vilayet of Kastamonu
A. Sancak of Kastamonu 5 3,978 4 7
B. Sancak of Çankırı 1 1,000 1 1
C. Sancak of Inebolu 6 3,217 7 6
D. Sancak of Sinop 6 5,266 5 4
Total 18 13,461 17 18 (2,500)
8. Vilayet of Trebizond/
Trabzon
A. Sancak of Trabzon 116 (6,000)
– Trebizond, Akçeabat, 37 20,158 25 1
Surmene
– Görele 2 562 3
– Tirebolu 1 868 1
– Giresun 2 2,335 3
– Ordu 30 13,565 25
Continued

Churches/
B. Sancak of Samsun/Canik
– Samsun 1 5,315 1 3 (610)
– Bafra 1 2,035 1 3 (374)
– Çarşamba 21 13,316 21 33 (1,160)
– Terme 5 3,427 6 8 (310)
– Uniye 11 7,700 14 21 (?)
– Fatsa 3 1,330 3 3 (?)
C. Sancak of Gumuşhane 3 2,749 3 3 (?)
D. Sancak of Rize/Lazistan 1 35 1
Total 118 73,395 106 31 90 (9,254)
9. Vilayet of Angora
A. Sancak of Angora
– Angora 2 11,319 72 15 (2,000)
– Kalecik 1 830 1 1 2 (120)
– Stanoz/Zyr 1 3,142 3 2 (500)
– Nallihan 1 1,030 1 2 (220)
– Mihaliççik 1 272 1 1 (59)
– Sivrihissar 1 4,265 1 2 (990)
B. Sancak of Kirşehir 2 4,400 2 4 (990)
C. Sancak of Yozgat
– Yozgat 4 13,969 5 6 (3,300)
– Sungurlu 1 1,936 1 2 (170)
– Çorum 6 3,520 4 6 (380)
– Boğazliyan 32 35,825 36 1 22 (c. 5,000)
– Akdağmaden 5 3,361 3 6 (450)
D. Sancak of Kayseri 31 52,000 40 7 56 (7,119)
Total 88 135,869 105 11 126 (21,298)
10. Vilayet of Sıvas
A. Sancak of Sıvas
– Sıvas 37 31,185 13 4 19 (1,980)
– Yenihan 2 2,175 3 3 (186)
– Şeyhkeşla/Tonus 26 21,063 20 22 (1,988)
– Aziziye 1 1,106 1 2 8 (412)
– Bunian 5 4,781 6
– Gürün 7 13,874 10 12 (1,120)
– Darende 2 3,983 2 1 2 (220)
– Kangal 9 7,339 7 1 8 (1,152)
– Divrig 18 10,605 18 2 10 (857)
– Koçgiri/Zara 9 7,651 10
– Koçhisar 30 13,055 30 2 7 (590)
B. Sancak of Şabinkarahisar 28 (2,483)
– Şabinkarahisar 9 9,104 8 1 9 (1,085)
– Suşehir 35 13,430 24 1 23 (1,815)
– Alucra/Mehsudiye 3 627 3 2 (75)
– Köyulhisar 2 190 2
– Hamidye/Alucra 2 520 2 2 (65)
Continued

Churches/
C. Sancak of Tokat
– Tokat 18 17,480 17 2 11 (1,400)
– Niksar 3 3,560 3 2 (715)
– Erbaa 9 6,948 6 2 (460)
– Zile 4 4,283 2 3 (600)
D. Sancak of Amasia
– Amasia 1 13,788 5 2 12 (1,325)
– Merzifun/Marzevan 3 10,666 1 8 (1,221)
– Ladik 2 350 1 1 (40)
– Havza 1 333 1 1 (35)
– Vizirköprü 1 1,612 1 2 (150)
– Gümüşhaciköy 1 4,064 2 6 (550)
– Mecidözü 1 700 1 1 (75)
Total 241 204,472 198 21 204 (20,599)
11. Vilayet of Adana
A. Sancak of Adana 6 27,990 4 25 (2,755)*
B. Sancak of Mersin 3 6,987 4
C. Sancak of İçil 2 466 2
D. Sancak of Sis/Kozan
– Sis 11 5,600 2 1 7 (641)*
– Feke/Vahka 8 4,948 7 1 9 (661)*
– Hacın 5 27,850 8 1 4 (577)*
– Karsbazar 6 5,645 4
E. Sancak of Cebelbereket 29 39,928 13 2 18 (1,200)*
Total 70 119,414 44 5 63 (5,834)*
12. Vilayet of Alep
A. Sancak of Maraş
– Maraş 23 32,844 20 2 23 (1,629)*
– Bazarcik 1 1,500 1
– Göksun 18 9,505 12 1
– Zeitun 18 22,456 14 3 10 (690)*
– Albistan 4 5,838 4 4 (265)*
B. Sancak of Ayntab
– Ayntab 3 36,448 8 25 (5,000)
– Kilis 1 7,966 1 1 (380)
C. Sancak of Urfa
– Urfa 10 38,680 6 20 (?)
– Birecik 2 1,600 2
– Rumkale/Hromgla 4 1,460 3 2
D. Sancak of Antioch/
Antakya
– Antioch 8 8,532 7 2 10 (487)*
– Şuğur/Kesab 9 8,736 9 8 (?)
– Iskenderum/Alexandretta 16 14,000 6 12 (?)
and Beylan
Total 117 189,565 93 16 113 (8,451)
Continued

Churches/
13. Vilayet of Harput/

Mamuret ul–Aziz
A. Sancak of Harput
– Harput 57 39,788 67 9 92 (8660)
– Keban Maden 3 789 3 2 (122)
– Arapkir 5 10,880 9 14 (862)
– Pötürge 1 679 1 1 (120)
– Agn/Eğin 25 16,741 25 3 20 (1300)
B. Sancak of Dersim
– Hozat 16 2,299 18 11 5 (180)
– Kyzilkilise/Nazimiye 1 89 5
– Medzgerd/Mazgirt 9 1,835 14 22 2 (155)
– Çarsancak 43 7,940 51 15 23 (1114)
– Çemişkezek 22 4,494 19 2 17 (729)
– Ovacık 1 50 –
C. Sancak of Malatia
– Malatia 5 17,017 7 2 8 (1370)
– Kahta 57 10,245 11
– Hasanmansur/ 21 5,202 5 4 (370)
Adiyaman
– Behisni 8 4,550 3 1 4 (320)
– Akçadağ/Arga 5 1,691 4 4 (330)
Total 279 124,289 242 65 204 (15632)
14. Vilayet of
Dyarbekir
A. Sancak of Dyarbekir
– Dyarbekir 25 16,352 10 1 11 (1300)
– Severek 8 9,275 8 3 (250)
– Derik 3 1,782 2 1 1 (50)
– Viranşehir 1 1,339 1 2 (100)
– Beşiri/Chernig 40 5,038 15 14 (700)
– Silvan 70 13,824 28 2 35 (1600)
– Lice 33 5,980 24 1 5 (305)
B. Sancak of Arğana
Maden
– Arğana Maden 11 10,559 10 2 7 (700)
– Palu 37 15,753 38 2 26 (2,050)
– Çermik/Chermug 3 12,418 5 1 5 (900)
C. Sancak of Mardin
– Mardin 2 7,692 3 4 (800)
– Nusaybin/Nisibin 1 90 1 5 (500)
– Cezire/Cizre 12 4,281 1
– Midyat 1 1,452 1 2 (210)
– Savur 1 1,032 1 2 (195)
Total 249 106,867 148 10 122 (9,660)
Continued

Churches/
15. Vilayet of Erzerum

A. Sancak of Erzerum
– Erzerum 53 37,480 43 3 52 (6355)
– Hinis/Khnus 25 21,382 21 4 17 (871)
– Kiği/Kghi 51 19,859 45 5 63 (2925)
– Tercan/Mamahatun 41 11,690 36 2 27 (1187)
– Bayburt/Papert 30 17,060 5 3 9 (844)
– Ispir/Sper 17 2,602 17 1 13 (459)
– Tortum 13 2,829 14 1 3 (?)
– Keskin 13 8,136 14 5 (?)
– Narman 2 748 2 2 (160)
– Pasinler/Pasen 57 16,740 16 1 20 (940)
B.– Sancak of Erzincan
– Erzincan 38 25,795 53 24 37 (3863)
– Pülumur/Polormor 4 862 4 3 3 (103)
– Kemah/Gamakh 15 6,396 37 6 13 (802)
– Kuruçay 6 2,989 6 5 (?)
– Refahiye/Gerjanis 3 1,570 3 2 3 (?)
C. Sancak of Bayazid 25 (2839)
– Bayazid 5 4,884 14 8 6 (684)
– Diyadin 8 1,649 6 11 2 (200)
– Karakilise 12 8,180 9 1 4 (?)
– Eleşgird/Alashgerd/ 12 9,914 13 1 11 (960)
Toprakkale
– Tutak 20 1,624 7 2 (?)
Total 425 202,391 406 76 322 (21,348)
16. Vilayet of Bitlis
A. Sancak of Bitlis
– Bitlis 57 23,899 57 8 15 (979)
– Ahlat/Khlat 22 13,432 23 4 15 (898)
– Hizan 76 8,207 48 10 14 (500)
– Modgan/Mutki 27 5,469 26 4 1 (14)
B. Sancak of Muş/Mush
– Muş/Mush 103 75,623 113 74 87 (3,057)
– Sasun 156 24,233 127 6 15 (1,300)
– Malazgird/Manazgerd 39 11,931 25 45 15 (527)
– Bulanik/Pulanegh 30 25,053 29 3 14 (575)
– Varto 9 4,649 7 3 4 (210)
C. Sancak of Genc/Ardushen 23 4,344 18 2 5 (300)
D. Sancak of Siirt/Seghert
– Siirt/Seghert 9 4,437 3 1 2 (330)
– Harzan/Kharzan 76 8,343 22 1 14 (392)
– Pervari 15 2,538 7 2 (72)
– Eruh/Bohtan 20 3,393 4 2 (120)
– Şirvan 19 2,853 11 2 (60)
Total 681 218,404 510 161 207 (9,309)
Continued

Churches/
17. Vilayet of Van

A. Sancak of Van
– Van 116 53,589 200 19
– Perkri 41 5,152 40 8
– Erciş/Arjesh 54 10,381 24 4
– Adilcevaz/Ardzge 25 6,460 19 3
– Mahmudiye 4 826 3
– Kiavaş/Vostan 25 6,851 30 15
– Karcikan/Garjgan 36 7,281 26 7
(+ Lower Gargar)
– Moks 45 4,459 36 14
– Şatak (+ Norduz) 65 8, 433 49 5
B Sancak of Hakkari
– Çulamerk/Chulamerg 5 534 2
– Hoşab 12 1,746 7 2
– Elbağ/Aghpag 20 3,505 19 3 2
– Kiavar/Gevar 2 1,680
Total 450 110,897 457 80 192
TOTAL 2,925 1,914,620 2,538 451 1,996 (173,022)

Chapter 2
The Ottoman Armenians’

Socio-Economic Situation on
the Eve of the War
A
ccording to the figures presented in the previous chapter, of the 2,925 towns
and villages of the empire in which Armenians lived, no fewer than 2,084 were
located on the Armenian high plateau, properly speaking – that is, in the vilayets
of Erzerum, Van, Bitlis, Mamuret ul-Aziz, and Dyarbekir. In these basically rural regions,
762,848 Armenians, 90 per cent of them peasants, lived side by side with the Turkish pop-
ulation and their turbulent Kurdish neighbors. In the adjacent regions, in the vilayets of
Sıvas, Trebizond, and Angora, 413,736 Armenians lived alongside Turks, Greeks, and Kurds.
Peasants represented a somewhat smaller proportion of the population of these provinces:
according to figures provided by the Patriarchate’s 1913–14 census, approximately 80 per
cent of the Armenians there lived in the countryside. To the south in Cilicia, in the vilayet
of Adana and the northern part of the vilayet of Aleppo, this figure fell to 60 per cent. Of
the half a million other Armenians scattered throughout the other regions of the empire,
180,667 lived in the towns and villages of Bithynia, from Ismit through Kütahya to Bursa,
60 per cent of whom earned their living by tilling the soil. Another 215,131 lived mainly in
urban environments in Constantinople, Smyrna, and Thrace. Thus, it clearly appears that
Armenian society was predominantly rural on the eve of the First World War, not only on
the high plateau, but also in the regions beyond it.
To date, there has been no serious study of the socio-economic situation of the vilayets
of the Armenian high plateau in the early twentieth century. Aside from the fact that the
Armenians lived in a basically rural society that was largely autarchic, even if they also
boasted a few urban centers that exported manufactured products, we know virtually noth-
ing about the macroeconomic equilibria prevailing at the time. Nor do we know how much
each of these regions contributed to the budget of the Ottoman state. The modernization
of the state had, however, made it necessary to gather statistics on a regular basis. The first
such statistics to be released were for fiscal years 1326 and 1327 of the Hegira (14 May 1909 to
13 May 1910 and 14 March 1910 to 13 March 1911); they appeared in the Annual Statistical
Bulletin (later quarterly), published by the Ministry of Finance. These official statistics allow
us to draw a few conclusions about the economy. First of all, expenditures and receipts were
more closely balanced in the five Armenian vilayets than elsewhere. For calendar year 1326
of the Hegira (1910–11), the vilayet of Erzerum (which, according to the official statistics
for the year, had 781,071 inhabitants) contributed 48,324,826 piasters to the state budget
and spent 49,040,755 piasters. The vilayet of Bitlis (410,079 inhabitants) paid out 20,756,439
piasters and received 19,316,833 in exchange; the vilayet of Dyarbekir (424,760 inhabitants)
contributed 27,840,936 piasters and got back 24,184,027; the province of Mamuret ul-Aziz

(455,579 inhabitants) paid in 21,842,050 piasters and received 22,050,358; and finally, the
vilayet of Van (285,947 inhabitants) paid out 12,998,311 piasters and had expenditures of
18,623,690. One can see at a glance that the average per capita contribution was much the
same from vilayet to vilayet. By contrast, expenditures for these eastern vilayets were propor-
tionally twice as high as in the other provinces of the empire, with the exception of Albania,
the Edirne region, and certain Arab provinces. In theory, this should have facilitated devel-
opment of the basic structures and economy of these regions. A closer look at expendi-
tures in the east shows why it did not: of a total of 133,215,663 piasters allocated to the
region, no fewer than 58,136,107 went to cover the expenditures of the Ministry of War in
these five vilayets, while 17,010,324 piasters went to the gendarmerie and another 10,655,062
were allocated to local agencies of the Ministry of the Interior. Thus a total of 85,801,493
piasters – two-thirds of the total expenditures in the five vilayets – went exclusively to financ-
ing repressive apparatuses: to the army as well as the gendarmerie and other agencies of the
Interior Ministry. This speaks volumes about the policies of the state in the eastern vilayets
of the Ottoman Empire. Plainly, these non-productive “investments,” proportionally three
times higher than in the rest of the empire, left no leeway for collective or social programs.
The absence of such state investments probably reflects the state’s intention to block the
economic development of these regions, among the most neglected in the empire, in which
half of all tax revenues emanated from the agricultural sector.1
Families and Communities: Organization and the Economy

In Armenian society, the family is more than just a solidarity network based on blood ties. It
is a community in itself, with a strict hierarchy that still bears the marks of Indo-European
heritage.2 It is patriarchal and assigns a very important place to the head of the household,
the danuder, who determines the way the family’s land or other property is used. All the
male descendants of a family are grouped around the danuder, together with the wives of his
younger brothers and his sons. The whole thus formed functions in accordance with well-
established rules and a precise hierarchy. In the absence of this strict form of social organiza-
tion, survival would have been all but impossible in the harsh climate of many Armenian
provinces, as nomads of different origins have observed throughout history. This no doubt
explains why certain regions remained Armenian down to the beginning of the twenti-
eth century, despite the Ottoman authorities’ attempts to colonize them from the sixteenth
century on. The partial integration of the Kurdish nomads there was made possible only by
the “symbiosis” imposed by the national government. Is eastern Turkey not very sparsely
populated even today? Indications are that the sedentarization of the Kurds’ descendants was
not successful everywhere it was attempted. It doubtless took all the know-how of an ancient
agricultural civilization such as the Armenians’ to produce everything that was needed to
survive in these climes.
In the region of Kayseri, a couple had on average “only” slightly over four children. In
Erzerum, couples had five; in Pasın, Bayburt, Kemah, Hizan, Genc, Muş, Sasun, and the
vilayet of Van, couples had eight. Households were correspondingly large. As many as 70
members of the same family lived together in some mountain districts – that is, several
couples and their children, as in Sasun or Moks. In the plains and valleys, an average house-
hold generally contained 30 to 40 people. In urban centers, where tradition was weaker, the
brothers or the youngest sons in a family often founded households of their own. Finally, in
cities such as Smyrna or Constantinople, many families consisted only of a couple and their
children; the eldest son would continue to live with his parents, or the other way around.
Statistics gathered during the 1913–14 census indicate that the average number of inhabit-
ants in a village community also varied sharply from one region to the next. In high mountain

Ottoman Armenians’ Socio-Economic Situation 281
districts, many villages contained only 250 to 500 people. Yet households containing from 50
to 150 individuals were not rare there. On the plain of Muş or Harput, in contrast, villages
were much larger, containing on average 700 to 800 inhabitants. In such villages, mixed
populations of Christians and Muslims were more frequent than in the mountains.
In villages with fewer than one thousand inhabitants, the Ottoman administration was
nonexistent. The social hierarchy was organized around the “mayor,” clergy, and a “council of
wise men.” After 1908, schoolteachers began to occupy an ever more important place in the
social life of rural communities, as both educators and activists in the political parties. The
“mayor,” the danuder, was, as the title indicates, the head of a household – the richest or the
most respected. It fell on him and his peers to run community affairs, whether it was a ques-
tion of the equitable distribution of water for irrigation of the fields, relations with Ottoman
officialdom in the kaza to which the village belonged, disputes between individual peasants,
distribution of the collective tax burden among the households of the village, or renovation
of the village church and construction of a school. This council of wise men maintained
close relations with the village priest, who was, when he was not attending to his religious
duties, himself a farmer and paterfamilias like the others. Deeply attached to its Christian
faith, the rural world lived a life punctuated by religious holidays, which also marked off the
seasons and thus the rhythms of farm life. When nomadic Kurdish brigands attacked a vil-
lage, the church served as a refuge, for it was always the most solid building in the village.
The nature of the rural economy varied, of course, from region to region. In high moun-
tain districts such as Sasun, Moks, or Şatak, the villagers raised sheep, pigs, horses, and water
buffalo. These activities, very important economically, were practiced along with agricul-
ture. The long, snowy winters condemned most of the villages in these regions to autarchy
for several months of the year, and also favored the exercise of crafts such as rug-making,
pottery, carpentry, and so on. Agricultural instruments were basically made of wood, but had
certain metallic parts. Plows were drawn by animals, generally oxen or water buffalo, as on
the plateaus or plains. On the plains, agriculture was naturally more highly developed than
elsewhere, typically consisting in the cultivation of cereal plants, grapevines, fruit trees, and
vegetables. The purpose of all this activity was, as a rule, the production of an autonomous
food supply rather than a marketable surplus. It was rounded off by beekeeping, which fur-
nished sugar as well as wax for candles. As for the salt needed to preserve food, it was found
in surface mines or on the shores of Lake Van. The iron and copper used by blacksmiths,
tinsmiths, silverers, and so on were extracted from lodes exploited with the help of primi-
tive techniques already in use in ancient times. Over the centuries, in short, the rigorous
climate and rugged relief helped forge a nearly self-sufficient society that was inward-looking,
attached to tradition, and above all concerned with living under secure conditions.
It was precisely the quest for security, which was often severely threatened, that brought
Armenian peasants to abandon their land, whether it was a question, as in the sixteenth
century, of deportations and deliberately induced famines, or the policy of depopulation sys-
tematically pursued by Abdülhamid and the Young Turks in his wake. Rural areas were par-
ticularly vulnerable to the talan, the annual raid that was most often carried out by Kurdish
nomads, who did not always content themselves with the payment of tribute. Thus, every
year, as if subject to a ritual, the peasants would be confronted by their nomadic neigh-
bors, who had for centuries been accustomed to living off the sedentary inhabitants of their
region.
The Armenian population, although it was robust, lived in a land with an austere cli-
mate. Nature – especially epidemics – had eliminated the weakest. Until 1844, the plague
regularly raged on the Armenian high plateau, sometimes mowing down as many as half of
the inhabitants of urban centers, and a somewhat smaller proportion of the population in
the countryside.3

The Urban Centers and the Beginnings

of Industrialization
In the Armenian provinces, villages were often entirely Armenian or had mixed Armenian-
Kurdish and, less frequently, Armenian-Turkish populations. A very different situation pre-
vailed in the urban centers, which were military garrisons and the seats of the Ottoman
administration. Here, Christians were not always in the majority but in almost every case
lived side by side with their Muslim neighbors. The Armenians, clustered together outside
the city walls in neighborhoods of their own, went downtown only to exercise their profes-
sions in their craftsmen’s shops or their stands at the bazaar. At the turn of the century, they
still held a virtual monopoly on local and interregional commerce, and had unchallenged
control of the craft guilds. Here they perpetuated traditions and craft techniques handed
down over the centuries. In the little towns, however, a significant portion of the popula-
tion engaged in agricultural work: they cultivated, notably, vegetable gardens, orchards, and
vineyards, with the result that these towns had something of a rural air.
As far as craftsmanship went, every region had its specialties. Thus, Eğin/Agn was famous
for its goldsmiths, who plied their trade in Constantinople as well; Van was known for its
skilful tailors, tinsmiths, goldsmiths, and saddle-makers; Sıvas was celebrated for the dex-
terity of its blacksmiths, gunsmiths, and weavers; Kayseri’s architects, masons, carpenters,
stone-cutters, and tapestry-makers had an excellent reputation, as did the shoemakers of
Harput; Amasia, Malatia, and Hacın were known for their textiles, Muş and Bitlis for their
woolens, Gümüşhane and Erzerum for their silversmiths, Erzincan and Kemah for their
wholesalers, and so on. These craftsmen, the esnafs, who had for centuries been organized in
guilds governed by statutes, also played a significant political and social role in the Ottoman
Empire.
Early in the twentieth century, Armenians were also still very active in the crafts in
Constantinople. In Büyükçarşi, Vezirhan, Çuhacihan, Kürkçühan, and Çarsambabazar, there
were no fewer than 1,850 Armenian workshops in which some 15,000 master artisans, jour-
neymen, and apprentices plied their trades. In the city as a whole, there were 5,000 shops
and 35,979 professional craftsmen. Competing Western products, however, made the indus-
trialization of Turkey an imperative. As early as the 1870s, certain forms of craft production,
notably in the textile branch, had begun to die out because they were unable to compete
with European production. The first Ottoman “industrial” enterprises appeared in this con-
text. The Armenians quite naturally joined the new movement, unhesitatingly introducing
Western technical innovations into the empire. The Armenian bourgeoisie of Constantinople
and Smyrna was at the front ranks here, but notables from Bithynia, Cilicia, and to a lesser
extent the Armenian high plateau were also very dynamic. Inhabitants of the high plateau,
lacking means of transportation and practicable roads, lived, as we have pointed out, in a state
of permanent insecurity, and it did not easily lend itself to large-scale industrialization.
Steam engines, power looms, iron furnaces, and so on were slowly making their way into
the empire. Tobacco factories, flourmills, textile factories (cotton mills, silk mills, and wool
mills), as well as shipyards, were largely in Armenian hands.
Armenians also took an active part in trade and finance. The monopoly of local trade
and international commerce characteristic of Armenians in the east was no less striking
in Istanbul, Smyrna, and other cities in the west of the empire. These individual successes,
which some tend to celebrate as proof of the benevolent attitude of the Ottoman government
towards the Armenians, in no way reflect the policy of the sultans vis-à-vis the Armenian
population.
As a result of local conditions as well as the subordinate status that the Armenians had
had for centuries, even affluent Armenians rarely made a show of their wealth by building

Ottoman Armenians’ Socio-Economic Situation 283
outwardly resplendent homes. The interiors of their homes, on the other hand, were often
marked by great refinement, with harmonious inner courts, murals, and libraries fitted out
with elaborately worked wainscoting. The sumptuous homes of the Armenian quarter of
Kayseri, which were only recently torn down, bore witness to the affluence and tastes of this
provincial bourgeoisie, as do the many still extant, albeit dilapidated and sometimes com-
pletely neglected, mansions in Sıvas, Erzerum, and Kars.

Chapter 2.1
The Eradication of the Armenian

Population in the Provinces of the
Ottoman Empire: Reasons for
a Regional Approach
O
n the threshold of the fourth part of the present work, about the first stage of the
genocide, we ought perhaps to explain why we have placed so voluminous a file in
the middle of the book – a file that is, moreover, largely empirical. We could, of
course, have omitted it and continued instead to examine the mechanisms put in place by
the Young Turk regime to liquidate the provincial Armenian population. Had we done so,
however, it would have been much harder, if not impossible, to take stock of the differences
in the way the various regions were treated and to grasp the complexity of the machinery of
destruction. Omitting this section would also have precluded an assessment of the precise
role of local governments and the army, and would have obscured the activity of the Special
Organization, especially in the eastern provinces. In the absence of regional studies, we
might also have been tempted to make do with approximations: the socio-economic dimen-
sion of the genocidal enterprise, particularly the activity of the commissions responsible for
“abandoned property,” might well have escaped our notice, along with the possibility of accu-
rately weighing up the demographic issues involved in evicting the Armenians from their
homes and settling “Turkish” muhacirs in their place. Moreover, a regional approach makes
it much easier to appreciate the victims’ experience in each of the regions involved. Finally,
it allows us to pinpoint the historical moment at which a world came to an end: the violent
disappearance of an Armenian presence in the area that went back 3,000 years.
Obviously, the regional treatment proposed here presupposes knowledge of the mecha-
nism of destruction. Starting out by considering the “operating instructions,” however, has
its disadvantages. While there is a pedagogical justification for beginning that way, from a
methodological standpoint it is open to the objection that only micro-historical examina-
tion makes macro-historical observation possible. We have consequently chosen to draw the
central lessons of the Young Turk experiment only after immersing ourselves in events in the
provinces. Moreover, our discussion in the third part of this study of the nature of the Special
Organization, its hierarchy, and its activities in the opening months of the war, together
with our examination of the functioning of the emvalı metruke commissions – that is, the
apparatus of destruction and confiscation – has laid bare the foundations of the genocidal
process. The CUP’s driving role and the activity of the government ministries, local officials,
and coordinators known as “responsible secretaries” or provincial delegates of the CUP have
also been approached from a structural angle. Thus, the fourth part of our study draws a sort
of line of demarcation between the entity that conceived the program of eradication and

ultimately set it in motion and the concrete realization of the plan by the structures thus
called into existence. Finally, approaching the matter from this angle focuses our attention
on the same set of problems that the Ittihad’s Central Committee itself confronted when it
decided to carry out its plan to eliminate the Armenians at what it deemed the most oppor-
tune moment. We have, in some sense, once again pulled out the ethnographic maps that it
used to plan the liquidation of the Armenians and homogenize Anatolia.
To grasp all the different facets of this complex question, we had no choice but to examine
the traces left not only by the actors – the victims and their executioners – but also by “out-
side” witnesses whose own interests in the acts committed varied. American missionaries
or diplomats, as well as German or Austro-Hungarian officers or consuls, have viewpoints
shaped by their personal experiences and the status of the state or organization that they
serve. Similarly, the way the victims and executioners view events is largely conditioned
by their individual status and religious confession. In other words, the actors invested with
state legitimacy will tend to legitimize their actions by evoking the higher interests of the
state, just as the actor-victims will tend to condemn their “natural” predators, the more so as
they only rarely possess the means needed to grasp the real nature of the operations directed
against them.
The historian is of course often confronted with accounts that describe the same events as
seen through radically opposed interpretive grids, with Western observers as “umpires” – this
was often the case in the Ottoman Empire of the day – marked by their religious convictions
and specific military or political interests. There was virtually no town in the empire, how-
ever unprepossessing, that did not have its American or German eyewitnesses, although only
some of these eyewitnesses had experience (sometimes long-time experience) of the country
and, as a result, the ability to understand local phenomena “from the inside.” Despite the
inherent weaknesses of some of these accounts, they remain indispensable when it comes
to establishing the credibility of survivors’ testimony. But they have another by no means
negligible merit: they provide us with crucially important clues about the actions of the local
civilian and military authorities to whom the diplomats and missionaries often turned in
their capacity as spokespersons for the Armenian population.
As for information provided by the victims, which researchers long dismissed, it must
first be pointed out that only accounts made while the events related were still “fresh” – that
is, accounts dating from the immediate postwar period – are utilized here. These accounts
were collected by the Armenian Patriarchate of Constantinople and the Armenian National
Unions formed to care for the deportees in the same period, or else stem from evidence given
by survivors at the first 1919–20 Istanbul trials of Young Turks implicated in war crimes and
the massacre of Armenians. Such material sometimes allows us to draw valuable lessons
about the psychology of the executioners from the courtroom confrontations between the
victims and their executioners. Some of these documents have been published in their origi-
nal language; many others remain in manuscript form.
Official and semi-official Young Turk sources are problematic. It is known that certain sets
of documents concerning the treatment of the Armenians that emanated from the Ministry
of the Interior or the CUP’s Constantinople headquarters were destroyed or shipped to an
unknown destination. This point will be discussed in detail in Part Six. Yet, however many
precautions the Unionist leaders took, they were unable, for technical reasons, to destroy
all the documents produced by the government. In other words, only a small fraction of
this material is currently accessible; yet even this fraction provides insight into the way the
genocidal machinery worked.
The indictment and the supporting evidence presented to the court-martial on 27 April
1919 indicate that in the course of the criminal investigation it became obvious that a good
many of the “documents concerning this Organization as well all the documents of the Central

The Eradication of the Armenian Population 287
Committee were stolen.”1 It appears, then, that the archives of the Special Organization and
the Ittihadist Central Committee, whose interrelations we have already discussed, were spir-
ited away from the Nuri Osmaniye headquarters by a party official immediately following the
resignation of Talât’s cabinet on 7 October 1918. According to the Partriarchate’s Bureau of
Information, it was Midhat Sükrü who purged the files at party headquarters.2
The same indictment cites a note (No. 31) from the minister of the interior “which proves
that files containing important information and the correspondence of the Organization
were removed by Aziz Bey, the Director of the Department of Criminal Investigations [of
the Department of State Security], before Talât resigned.”3 In question here are probably
the thousands of instructions, circulars, and encrypted telegrams that the interior and war
ministries sent to the valis of the provinces and the army commanders, as well as statis-
tics concerning the deported and massacred Armenians. This material was apparently
kept, according to the same judicial source, in the offices of the Political Department of the
Interior Ministry, where it was deposited in the files of the Special Organization known as
the “Special Secret Archives.” It, too, was removed in early October 1918, two days before
Talât resigned, loaded into light wooden crates and sent to an unknown destination. At any
rate, such was the answer that the minister of the interior gave upon repeated questioning
by the court-martial.4
Despite the precautions taken by the Young Turk leadership, as we have said, it proved
technically impossible to eliminate all traces of the genocidal operations.5 The first category
of documents, encrypted originals, is extremely rare, for such documents were briefly kept in
the files of the Post and Telegraph Office before being transferred to the files of the Interior
Ministry or the Department of Security in Constantinople under the name Mahrim dosieler
(secret files). In contrast, the second category of materials, the encrypted telegrams sent by
the administration of the Post and Telegraph Office and then transcribed locally, is more
common. Decoded by the addressees, who knew the code – as a rule, the vali of the province
to which these telegrams were sent or his private secretary – they comprise the message
received in coded form as well as the decoded version, written between the lines of the
coded message if there was room enough or, if not, on the bottom or back of the page bear-
ing the coded message. Once the originals of the encrypted telegrams were decoded, they
were signed or initialed by the vali and his assistant and provided with one or more marginal
annotations by the same vali and/or the assistant director of the Bureau of Deportees, who
was responsible for carrying out the orders received. Sometimes the police chief or com-
mander of the gendarmerie played this role.
The third category of document is still more common: it comprises copies of encrypted
telegrams, accompanied either by another copy of the encoded text and the decoded text,
or the decoded text alone. What are involved here are certified copies of the originals of
the encrypted telegrams, authenticated by the secretary general of the vilayet before being
transmitted to the Ministry of the Interior, the president of the Commission of Inquiry (the
Mazhar Commission) or the judge presiding over the court-martial.
The investigative files prepared by the Mazhar Commission and court-martial include
material falling into the two last-named categories. These documents came from virtually
all the provinces, where it had obviously proved impossible to “clean house” thoroughly. It
was the documents included in these investigative files, available to the plaintiffs, which the
Armenian Patriarchate of Constantinople legally obtained in the form of certified copies in
its capacity as representative of the community.
Only a few vilayets responded to the demand for materials formulated by the Ottoman
legal institutions, notably the vilayets of Konya and Angora.6 However, insofar as the docu-
ments involved were circulars sent to all the provinces, the materials transmitted from these
vilayets to Istanbul are a source of first-hand information.

Chapter 3
Deportations and Massacres

in the Vilayet of Erzerum
T
he vilayet of Erzerum was the major theater of the fighting between the Russians and
Turks and, as such, constituted a central strategic stake of the First World War. The
fortress of Erzerum and the surrounding plain constituted the rear base of the Third
Army, which had its headquarters in Tortum, north of the regional capital. With the failure
of the Turkish offensive in winter 1914–15, the Third Army was decimated and the Ottoman
general staff had to make a strenuous effort to form new unities. In February, Enver suggested
that Liman von Sanders, the head of the German military mission, take command of this
front, but the German general rejected the offer since the troops with which he was supposed
to rebuild the army were in a catastrophic state: “approximately one-third of the troops in
the region’s training camps were ill, while another third had deserted on their way to the
recruitment centers.”1 The command of the Third Army had consequently been entrusted to
Kâmil, a former classmate of the minister of war.2 From the moment he took office in May, the
new vali of Erzerum, Tahsin Bey,3 had also been confronted with a typhus epidemic that was
wreaking havoc on the soldiers and the civilian population (he had been briefly aided in his
new post, as we have seen, by the president of the Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa, Bahaeddin Şakir, before
Şakir’s departure for Istanbul on 13 March 1915).4 Thereupon, Filibeli Ahmed Hilmi Bey, a
famous CUP fedayi, took the reins of the Special Organization as its interim president.
So far, we have seen that the violence inflicted on the Armenian population, which
basically occurred during the military operations in the winter of 1914–15, affected border
zones and can be explained in terms of strategic imperatives and the Ittihad’s desire to elimi-
nate potential enemies.5 The rest of the vilayet of Erzerum had, generally speaking, been
spared massacres. On the other hand, we noted the excesses that accompanied the military
requisitions, as well as acts of violence, confirmed by German diplomats, in certain kazas
of the Erzerum vilayet.6 The incidents were serious enough that the German ambassador
Wangenheim felt compelled “to address them in conversations with the Sublime Porte ... The
Grand Vizier thinks that these incidents could not have taken place without provocation
from the Armenians.” The German consul Paul Schwarz, however, noted in a 5 December
1914 report to his ambassador that the Armenians were in a state of high alarm as a result of
certain incidents “that they considered to be warning signs of new massacres.” He mentioned
in particular the murder of the parish priest in Odzni on 1 December by “three Turkish irreg-
ulars” who had spent the night in his house, as well as the exactions committed by other çetes
of the Special Organization (for example, in the village of Tevfik, where a dozen irregulars
had illegally locked up the men of the village because they were unable to produce the 100
Turkish pounds demanded of them).7 Violence had also been perpetrated by regular Turkish
troops, who compensated for the shortage of barracks by taking up quarters in Armenian
villages, evicting the inhabitants and consuming their food reserves.8

Black Sea •
Ardahan N
• •
• Kirason Trebizond
•
Keskin
Alexandropol
Tortum Kars• Russian Empire
•
Ispir/Sper • • Narman
Kagizman • Erevan
•
Bayburt/Papert
• Arax
Western Euphrates
Refahiye
Gerjanis
• Erzincan
•
•
Tercan/
Mamahatun
•
Erzerum Arax
Pasinler/Pasen
•
•
• •
Alaşgird/
Bayazid
Toprakkale Karakilise
• •
•
Kuruçay • Kemah
• Tutak
Diyadin
•
Pülumur/Polormor Kiği/Keghi
•
Hinis/Khnus
•
Western Euphrates Persia
The celebrations and patriotic manifestations that had been organized in the capital after
the capture of Ardahan9 were now things of the past, as were the congratulations that Enver
Pasha had extended to the Armenian primate of Konya on the conduct of the Armenian
soldiers on the Caucasian front.10 On his retreat to Erzerum, moreover, the minister of war
had taken 200 Armenians from the Olti area hostage. They were imprisoned in Erzerum and
later executed.11 Enver also had 30 Armenian civilians from Ardahan, whom he had likewise
taken hostage after the defeat at Sarıkamiş, hanged beneath the ramparts of Erzerum at the
Istanbul Gate.12 To be sure, the allegedly hostile activity of these foreign civilians was cited
to justify the treatment meted out to them, but it did not frighten the Armenian population
of Erzerum any less for that. The Armenians interpreted it as a clear sign of the Young Turk
government’s mood.
The intensification of the hostility toward the Armenians peaked, without a doubt, on
10 February 1915, when, in broad daylight, two soldiers murdered the assistant director of
the Erzerum branch of the Banque Ottomane, Setrak Pastermajian, in the middle of the
street. The directors of the bank in Constantinople learned that the local authorities had
announced that Pastermajian had died of typhus,13 which was then raging in the region.
In private, however, as well as in diplomatic circles, it was rumored that he had been killed
because his brother, a former parliamentary deputy from the vilayet, was working for the
Russians. The military commander of the garrison, General Posseldt, who took an interest in
the matter, observed that the murderers, whom everyone knew, had not been arrested.14 This
was an indication that the soldiers had been acting under orders. According to Constantin
Trianfidili, a Greek notable from Erzerum, many more Turks than Christians had refused to
enlist in the army ever since the 3 August announcement of the general mobilization, yet only
the Christians were harassed. The same witness claimed that Pastermajian had been mur-
dered in order to see how the Armenians would react, and they had not budged.15 For his part,
Alphonse Arakelian observes that “the deportations did not come out of a clear blue sky; the
government first had recourse to provocations.” Bands of çetes raped and looted in the rural
districts, while murders of soldiers took place more frequently.16 But “still no-one budged.” The
Armenians of Erzerum knew, says the same witness, that a large number of military units had
pitched camp in the area; “what is more, almost all the young Armenian men were already
in the army.”17 Thus, here, as in the vilayet of Van, provocations began mushrooming from
February 1915 on, although the phenomenon did not take on the dimensions it did there.
As has already been said, a good many Armenian inhabitants of the kazas of Pasın (pop.
12,914), Narman (pop. 655), Bayazid (pop. 1,735), Dyadin (pop. 1,111), Karakilisa (pop. 6,034),
and Alaşkert (pop. 7,732) – a total of 30,181 villagers in all (3,726 households) – followed

Deportations and Massacres: Erzerum 291
the retreating Russian forces in late December and early January.18 In the kaza of Pasın,
however, only the Lower Pasın district was evacuated. In areas further to the west, not far
from Erzerum, 4,000 people remained behind, notably in Ekabad, Hertev, Hasankale, and
Badijavan.19 In late March, the peasants of these villages in the Pasın district were deported
on the pretext that “they lived too close to the border and there was good reason to be suspi-
cious of the Armenians.”20
These provocations notwithstanding, the Armenians of Erzerum were not unduly
molested until April. When violence did occur, the primate, Smpat Saadetian, would go with
a few other notables to lodge a complaint with Vali Tahsin, who “played dumb or pretended
to be deaf, depending on the circumstances.”21 The first sign of alarm came in late February
1915, when 70 Armenian notables from Erzerum were arrested. Sixty of those detained were
released after the prelate interceded on their behalf, but ten members of the editorial board
of the Dashnak newspaper Harach, Aram Adruni and his comrades, were kept in prison
and then transferred to an unknown destination.22 The target of these actions was plainly
the local Dashnak committee. For the time being, however, the local authorities seemed to
content themselves with measures of intimidation.
As elsewhere, the Armenian elite of the region was arrested on 24 and 25 April 1915.
Some 200 individuals were apprehended, including the Dashnak leaders Kegham Balasanian,
Stepan Stepanian (known as Maral), Pilos, and Mihran Terlemezian.23 The next day, Adruni,
Stepanian, Balasanian, Hrant Koseyan and Boghos Papaklian, among others – 30 notables
in all – were ordered to be transferred to Erzincan and were slain on their way there.24 The
others were held in the central prison of Erzincan and interrogated under torture about arms
caches as well as alleged plans to revolt.25 Four to five hundred prisoners were squeezed into
squalid cells. Officially, the aim was to forestall a general insurrection. The real aim, however,
was to obtain compromising “revelations” by means of torture. These confessions were meant
to justify in advance the events that were about to unfold.
A telegram that Bahaeddin Şakir sent on 21 April 1915 from Erzerum to the CUP delegate
responsible for the vilayet of Mamuret ul-Aziz, Resneli Boşnak Nâzım Bey, shows that the
head of the Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa had returned to the region in the latter half of April.26 He
quickly set up a special deportation committee; Cemal Bey, secretary general of the vilayet
(a sort of “vice vali”) and an influential member of Erzerum’s Ittihadist club, was named as its
president. He was assisted by the kaymakam of Hasankale, Tahir Bey; Hulusi Bey, the police
chief; Mustafa Efendi Ali Guzelzâde, an Ittihadist; and Jafer Mustafa Effendi, the commander
of the squadrons of the Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa in Erzerum. All deportation orders were executed
under the supervision of this committee, which handled the lists of deportees.27 The çetes
were under the supervision of Filibeli Ahmed Hilmi Bey, Şakir’s assistant. Information com-
municated to ambassador Wangenheim by the German vice-consul Scheubner-Richter, who
was reporting explanations given by Vali Tahsin, indicates that the deportation orders were
issued by the military authorities – more exactly, by the commander of the Third Army,
Mahmud Kâmil – whereas the civilian authorities, especially the vali, were reluctant to imple-
ment these measures.28
Thanks to information provided by an Armenian survivor from Erzerum, Boghos
Vartanian,29 we can give a more coherent explanation of the process that culminated in the
application of the decision to eradicate the Armenians. According to Vartanian, the Sublime
Porte sent a telegram to Erzerum about the treatment to be meted out to the Armenians.
In response, a secret meeting was held at Vali Hasan Tahsin’s residence from 18 April to
21 April 1915. In attendance were the local Ittihadist leaders and notables from the city,
some 120 people in all. Those present fell into three groups. A group of 40 people argued for
limiting the pending measures to removing the Armenians from the border zones. The 20
people in the second group recommended that the Armenians be left alone. A third block,

headed by the vali, the parliamentary deputy Seyfullah, and the principal Young Turk lead-
ers of the city, demanded “that all the Armenians be eradicated, that all of them be taken
from their homes and then massacred, until not a one is left alive.” The date of this conclave
gives us reason to think that Şakir and Filibeli Hilmi took a discrete part in the discussions,
submitting the “patriotic” arguments of the Young Turk Central Committee to the consid-
eration of their friends from Erzerum. It is, consequently, probable that local officialdom and
the local elite were brought into the decision-making process in all the vilayets. The content
of the message that Şakir sent from Erzerum to the CUP delegate in Harput, Resneli Nâzım,
on the last day of the Erzerum conclave, 21 April 1915,30 reinforces this suspicion.
Furthermore, a cable that Vali Tahsin sent to the minister of the interior on 13 May 191531
seems to confirm that the army played the central role in the initial operations aimed at
cleansing the region of its Armenians. More exactly, it confirms that the CUP had chosen to
address its deportation orders to the military hierarchy as a way of legitimizing its discourse
about ensuring the security of the army’s rear. Concealed behind this official facade, however,
as the instructions dispatched by the interior minister show, was an administrative apparatus
on the one hand and the Young Turk network on the other. Yet we must not neglect the real
hostility of certain high-ranking government officials to these measures, either because they
were loath to carry out such tasks or, as in the case of Hasan Tahsin, because they were aware
of all the negative consequences that this deportation could have for the local economy,
the provisioning of the army and, more generally, the maintenance of social peace in the
vilayet. Tahsin was also made uncomfortable by allegations of an Armenian insurrection,
which seemed too implausible to him; he suggested that the civilian population be allowed
to remain at home.32 But the official response of the minister of the interior, dated 23 May,
recommended that the civilian officials of the eastern vilayets apply the orders issued by the
military authorities33 – in other words, by the commander of the Third Army, which had
jurisdiction over the six eastern vilayets.
The collection of documents for the years 1915–20 published by the General Directorate
of the State Archives unfortunately does not include the deportation order transmitted to
the valis, probably because it did not have an official character. According to Sebuh Aguni,
who had a great many documents at his disposal in his time, this order arrived in Erzerum
on 5 May 1915,34 even before the cabinet had officially decided, on 13 May,35 to deport the
Armenian population and, on the 27 May, made the “law” on the matter public.36 Thus,
there was a marked lag between the CUP’s political decisions, the corresponding discussions
in the provinces, and their formal translation. The only information we have on the content
of the message sent to the local governments is provided indirectly by the resolution of the
Council of Ministers, which still bears the marks of the Ittihad’s militant discourse and is
much less formal than the “temporary deportation law” published two weeks later. The reso-
lution is, in fact, of the order of a propaganda declaration: it evokes, pell-mell, “Armenians
engaged in dangerous operations, collaborating with the enemy, slaughtering an innocent
[Muslim] population and plotting rebellions.”37
It is probable that the Ittihadist leaders came to the conclusion, after publishing a reso-
lution designed for internal consumption, that it was not likely to appear credible outside
Ottoman circles. In any event, the deportation orders in the three eastern provinces of Van,
Bitlis, and Erzerum were issued before any decision had been reached by the cabinet. The
Central Committee used its own channels to circulate them, but rapidly realized that, despite
the presence of its delegates in the provinces, it could not set its extermination program in
motion without offering local governments a legal justification for their acts. In other words,
the CUP was at the outset certainly planning to conduct operations in line with its usual
internal procedures – in secret and without the slightest legal grounding – but then changed
its mind.

It is doubtless no accident that on the very day on which Talât confirmed the deporta-
tions from the vilayet of Erzerum – 23 May – the minister of the post and telegraph office
ordered that all its Armenian employees in the provinces of Erzerum, Angora, Adana, Sıvas,
Dyarbekir, and Van be dismissed.38 The desire to ensure the confidentiality of communica-
tions and the nature of the orders to come undoubtedly mandated such precautions.
The first operations targeting Armenian civilians were so violent that, notwithstanding
the many measures taken in advance to keep them out of the public eye, the German vice-
consul, Scheubner-Richter, felt compelled to alert his embassy. For his part, Dr. Mordtmann,
who was responsible for the “Armenian file” at the embassy, demanded an explanation from
the interior minister. Talât responded that very serious charges had been leveled against the
Armenians of Erzerum, who were involved in a conspiracy.39 He saw proof of this in the dis-
covery of “bombs,” a term to which the minister of the interior frequently resorted by way of
explanation. Yet the German diplomat’s reports and the official correspondence published by
the General Directorate of the State Archives, which are rife with accusations of this kind,
make no mention of such discoveries in Erzerum. No doubt Talât had been extemporizing.
He informed the Germans in the same breath that the decision to deport the Armenians
was irrevocable.
Deportations from Erzerum and the Surrounding Countryside

Once the decision had been made, the procedure that the authorities in Erzerum followed for
deporting Armenian civilians seems to have unfolded in accordance with a pre-established
plan. Indeed, a region-by-region chronology of the deportations rather clearly shows that
the strategy was to evacuate the eastern kazas of the vilayet first, followed by the rural areas
around the provincial capital, in order to isolate the Armenian population of Erzerum and
eliminate any possibility that it might receive outside support. Examination of the facts also
reveals that the organizers of the deportation sought to empty the towns and villages lying
along the planned deportation routes, and also to vary those routes so as to isolate the con-
voys of deportees as much as possible from each other, thus reducing the risk of resistance.
Furthermore, particularly in the case of Erzerum, the deportation committee chose to include
people in certain social categories in the first convoy, such as big merchants and traders. We
cannot explain this choice on the basis of the sources at our disposal, but the rapid expulsion
of these prominent men, who were a burden on Tahsin and must have had support among the
local Turkish population, would seem to have been a prudent next step after the arrest of the
political and intellectual elite in late April. Yet gradually isolating Erzerum also had its disad-
vantages. News of the massacres of the villagers from the plain or the outlying kazas reached
the Armenian authorities in short order. The primate, Smpat Saadetian, reacted, as usual
in the Ottoman Empire, by going to see the vali and asking him whether the Armenians of
Erzerum were to be subjected to the same fate. Saadetian asked Tahsin why there had been
so many murders of Armenian draftees assigned to the amele taburis since 14 May, and why
the Armenian villagers of the plain of Erzerum, who had set out for Mamahatun in three
big caravans on 16 May, had been systematically massacred in the vicinity of Erzerum.40 As
happened elsewhere – we have already seen how valis and mutesarifs in Van and Bitlis/Mush
maintained ostensibly friendly relations with the Armenians’ civilian and religious leaders
down to the last moment – Tahsin did his best to seem reassuring, explaining to the prelate
that these had been regrettable incidents that would not be repeated, since he had taken all
the measures required to prevent “Kurdish brigands” from again attacking the convoys of
Armenian deportees.
The German vice-consul, Scheubner-Richter likewise informed the vali that he disap-
proved of the massacres that had been perpetrated against the deportees. In response, Tahsin

Bey expressed his regrets and declared that such things would not happen again. At the same
time, he took refuge in the statement that it was Mahmud Kâmil who held “real power” in
the region.41 But all of this high government official’s skill proved insufficient to mask the
Ittihadists’ true objectives. The one thing that neither the prelate nor the diplomat knew
was that, behind the official figure of Tahsin, there existed a well-organized apparatus, that
of the Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa, supervised by one of the three leading members of the Young Turk
Central Committee, Bahaeddin Şakir.
The First Convoy from Erzerum

Obviously, the 14 June departure of this first group did not escape the German vice-consul’s
attention, the more so as it included the most influential Armenian families in Erzerum.42
Such information as the vice-consul possessed, however, was quite superficial: all he really
knew was that the men in the convoy had been killed on the road. Only the accounts of
the survivors from this group give us an inside view of the way the executioners went about
their work. Shushanig M. Dikranian and Adelina Mazmanian were both in this convoy, and
endured the ordeals inflicted on it along with all the others. The two women provide con-
verging information about the convoy’s date of departure, 16 June 1915, and the number of
families it included, 25, making a total of about 150 people.43 They disagree, however, about
the number of gendarmes escorting the convoy – one says 30, the other 50 – although both
give the name of the gendarmes’ commanding officer, Captain Nusret.44 Mazmanian even
identifies almost all the families in the convoy: Mazmanian, Kazanjian, Ohanian, Janisian,
Arushanian, Seferian, Dikranian, Nalbandian, Oskerchian, Mesrikian, Stepanian, Sarafian,
Danielian, Movsesian, Musheghian, Samuelian (the two last-named families came from
Kghi), Karagiulian, Der Melkisetegian, Keoseyan, Mozian, and Chiregian. These families
took 30 loads of goods with them on muleback. Beginning the very first time they pitched
camp, a ritual seems to have been observed: each gendarme chose a family and sat down for
dinner at the table that that family set up under a tent. Thus, this first convoy was rather spe-
cial, since it was traveling under conditions characterized by a certain standard of comfort.
Moreover, it did not take the northwestern route that led toward Erzincan, where the killing
fields under the control of the Special Organization’s “butchers’ battalions” were to be found,
but rather the route leading southwest toward Kıği and Palu.
On the third day, the relationship between the gendarmes and the notables in this first
convoy began to change. Captain Nusret suggested to those “under his protection” that they
entrust him with the sum of 600 Turkish pounds so that he could satisfy the demands of
the Kurdish brigands dogging the convoy.45 After 11 days on the road, the deportees arrived
in the kaza of Kıgi, near the village of Şoğ, where they were threatened by Kurdish çetes.
According to Mazmanian, the headman of the neighboring village, Husni Bey, promised
to protect them from the Kurds following them for one night in exchange for 260 Turkish
pounds. It was in Şoğ that the caravan was looted and three men – Musheghian, Hagop
Samuelian and Nazaret Keogishian (a native of Arapkir) – were killed.46 Dikranian notes
that during this first act of the deportees’ drama the çetes reminded them that revolutionar-
ies had massacred the population in Van, “tearing fetuses from their mothers’ bellies and
dishonoring the young women.” They used these false rumors, spread by the Turkish press, to
justify the crimes they themselves were committing.
The worst, however, was yet to come. The next day, at an hour’s march from Şoğ, while the
convoy was making its way through a thick forest, the Armenian deportees were surrounded
by a thousand Kurds under the command of two çete leaders from the Special Organization,
Ziya Beg of Başköy47 and Adıl Bey (whose real name was Adıl Güzelzâde Şerif).48 The two
men proposed to escort them safely as far as Harput in exchange for a certain sum. They

also promised to bring 50 gendarmes from Kıği in order to protect the caravan from the
local Kurdish and Turkish populace. Shortly thereafter someone blew a whistle. Nusret, the
captain of the gendarmerie who was leading the convoy, stepped aside and the massacre
began.49 According to Mazmanian, the çetes killed one of the editors of Harach, Ardashes
Kagakian, as well as Kalust Garabedian; Hovhannes, Armenag, Diran and Rupen Hanesian
and three of the Hanesian children; Mkhitar, Aram, Mushegh, and Satenig Mesrigian and
two of the Mesrigian children; Levon and Vahan Mazmanian (their sisters, our eyewitness
and her younger sister Vartanush, were abducted by Kurds); Hagop Karagulian and his wife
Armig (their two children, Nvart and Krikorig, disappeared); Yervant Keoseyan and his chil-
dren Aram and Dikran; the Antranig brothers; Mardiros and Karnig Dikranian, their mar-
ried sister Aghavni Mnatsaganian and her two children; Arshag, Sarkis and Krikor Seferian;
Garabed, Levon and Siragan Arzanian; Pakrad Daniélian; Toros Ohanian (his daughter
Mayranush was abducted by Ziya Beg); Siragan Geogushian; Bedros from Harput; Hagop
Nalbandian and his son; Harutiun and Hagop Alzugian; Hovhannes Der Melkisedegian, his
son Hampartsum and his grandson; Dikran Oskrchian and his sons Yervant and Harutiun;
Harutiun Sarafian; Harutiun Stepanian; Kevork Ghazigian; and Garabed and Hagop
Zeregian, as well as other old men, women and children whose “names” our witness had
“forgotten.”50
According to Shushanig Dikranian, the çetes were soon replaced by Kurdish women armed
with knives, who swooped down on the rest of the convoy, shouting “Para, para!” (money,
money) and rifling through the corpses.51 Our two witnesses confirm that two men survived
because they were dressed in women’s clothing – Vahan Dikranian, who was wounded, and
a servant named Parsegh, a native of Vartag. Shushanig alone adds that the men defended
themselves and killed 17 Kurds before they were overpowered and killed.52 A few women and
their children took refuge behind Captain Nusret and thus escaped the carnage, but not the
executioners’ insults and their descriptions of the way they had “hacked [the women’s] hus-
bands and children to pieces.” Several young women who had been stripped naked refused
to follow Nusret nude. The gendarmes eventually brought them clothing stained with the
blood of other, murdered members of the convoy. A few Kurds continued to attack a child.
An old man told them to leave the child alone: “It’s a pity,” he said, “let me have him. Why
kill him? He’ll grow up and will be able to do all sorts of things.” In the end, the child left
with the remains of the convoy. Of the survivors, ten more women were carried off by Kurds.
Among them were Nvart Karagulian, Mayranush Ohanian (“she is now with the çete Sayin,
in a village in the Dyarbekir area”), and Vartanush Mazmanian.
After traversing Palu, the 30 or so survivors trekked through the village of Bazu, where the
ground was littered with corpses and there was hardly a sign of life. A 25-year-old man, who
had hidden in a mulberry tree, was apparently the only survivor.53 When the group reached
the plain of Harput – this is an interesting detail – and then the little town of Hiuseinig,
the Armenian population had not yet been deported. When the people of Hiuseinig saw the
condition of their compatriots from Erzerum, says Shushanig Dikranian, they began to real-
ize what lay in store for them. In the principal city in the vilayet, Harput, the deportation
of the population was just beginning when this group of survivors arrived. The prelate, Bsag
vartabed, and other dignitaries had just been put on the road. The deportees now understood
that their hopes of receiving help from their compatriots were in vain. These 30 women and
children were soon Islamicized and parceled out among various Turkish households, where
some of them (Gayane Nalbandian and Nazenig Zeregian) found new husbands.54 After the
deportees had remained there for 40 days, the deported women were apprehended by the
police in the homes in which they had been placed. Vahan Dikranian, the only surviving
man, was incarcerated with the 900 Armenians being detained in the prison of Harput.
Every night, Shushanig Dikranian reports, small groups of these men were taken from the

prison, led outside the city limits and killed. One night the prison caught fire. The authori-
ties declared that fedayis were responsible for the blaze. This was true in a sense: the fire had
spread to the prison from the pyre on which the corpses of 20 Armenian “fedayis” were being
immolated.55
Shushanig Dikranian made several attempts to save her brother-in-law, Vahan Dikranian,
by appealing to the military authorities. It turned out that the commander of the garrison
in Mamuret ul-Aziz, Süleyman Faik, knew her family, the Der Azarians. Faik promised that
he would see to it that Vahan Dikranian was not killed, even while reminding Shushanig,
to show her how generous his act was, that the local authorities had in their possession “an
order from Istanbul to the effect that [the Turks] should not leave a single Armenian alive
on the face of the earth.” Shushanig Dikranian asked him why, in that case, were she and
the other women not dead? The brigadier general’s answer was, as it were, a practical expres-
sion of the Ittihadists’ Turkism: “Because our own women are utterly ignorant, we have
to take Armenian women to improve our family lives.” Shushanig herself was confronted
with a practical application of this Young Turk officer’s views. A Turkish family sought her
12-year-old daughter in marriage for their young son. The girl rebelled at the idea, saying that
the people who wanted her to marry into their family had murdered her father. In fact, the
approximately 200 women and girls from diverse localities who had found refuge in Harput
by then were invited to convert to Islam.56 A ceremony was organized by the authorities. It
afforded Turkish families an opportunity to select a daughter-in-law for themselves.
These operations offer an occasion to evaluate the nature of the relations that were subse-
quently established between the families of the newlyweds. Shushanig’s “in-laws,” for exam-
ple, demanded that she procure the means they needed to send her future son-in-law to
pursue his studies Constantinople. Apparently some people were not unaware that these rich
families had accounts in the Erzerum branch of the Banque Ottomane. What they did not
know, however, was that the directors of this bank in Constantinople had set a limit of 25
Turkish pounds per person on withdrawals by Armenian deportees.57 Shushanig Dikranian’s
request, made under her former name, to make a withdrawal from the bank was honored
two weeks later, when she received 50 Turkish pounds from the bank, enough to rid herself
of her “in-laws.” These forms of pressure induced the Armenians to turn to the American
consulate, where they were apparently well received. As the circumcision ceremony of her
son Bedros drew closer, Shushanig decided to flee to Aleppo.58 Adelina Mazmanian, for her
part, chose to return to Erzincan, and then Erzerum by way of Dersim when she learned that
Erzerum had fallen to the Russians.59
The Second Convoy from Erzerum

After the departure of the first convoy, the primate of Erzerum, Smpat Saadetian, who had
received specific information about the massacres in the sancak of Erzincan, went to see
the vali and the German vice-consul. The vali told him that the Armenians of Erzerum
would be spared and that incidents of the kind he had been told about would not happen
again. The German promised to protect the Armenian bishop. The primate let himself be
persuaded and urged his flock to obey. The second convoy set out in the direction of Bayburt
on 18 June 1915. It was made up of 1,300 middle-class families, who were joined en route
by 370 families from the little town of Garmirk (in the kaza of Kiskim), making a total of
some 10,000 people. They were escorted by hundreds of gendarmes commanded by Captain
Muştağ and Captain Nuri, under the supervision of two leaders of the Special Organization,
the kaymakam of Kemah and Kozukcioğlu Munir.60 Two survivors from this convoy, Garabed
Deirmenjian and Armenag Sirunian, later stated, referring to their arrival in Pirnagaban, a
village halfway between Erzerum and Bayburt: “We encountered an automobile in which the

famous Dr. Bahaeddin Şakir and Oturakci Şevket were sitting ... We learned a few days later
that they were on their way back from Ispir, where they had organized the eradication of all
the Armenians living in that district.”61 The caravan made its way through Bayburt, which
had already been emptied of its Armenian population, and reached the bridge that spans
the Euphrates at the entrance to the Kemah gorge without mishap. Here çete bands led by
Oturakci Şevket and Hurukcizâde Vehib sorted the deportees into groups. Several hundred
men were separated from the rest of the convoy. Guarded by çetes, the caravan continued
on its way southwest as far as the area around Hasanova. There, the irregulars of the Special
Organization extorted money from the deportees, who were traveling on foot or in carts
and pitched their tents every night. They then proceeded to carry out the first massacre.
Thereafter, the convoy continued on its way, passing close by Eğin/Agn and Arapkir, and
finally arriving near Malatia. There, the deportees camped in a place known as Bey Bunar,
where their guards from Erzerum turned them over to the local authorities, first and foremost
the mutesarif of Malatia, Reşid Bey.62
When the caravan reached the mountain district of Kahta, south of Malatia and east of
Adiyaman, the deportees were suddenly confronted with an appalling sight: the gorge just
outside Fırıncilar was filled with the corpses of people from earlier convoys. They were, in
fact, entering one of the main killing fields regularly used by the Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa. It had
been put under the supervision of the parliamentary deputy from Dersim, Haci Baloşzâde
Mehmed Nuri, and his brother Ali Pasha, who had two Kurdish leaders from the Reşvan
tribe under their command, Zeynel Bey and Haci Bedri Ağa, as well as Bitlisli Emin, a retired
gendarmerie officer.63 Once the caravan reached the gorge, Zeynel Bey directed operations
from a height, following a well-established ritual. He first had the men separated from the
convoy and put to death. The operation went on for a full hour and a half. According to
Alphonse Arakelian, who was in this convoy, 3,600 people lost their lives, but some one
hundred men survived.64 One of Arakelian’s companions, Sarkis Manukian, later declared,
for his part, that 2,115 men were slain that day in the Kahta gorge.65
The next day, the deportees, who the surviving men had rejoined, came face to face
with a newly arrived inspector (mufettiş), “officially” representing the mutesarif of Malatia
and the kaymakam of Adiyaman. The mufettiş ordered that the deportees be subjected to a
body search, and had “tents, rugs and anything else that seemed as if it might have value”
confiscated, including watches, jewels, money, and checks. The survivors then set out on
their way again. They now encountered the kaymakam of Adiyaman, Nuri Bey, who had
probably come in order to assess the effects of the treatment to which the deportees were
being subjected, but also to claim the share of the Armenians’ property due to the Special
Organization. The deportees’ route led them back to the banks of the Euphrates at Samsad,
where the gendarmes threw “the sick and crippled” into the river and made off with young
women and children. Four months after the second convoy left Erzerum, “what was left of
some sixty families” arrived in Suruc (in the sancak of Urfa). From there they were set march-
ing in the direction of Rakka and the Syrian Desert.66
Thanks to Boghos Vartanian’s eyewitness account, we know what happened to the men
who were separated from the convoy at Kemah. There were between 900 and 1,000 people in
this group. Their escorts carefully searched them and stripped them of their belongings on the
Kemah road. Three hundred Armenians were packed into a stable on the spot and left with-
out food and water; they had to bribe their guards to open the door to let in a little air or give
them water from the Euphrates, which they paid for by the glassful. The guards exacted 2,000
Turkish pounds in the form of checks from another group of 160 men who had been shut up
in the church in exchange for a promise to set them free. In the small hours of the morning,
when the commander arrived, a list of the deportees present was drawn up, specifying their
age and place of origin. The same officer informed them that they were to be assigned to labor

battalions but that for security reasons they would do better to turn their money and valu-
ables over to him. Only half-convinced by these reassuring words, the deportees gave him a
mere 14 Turkish pounds, along with rings and 14 watches. The çetes then entered the stable
and brought the men out in groups of from 15 to 30, after tying them together. The wealthi-
est individuals were tied together in pairs, back to back, so that they could walk only with
difficulty. This was on 18 July. The prison, too, was emptied of its last occupants, some 20
Dashnaks – Vagharshag Zorigian, Bedros Baghdigian, Shah-Armen, Vahan Dandigian and
others – who had requested that they be tied together and killed together.
These groups of bound men were then taken under guard toward the Euphrates and the
bridge over the Kemah gorge. The operation was directed by the strong man of the district,
Çetebaşi Jafer Mustafa, who had chosen the heights where the groups of men were killed
before being thrown down into the turbulent waters of the Euphrates.67
Vartan Der Azarian was one of the first to die. He asked that those who survived tell his
family where he had been slain. The çetes circulated among the groups who were waiting for
their turn to be killed, collecting the money that the deportees would no longer need. Some
of these irregulars were perhaps sorry that they had to do a job of this sort: “We are only car-
rying out government orders,” they said. Some even declared that they were collecting this
money “in order to give it to [the men’s] families, who had been detained elsewhere.”
By nightfall, there were only ten “roped groups” left. The çete leader Jafer ordered his men
to abandon the usual methods, which involved killing the people in these groups one by one,
and execute them all at once instead. When the group of men in which our witness found
himself reached the edge of the cliff overhanging the Euphrates, they saw hundreds of life-
less bodies down below; the çetes were inspecting them and finishing the wounded off with
their bayonettes.68 Of this last group, attacked at dusk, less carefully than had been the case
in the preceding hours, four wounded men survived because the bodies under which they
found themselves lying had protected them. These men were Boghos Vartanian, our wit-
ness, Bedros Baghdasarian, and two peasants from the plain, Yervant Kloyan and Harutiun
Mnatsaganian. After walking east along the left bank of the Euphrates, the survivors finally
decided to head toward Dersim, where the local Kurds were reported – accurately – to be
protecting Armenian deportees. Bedros eventually collapsed in the sand, temporarily unable
to go on.69
After a four-day trek, the men arrived in Dersim on 22 July, where the Kurds fed them
and sent them on to their mountain pastures. Krikor, an Armenian orphan between 10 and
12 years old whom they met on their way, served Boghos Vartanian as a guide and gave
him all the bread he had as provisions for the rest of his voyage. As Boghos penetrated ever
deeper into the Dersim district, he met 16 Armenians from Kampor/Koghk (in the kaza
of Ispir/Sper) and then, on 28 July, two families from Erzincan. The women fed him and
tended his wounds.70 The case of these Armenians who found refuge in Dersim was no rar-
ity. Vartanian met others, such as Father Arsen Arshaguni from the village of Ergans (in the
kaza of Erzincan), who was now living in the camp of Ali Said Ağa. Our witness remained in
the same camp for ten months, until spring 1916, when the Russians took Erzincan. When
he returned to Erzerum, Vartanian found its Armenian neighborhoods in ruins; the houses
had been burned down.71
The Third Convoy from Erzerum

The third caravan left Erzerum on 29 June 1915. Made up of from 7,000 to 8,000 individu-
als, including 500 families from the Khodorchur district, it was conducted toward Bayburt
and Erzincan. In Içkale, a ten-hour march from the city, 300 men were separated from the
others and slain. Further on, in Kemah, all the remaining males were separated from the

rest of the convoy and led into the gorges of the Euphrates, where they were supposed to be
killed. However, hundreds of the men in this group defended themselves against the çetes’
attacks before finally surrendering. The famous Zeynel Bey later liquidated the survivors in
a gorge south of Malatia. Only a few dozen women and children in this convoy ever reached
Mosul.72
The Fourth Convoy from Erzerum

The fourth caravan left Erzerum for Bayburt on 18 July. It was made up of 7,000 to 8,000 peo-
ple, basically workers in military plants, the families of soldiers, army doctors and pharma-
cists, together with bishop Smpat Saadetian, the primate of the diocese, and Father Nerses,
the prelate in Hasankale.73 Saadetian was one of the first victims in this group; the çetes
made him dig his own grave in the Erzincan cemetery before “tearing him to pieces and
tossing him into it” under the gaze of a Greek army veterinarian, M. Nikolai.74 The Special
Organization’s well-oiled apparatus then took charge of the convoy: the men were dispatched
in Kemah and the women and children in Harput. Roughly 300 survivors, including two
men disguised as women, managed to reach Cezire and then Mosul.75
Deportations from the Plain of Erzerum: the Kazas

of Pasın, Tortum, Ispir and Erzerum
As we have seen, the rural areas of the vilayet of Ererum were emptied of their Armenian
population well before the cities. Most of the population of the sancak of Bayazid found
refuge in the Caucasus, whereas the last villages of the Pasın district began to be “displaced
toward the interior” late in March.76 However, the towns and villages in Pasın lying near the
Russian border that were evacuated in December 1914 or January 1915 were not spared atroc-
ities. Half of the livestock (800 sheep, 1,400 cows, and 230 water buffalo) belonging to the
villagers of Khosroveran, where 40 families earned a living mainly from animal husbandry,
were seized during the military requisitions in fall 1914 without the compensation provided
for by the law. Eleven men were massacred during the Turkish army’s retreat, the Mgrdichian
family was Islamicized, seven people were killed while fleeing toward the Russian border, and
five children were abandoned en route.77 In the neighboring village of Ishkhu, where 1,100
Armenians lived before the war, 70 per cent of the community’s livestock (2,600 cows and
2,700 sheep) was confiscated to meet the army’s needs at the very outset of the mobilization.
The village also contributed 45 conscripts and 20 to 30 porters to the war effort; the porters
carried supplies to the front on their backs. Moreover, 30 adults were massacred on the spot
during the January 1915 debacle, another 45 people died on the way to the Caucasus, and
eight children were abandoned along the way.78
We have only an indirect account about the kaza of Ispir, which comprised 17 small vil-
lages with a total Armenian population of 2,602. Thanks to this account, we know that
these villagers were exterminated where they were found toward mid-June 1915 under the
direct supervision of Bahaeddin Şakir and the çete leader Oturakci Şevket.79 Of the fate of
the 13 villages in the kaza of Tortum (pop. 2,829), where the Third Army had its headquar-
ters, and the two neighboring localities in the kaza of Narman (pop. 458),80 we know nothing
at all. At most, we can hazard a guess that the presence of Armenian peasants in the imme-
diate vicinity of the army’s headquarters was not tolerated for long. The complete absence of
eyewitness reports even suggests that there were no survivors from these districts – that their
fate was similar to Ispir’s.
We know more about the fate of the 53 villages of the plain of Erzerum, with a total
Armenian population of 37,480.81 While the population of the localities in the immediate

vicinity of Erzerum was deported at the same time as that of the city itself, those remain-
ing, roughly 30,000 people, were deported in the direction of Mamahatun in three con-
voys, beginning on 16 May 1915.82 There seems, however, to be no geographical logic to
the route taken by one of the three caravans, given the location of the deportees’ villages.
Inhabitants of localities west of Erzerum were put in the same convoy as inhabitants of
others north of it. Thus, it is likely that the authorities’ strategy consisted – as in the case
of the plain of Erzerum, to be discussed later – in making their system invulnerable to
attack by treating the villages independently of each other, concentrating their forces on
just a few villages or little towns at a time and evacuating villages located far apart from
one another, probably to avoid all risk that the villagers would pool their forces and fight
back.
The first convoy included the inhabitants of the villages of Chiftlig, Gez, Kararz/Ghararz,
and Odzni; it seems to have reached Erzincan without losses. The second was made up of
villagers from Ilija, Tsitogh, Mudurga, Hintsk, Tvnig, and a few other places; they were mas-
sacred as soon as they reached Mamahatun. The third and final convoy evacuated the peas-
ants of Umudam, Badishen, Tarkuni, Ughdatsor, Norshen, Yergnis and a few other villages.
A good many of its members were cut down in Piriz, a locality close to the banks of the
Euphrates a short distance north of Tercan. A few survivors nevertheless managed to return
to the plain, and eventually found refuge in the cathedral in Erzerum.83
Unlike the convoys that left the city in June, these caravans passed directly through
Mamahatun and proceeded to Erzincan without taking the route that led through Bayburt.
That difference aside, the treatment meted out to them was much the same as that to which
the other Armenians of the vilayet were subjected. Their numbers were first reduced as
they passed through the Kemah gorge. The survivors were then conducted toward Eğin and
Malatia and massacred in the Kahta gorge. Finally, the remnants of the convoys arrived in
the deserts near Rakka, Mosul, or Der Zor. Because Dersim was so close, a few hundred peo-
ple managed to escape death by taking refuge with the Kurdish Zaza/Kızılbaş population of
that district.84 A few eyewitness accounts by survivors from these villages, collected after the
arrival of Russian troops in the region in spring 1916, provide information about the experi-
ences of the Dersim refugees. Thus, we learn that of the 2,050 people who lived in the village
of Mudurga before the war, 36 saved their lives by fleeing to Dersim. As for the inhabitants of
Shekhnots, which had a population of 700 before the deportation, there were no indications
one year later that any had survived. It seems that only a few women from Tuanch, which
had 695 Armenian inhabitants, 50 of whom had been drafted, managed to survive in the
deserts of Syria and Mesopotamia. Of the surviving inhabitants of Hinsk, we know of only
three Islamicized families who reverted to their original faith after the Russians arrived, and
33 refugees who fled to Dersim. Seventy-five survivors from Otsni/Odzni arrived in Syria, and
two more found refuge in Dersim.85
The Kaza of Bayburt

To this northern kaza with its roughly 30 Armenian localities and a total Christian popu-
lation of 17,060,86 the Young Turk government had sent one of its most faithful militants,
Mehmed Nusret Bey, a native of Janina, to serve as the kaymakam of Bayburt. The Special
Organization, for its part, put its squadrons in the area under the command of Lieutenant
Piri Necati Bey.87 This district, through which ran the roads leading south from the shores
of the Black Sea as well as the main road between Erzincan and Erzerum, was cleansed of
its Armenian population earlier than most others. As early as 2 May 1915, the Armenian
villages in the northern part of the kaza were set upon by bands of çetes. The next day, the
military authorities issued an order to “remove” the Armenian population from all areas

within 75 kilometers of the border. The first to be arrested and murdered were the notables
of the village communities.
What gives a particular twist to the events of May–June 1915 is the fact that operations
in this period were directly supervised by Bahaeddin Şakir, who traveled from Erzerum to
Bayburt in order personally to establish the procedures to be used during the deportations and
massacres, first in the villages and then in the cities and towns. He had Nusret Bey appointed
president of the deportation committee, which was made up of Piri Mehmed Necati Bey; Ince
Arab Mehmed, a government official; Arnavud Polis, the police chief; Kefelioğlu Süleyman
Paşazâde Hasib; Velizâde Tosun; Şahbandarzâde Ziya; Musuh Bey Zâde Necib; Karalı Kâmil;
Kondolatizâde Haci Bey; and Ince Arab Yogun Necib.88
The trial of those who organized and carried out the massacres in Bayburt, which was
held in July 1920 before Court-Martial No. 1 in Istanbul, provides us with information that
we lack in the case of the other regions of the vilayet of Erzerum. The testimony of Adıl Bey,
a captain in the gendarmerie stationed in Erzerum, shows that the massacres in the kaza of
Bayburt were organized by Bahaeddin Şakir, the “president of the Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa” and
a member of the party’s Central Committee; Filibeli Ahmed Hilmi Bey, the party’s delegate
in Erzerum; Saadi Bey, a nephew of the senator Ahmed Rıza bey and a lieutenant in the
reserve; and Necati Bey. The verdict handed down by the court-martial states, finally, that
the massacres perpetrated in this region were the first to be discussed and decided upon by
“the headquarters [of the Central Committee] of the Union and Progress party” and that
they were organized under Bahaeddin Şakir’s authority.89
In the course of this trial, it was established that Lieutenant Mehmed Necati voluntarily
transferred most of the mobile battalions of the gendarmerie to the front so that he himself
could escort the convoys of deportees. In other words, the Special Organization considered
the gendarmes to be an obstacle to the realization of its plans. At their trial, of course,
Necati and Nusret adamantly proclaimed their innocence of the crimes they were charged
with. They were, however, contradicted by Salih Effendi, the commander of the brigade of
the gendarmerie in Bayburt, who testified before the commission of inquiry that a few of his
men had been charged with carrying out arrests of army deserters or draft dodgers. The gen-
darmes in the region had, however, not escorted the caravans of deported Armenians, who
were taken in hand by Necati Bey. They never arrived in Erzincan.90
Other witnesses, such as Hasanoğlu Ömer, who was responsible for provisions and sup-
plies in Bayburt, declared before the commission that Kefalioğlu Kiaşif, a lieutenant in a
labor battalion, Iliasoğlu Sabit, and others, deported the Armenians from Bayburt in several
convoys: “At two hours’ distance from Bayburt, they took the children aged between one and
five from the convoys and brought them back to the town.” Ali Esadoğlu Effendi, a native of
Baştucar (in the kaza of Surmene), added that Nusret was a close friend of Tahsin Bey’s and
that he sent 150 orphans to Binbaşihan, where he invited the inhabitants of the village to
choose those they wished to “adopt.” All reports concur about the fact that Deyirmendere,
located on the first spurs of the Pontic Mountains to the north of the town, was the place
where most of these deportees were put to death.91
It would thus appear that the CUP had from the outset planned to recover children
of five and under in order to integrate them into the great Turkish family. The age limit
mentioned here suggests that the condition for this “integration” was that the children be
too young to remember their origins. Interestingly, Armenian women and children were
sought-after commodities. When Armenians were rejected, what was rejected was their
identity. It should be noted that Nusret Bey, the 44-year-old kaymakam of Bayburt who
“committed crimes during the deportation of the Armenians from his kaza,” helped him-
self to the 24-year-old Philomen Nurian of Trebizond and her younger sister “Nayime.”92
Accounts by survivors attest that Nusret sent the deportees to Binbaşihan and Hindihan,

where he had all their money confiscated; that he was present while the massacres took
place; and that, with the gendarmes’ help, he secured the prettiest girls and young women
for himself and carried them off. Nusret nevertheless maintained that the convoys of
deportees from Bayburt were sent to Erzincan. The court pointed out in response that they
never arrived there.93
The procedure employed here, at this experimental stage, was rather similar to the one
that would be adopted in other areas in the weeks to come. The first concrete action taken
was the arrest, on 18 May 1915, of the leading personalities of Bayburt – the primate, Anania
Hazarabedian, as well as Antranig Boyajian, Hagop and Smpat Aghababian, Arshag and
Manug Simonian, Ohannes and Serop Balian, Zakeos Ayvazian, Khachig Boghosian, Hagop
and Aram Hamazaspian, Vagharshag Dadurian, Vagharshag Lusigian, Antranig Sarafian,
Krikor Keynageuzian, Hamazasp Shalamian, and 60 other people. Those arrested were sent
to the village of Tighunk, guarded by a squadron of çetes under Nusret’s personal command.
There they were shut up in a stable belonging to the mufti, Kuruca Koruğ, where a squadron
of Turkish and Kurdish çetes stripped them of their belongings. On 21 May, the kaymakam
had them hanged to the beating of drums on the banks of the Jorok.94
On 24 May came the first attacks on the villages Aruk/Ariudzga (pop. 370), Chahmants
(pop. 502), Malasa (pop. 380), Khayek (pop. 361), and Lipan. On 25 May, Tumel (pop. 204),
Lesonk (pop. 981), and another ten or so villages were attacked; a total of 1,775 people were
evacuated and led to the gorge of Hus/Khus. Here they were massacred, under Nusret’s and
Necati’s direct supervision, by bands of çetes commanded by Huluki Hafiz Bey, Kasab Durak,
Derviş Ağa, Kasab Ego, Attar Feyzi, and Laze Ilias. On 27 and 28 May 1915, the inhabitants
of 24 more villages were evacuated and led in the direction of Hus/Khus, but were massacred
further off, near the village of Yanbasdi.95
According to the report of a survivor by the name of Mgrdich Muradian, the Turkish
population of Bayburt was opposed to the deportation of the Armenians; the kaymakam is
supposed to have had three Turks executed to bring people to reason.96 The first caravan
nevertheless left Bayburt on 4 June 1915, followed by a second caravan on 8 June and a third
on 14 June. In all, some 3,000 people were deported. As early as 11 June, İsmail Ağa, İbrahim
Bey, and Pirı Mehmed Necati Bey set about destroying the monasteries of Surp Kristapor in
Bayburt and Surp Krikor in Lesonk, after plundering them. The aim was doubtless to gain
possession of the monasteries’ treasures, but also to set in motion without delay the effort to
wipe out all traces of the Armenians’ millennial presence in the region, especially the superb
architectural monuments of the early Middle Ages.
According to Mgrdich Muradian, who was in one of the convoys that left Bayburt in the
first half of June, his convoy followed the road leading from Erzincan over the Kemah Bridge
to Arapkir, as far as Gümuşmaden. There, Kurdish çetes began systematically slaughtering
the deportees. A few women and children managed to make their way to a village lying
between Arapkir and Harput, Khule kiugh (Huleköy). From there, Kurdish ağas took them
to Dersim. In this way, 80 people escaped with their lives. They eventually found refuge in
Erzincan after the Russian forces captured the city.97
Keghvart Lusigian, who was probably in the same caravan as Muradian, reports that her
group was taken to a place two hours distant from Bayburt; there the men were separated
from the others and killed. In Plur, the convoy was attacked by Kurdish çetes, who slit the
throats of the last men in the group, Hagop Aghababian, Zakar Sheiranian, and Keghvart’s
brother Garabed Lusigian. The çetes then robbed the deportees and abducted a number of
young women. In Kemah, they put women, adolescent girls, and children in separate groups,
which were then given as gifts to Turks who had come from Erzincan for the purpose. Four
hundred women and girls were selected, but some of them succeeded in throwing themselves
into the Euphrates. According to Lusigian, some 300 women from Erzerum were “married”

to officers in Erzincan and another 200 were “married” to government officials. She herself
“belonged” to a kadi by the name of Şakir.98
It seems that the stretch of the Euphrates near the Kemah gorge also served to drown
2,833 children from the kaza of Bayburt99 who were too old to be “adopted.”
The Kaza of Hinis/Khnus

The 25 Armenian villages in the kaza of Hinis/Khnus, which lay in an isolated area in
the southern part of the sancak of Erzerum, had 21,382 inhabitants.100 These villagers
did not suffer the fate of the other localities in the region, but were massacred on their
native ground. As elsewhere, operations began with the arrest of the local elites. In Khnus,
the administrative seat of the kaza, Nusreddin Effendi, Haci Isa, Fehim Effendi, Şükrü
Mahmud Ağaoğlu, and Egid Yusuf Ağaoğlu formed a deportation committee that was
headed by Şeyh Said. This committee recruited çetes from the local Turkish population
and made public declarations about the threat to Islam embodied by the Armenians, said
to be preparing “to join with their brothers of Russia in order to massacre Muslims.”101 The
first massacres were perpetrated in the kaza in April, when Hoca Hamdi Bey, the com-
mander of a squadron of çetes, led his men, billeted in the Armenian village of Gopal in
the eastern part of the kaza, in an attack on two neighboring localities, Karaçoban (pop.
2,571) and Gövenduk/Geovendug (pop. 1,556). The çetes massacred a number of peasants,
abducted young women, and plundered the villages.102 Tahir Bey, the kaymakam of Khnus,
was by no means the least zealous when it came to liquidating Armenian villagers. It was
Tahir who took command of the 600 to 700 çetes recruited by the deportation committee.
In these remote rural mountain districts, the Turkist ideology of the Istanbul elites was
a less powerful spring of action than Ottoman Islam, so that the latter rather than the
former was exploited to mobilize local energies. Tahir was a classic example of the middle-
level government officials with a rudimentary education who nursed a deep hatred of these
Armenian villagers pretentious enough to try to give their children a proper education and
make social life a little less rude. Faithfully following the strategy designed by the Special
Organization, the kaymakam began by attacking his prey where it was weakest. The first
victims of the “deportations” initiated on 1 June 1915103 were the villagers of Karaçoban, or
what was left of it: they were taken to the furrows that the waters of the melting snow had
carved in the Çağ gorge and had their throats cut. The neighboring village of Geovendug
was subjected to the same fate the very same day. The çetes next attacked the villages of
Burnaz/Purnaq (pop. 449) and Karaköprü (pop. 1,161); their inhabitants were stabbed and
clubbed to death in an isolated area.104
The task of massacring the remaining villagers had been entrarsted to a Kurdish chief-
tain, Feyzullah, who inaugurated his campaign in the village of Khert (pop. 408) at the
head of a squadron of çetes, then attacked Khozlu (pop. 1,770), a village controlled by a Kurd
named Moro. Feyzullah and his çetes first killed the men and then proceeded to slaughter
the women and children, taking “the prettiest women for themselves” as they went along.
The inhabitants of the village of Yeniköy (pop. 451), in turn, had their throats cut in the
Kurdish village of Burhana, where their neighbors had invited them to take refuge. Some
of the villagers of Çevirme (pop. 1,361) were subjected to the same fate at Kızmusa, while
the rest were put to the sword by Feyzullah’s bands. The most agonizing death was reserved
for the inhabitants of Elbis (pop. 608): Şükrü Bey, their “protector,” burned them alive in a
barn.105
In the first days of May, Aghchamelik (pop. 318) and Pazkig (pop. 876) were attacked by
Feyzullah’s squadrons, as were Shabadin (pop. 391), Maruf (pop. 338) and Duman (pop. 398).
The inhabitants of all these villages were put to death.

The Armenians of Yahya (pop. 305) were liquidated by the garrison established in this
village. Khırımkaya (pop. 425), Salvori (pop. 245), Dorukhan and Gopal (pop. 1,375) were
wiped off the map by soldiers under the command of Haci Hamdi. Thanks to accounts by
three different eyewitnesses, we know that 75 men from Gopal, a village with a great deal
of livestock, were arrested and shot during the Russian offensive of late April 1915 – Israel
Sarksian, Dikran Avdalian, Tiko Kévorkian and Egho Barigian, among others – and that
the remaining villagers were massacred by the soldiers quartered in the village. A few people
managed to flee to the Russian lines, while a child, Harutiun Serovpian, was adopted by
Kurds and converted to Islam.106
It seems that only the villagers of Sarlu (pop. 540) and Mezhengerd (pop. 75), both near
Khnus, were deported, to an unknown destination.107 The last village to be attacked, Haramig
(pop. 898), valiantly withstood the çetes’ assaults under the command of Hagop Kharpertsi,
a hekim who practiced traditional medicine. The people of Haramig held out for two weeks
until their ammunition ran out; they inflicted heavy losses on the Kurds.
A few old men and children who had survived these slaughters and been left to wander
through the villages were gathered together in Hinis and deported a few weeks later.108
The Kaza of Tercan/Mamahatun

Lying astride the southern Erzerum-Erzincan road, the 41 Armenian villages of the kaza of
Tercan/Mamahatun had a total Armenian population of 11,690 on the eve of the war.109 The
deportations began in these villages on 30 and 31 May. They were directed by the parliamen-
tary deputy from Kemah, Halet Bey, the son of the former vali of Erzerum, Sağar Zâde, who
had organized squadrons of çetes made up of Muslims from the Kemah and Erzincan areas
as soon as the general mobilization was decreed.110 These bands, under the command of the
chief of the Balaban tribe, Gülo Ağa, were placed under the joint supervision of the mutesarif
of Erzincan, Memduh Bey, and the kaymakam of Tercan, Aslan Hafız.111
According to survivors’ reports, the men were massacred either where they were found or
some 15 miles to the south in Goter/Gotır Köprü, where the squadron commanded by Gülo
Ağa was waiting for them. Here they were stripped of their belongings, their throats were cut,
and they were thrown into the Euphrates.112 Survivors from the villages of Pulk (pop. 778),113
Pakarij (pop. 1,060),114 Sargha/Sarikaya (pop. 695),115 and Piriz (pop. 855)116 later affirmed
that some of those who survived these massacres were driven as far as Erzincan and then on
to the Kemah pass, where they were killed.
The Kaza of Kıği/Kghi

In the 50 Armenian villages of the kaza of Kıği, with a total Armenian population of
19,859,117 the mobilization and requisitions took place under conditions of relative calm,
thanks especially to the goodwill of the kaymakam. In May, however, he was replaced by
the commander of a squadron of çetes of the Special Organization, Laze Midhat Mehmed
Bey,118 who created a deportation committee. The committee was made up of Çinazzâde
Mustafa, the president of the local Ittihad club; Mehmedzâde Hilmi, a native of Kars; Husni
İsmail Çavuszâde Şakir, an assistant of the kaymakam’s; Haci Ahmedzâde Müdad, the mufti;
and Davudzâde Hafız. The leaders of the squadrons of çetes involved in the massacre of the
deportees from Kıği were Zeynelzâde Hasan;119 Erzrumli Ömer; Şeyhzâde Necibet and his
sons Hafız, Tevfik, Rıza, Beyti, and Mahmud; Dede and Ali Hamdi Abidoğlu, from Osnag;
İsmail Hüseyin; Ahmedoğlu Mehmed, from Hoghas; Osman Bey, the müdir (administrator)
of the nahie of Çılheder; Fazıl Bey, from Oror; Cemal Bey, from Tarman; Karaman Effendi;
and Ulaşzâde Mustafa and İzzet Ağa, from Karmrug. Ziya Beg, a native of Başköy, and Adıl

Güzelzâde Şerif, who participated in the massacre of the deportees from Erzerum, were also
involved here.120
On 8 June 1915, the new kaymakam, Laze Midhat Mehmed Bey, announced the order
to deport Armenians from the war zone to Harput to the primate, Kegham Tivekelian, and
the other 25 notables whom he had convoked. The Armenians’ safety, he said, would be
assured. The muezzin helped spread the order, adding that the Armenian population was to
be deported three days later. An order was also issued to stock food supplies in the church. In
the same period, Kıği, the administrative seat of the kaza, was required to billet a battalion
from Dyarbekir at Armenian expense.121
Tension had been running high in the villages of the kaza for a few days before the depor-
tation order was made public: the authorities had sent çetes there to collect the inhabit-
ants’ arms, threatening to have the men shot if they did not surrender their weapons. The
Armenians, however, turned in only their hunting rifles, hiding their other weapons in the
fields. The young people who were left in the village made plans to defend themselves, but
the prelate of Kıği requested that they do nothing of the sort. The kaymakam sent a lawyer
by the name of Toros Sadghigian to the area to investigate the situation, but Sadghigian was
murdered near the village of Sergevil by Zeynelzâde Hasan.122
According to Vahan Postoyan, a native of the village of Khups, Hıde Ibiz, a Kurdish chief-
tain from Dersim, attacked Akrag (pop. 350) with his followers on 3 June 1915, plundering
the village and killing several men. On 5 June, similar atrocities were committed – again
on the pretext of a search for arms – in the mixed villages of Hubeg (pop. 200), Kariköy/
Khasgerd (pop. 122) and Kholkhol/Kulkum (pop. 53). Sergevil (pop. 658) and its medieval
monastery, Surp Prgich, were attacked on 6 June; three-quarters of the village’s inhabitants
were slain. On 7 June, Herdig/Herdif (pop. 700) met the same fate.123
However, when the bands of çetes attacked the village of Khups/Çanakci (pop. 1,216) at
six o’clock on 7 June 1915, they were met with gunfire from the peasants, organized into six
self-defense groups led by Suren Postoyan, Srabion Postoyan, Mesrob Matosian, Hovhannes
Khoteian, Manug Elesigian, Baghdasar Der Garabedian, Yerazayig Kholkholtsi, and Zakar
Postoyan. After two days of uninterrupted fighting, which cost 40 Kurdish çetes and one
Armenian (Giragos Baghdigian) their lives, the villagers decided to break through the
enemy lines. They succeeded, but were all killed somewhat further off in a mill, in which
they fought to the last bullet.124
In the first days of June 1915, arrests took place in the other villages of the kaza. Among
those arrested in Dzirmak were Melkon Aloyan, Garabed Tchavushian, Hovhannes
Kalayjian, and Krikor Maghoyian and, in Tarman, Sarkis Endroyian, Sarkis Sarkisian, Arsen
Varzhabedian, Mampre Bardizbanian, and others. These men were transferred to the town of
Kıği in chains and killed with axes.125 Finally, the irregulars proceeded to encircle the town
and the remaining villages in the kaza. According to Vahan Postoyan, the initial operations
conducted in the villages of the district of Kıği by the çetes of the Special Organization
resulted in the deaths of 1,500 people.126
On 10 June 1915, the authorities arrested the heads of the town’s affluent households.127
They were put in the first caravan of 1,200 people that, accompanied by Bishop Tivekelian,
set out from Kıği toward the southwest on 11 June. On 13 May, this group arrived near
Tepe, in Deli Mizi, on the road to Palu. The bishop and a number of notables, including
Smpat Musheghian, Antranig Yesayan, Aghaser, the director of the town’s Armenian
schools, Hovhannes Boghosian, Hovagim and Hagop Hovhannisian, Diran, Armen Srabian,
Stepan Kurkjian, Vahram Kotan, Yesayi Yesayian, Vahan and Sarkis Dumanian, Avedis and
Kegham Kachperuni, Harutiun Oynoyian, Kevork Tcheogurian, and Senekerim Kharpertsi
were separated from the rest of the convoy, ostensibly in order to meet with the president of
the deportation committee, the kaymakam of Kıği, who had just arrived in the area. Hagop

Hovhannissian was the first to be tortured and then shot in the head by İsmail Çavuszâde
Şakir, who subjected the other prisoners to similar treatment, including the primate and
young men from the villages of Tchan/Çanet and Chanakji/Çanakci.128
The deportees in the first convoy were, of course, unaware of the notables’ fate. They con-
tinued on their way the next day. As they approached Palu Bridge, the men were separated
from the caravan, led to the banks of the Euphrates and massacred, after which the caravan
was plundered. All the subsequent caravans also passed through this area, where more than
half of the deportees from Kıği were killed in the next few days.129
According to an eyewitness account by Mrs. Aghaser, many women drowned themselves
by jumping into the river from Palu Bridge in order to avoid “being dishonored”; thus, of
the 1,200 people who set out in the first caravan, there remained only 200 to 250. These
survivors sought in vain to remain in Palu; they were sent on to Harput, where they arrived,
naked and starving, after 25 days on the road. Although all the other surviving deportees
were sent on in the direction of Dyarbekir and Aleppo, Mrs. Aghaser succeeded in staying
behind in Harput along with four other women, after finding employment as a supervisor
in the Turkish orphanage of Harput, which the Ittihad had founded in order to “educate”
Armenian children in the spirit of Turkism. The 700 orphans living in the orphanage were
left in the care of Armenian women. It was not long, however, before the kaymakam came
to the conclusion that they “were raising up enemies” and ordered the institution closed.
According to Mrs. Aghaser, he had the children sent on to Malatia, where they were thrown
into the Euphrates.130
The second convoy from Kıği, which set out on 11 May, comprised 2,000 villagers, 700
of them men. The deportees came from 12 different localities in the western part of the
district. On 15 June, they arrived in a place called Dabalu in the vicinity of Palu, escorted
by Mehmedzâde Hilmi, an eminent member of the deportation committee of Kıği.131 This
group was harassed and plundered even more ferociously than the preceding caravan had
been; the deportees, nearly naked, were in a wretched state. In the vicinity of Dabalu, near
Palu Bridge, the squadrons of çetes liquidated the men, then allowed the local population to
close in on the camp.132
The third convoy, which left on 12 June, comprised inhabitants of other villages and
the town itself. Three hours from Palu, in Lıhan, the çetes escorting the deportees extorted
3,000 to 4,000 Turkish pounds from them. The next morning, the convoy came under heavy
gunfire and the çetes then attacked it with knives and abducted young women. For the first
time in this region, those escorting a convoy cut open women’s bellies, for they had discov-
ered that some women swallowed their gold coins during body searches. On 16 June, the
deportees who survived the carnage (approximately one-quarter of the total) were brought
together in Palu with the vestiges of the first two caravans. On 18 June, all of them then set
out on the road leading south.133
On 13 June, a fourth convoy (the last to leave Kıği), made up of civil servants and mer-
chants, was put on the road under the command of the çete leader Karaman Ulaşzâde
Mustafa, a native of Karmrug. This caravan, however, was sent straight to Harput. By the
evening of 13 June, then, there were no more than ten craftsmen and other indispensable
individuals left in town, such as the municipal physician, Dr. Melikian, and an official in the
municipal health department, Barkev Nenejian.134
The last convoy, comprising villagers from 35 localities, including Temran, Oror, and
Arek, was put on the road on 16 June 1915. It was attacked and plundered for the first time
in a place called Sarpiçay, in the kaza of Akpunar; responsible for the attack was the müdir
of the nahie of Çılheder, Osman Bey, who ordered his Kurdish çetes to massacre the depor-
tees.135 During the shooting that followed, H. Sarkisian lost his father and uncle. He later
evoked the indescribable panic that came over the deportees, who fled in all directions. That

night, the çetes searched the corpses and finished off the wounded. Those in charge of the
convoy recovered the women and children who had been given refuge in a nearby Kurdish
village by threatening their rescuers and set them marching back down the road to Palu.
Like previous caravans, this one was brought to a halt on the outskirts of the town, near
the village of Dabalu, which was strewn with corpses. The church had been burned down
and the houses had been pillaged. The deportees were slaughtered with axes on Palu Bridge
and thrown into the Euphrates. Our witness, on his desperate flight toward Dersim, which
seems to have been the only place where the fugitives could find a safe haven, saw workers
busy destroying churches and cemeteries. A Kurd who briefly accompanied him on his way
told him, “It is the government which has given orders to demolish them, so that no trace
indicating that this was once an Armenian village will remain.”136
On 20 June 1915, the survivors from the last convoys, 2,500 people, including 350 men
disguised as women, were sent south by way of the notorious Palu Bridge. After three days
on the road, they arrived at a spot three miles from Arğana Maden, where, after a careful
identity check, the last men were knifed to death, while young women were sold to the local
populace.137 The last deportees arrived in Dyarbekir after a 50-day trek. They were confined
to a field outside the city walls, where they were visited by the vali, Dr. Mehmed Reşid, and
local dignitaries, who picked out a few young women for themselves. When the survivors,
who had been stripped of their clothing en route, reached Maden, they were clothed and fed
by Syriac Christians and lodged in partially burned houses whose cellars were stacked high
with charred corpses. After another 20 days on the road, the caravan reached Ras ul-Ayn,
where the last man in the group was murdered by Çerkez.138
Of all the deportees who had set out in the various convoys from Kıği, some 3,000 arrived
in Ras ul-Ayn. A month later, no more than 700 were left; famine and typhus had carried off
the rest. Four hundred survivors were sent by rail to Hama and Homs and another 300 were
sent to Der Zor. There, in late 1916, some 15 to 20 were still alive.139
According to Vahan Postoyan, 1,500 people were killed in the villages before the deporta-
tion began, while 461 women and children were recovered from the Muslim population after
Russian forces arrived in the region.140 The deportees were slaughtered in Chan/Çan (3,000),
Tepe (2,500), at Palu Bridge (10,000), and in Kasrmaden, near Harput (13,000).141
Deportations from the Kaza of Kiskim-Khodorchur

The kaza of Kiskim, in which the 13 villages of Khodorchur were located, had an Armenian
population of 8,136. Most of these Armenians were Catholics.142 Kiskim, a mountain district
well suited for sheep breeding, was one of the most isolated areas in the vilayet of Erzerum.
The villagers of Khodorchur were rich and peaceably inclined. When the general mobiliza-
tion was announced, they chose to pay the bedel for both themselves and the emigrants from
the area working abroad, rather than serve in the Ottoman Army. From late August 1914 on,
they also lodged and fed several battalions of the Ottoman army – protesting mildly, and to
no avail, when the army requisitioned all their horses and mules. In December 1914, the little
town of Garmirk was also visited by some 30 çetes, who plundered and beat the villagers and
imposed a tax of 300 Turkish pounds on them. But these were, after all, classic practices. The
house searches conducted in February 1915 by gendarmes looking for arms had been more
alarming, especially because they were accompanied by acts of torture and the arrest of village
notables, as in Mokhragud (Harutiun Dzarigian) and Khodorchur (Joseph Mamulian).143
Because the majority of Armenians in Khodorchur were Catholics, they had until then
benefited from the protection of French and Austro-Hungarian diplomats. Hence, they were
probably hoping when they received the deportation order that the ambassador of Austria-
Hungary would see to it that they were not harmed. Interestingly, negotiations conducted by

the German vice-consul in Erzerum at the Austrian ambassador’s request, though dragging
on from June to September 1915, succeeded in saving only about a dozen Armenian Sisters
of the Immaculate Conception and a few Mkhitarist monks;144 the Catholics of Khodorchur
as a whole were not spared. Quite the contrary: in May 1915, the local authorities proceeded
to arrest 27 priests who had been educated in Rome or at the seminary of Saint-Sulpice
in Paris – among them the primate, Harutiun Turshian, as well as some 30 schoolteach-
ers.145 Late in May, the kaymakam, Necati Bey, summoned the notables of Khodorchur and
informed them of the deportation order, adding that they would not be allowed to sell their
assets before setting out. A few local notables nevertheless encouraged Armenians to entrust
their property to them pending their return. Besides Necati, among the main organizers of
the deportation and spoliation of the Armenians were local dignataries such as Ali Beg,
Sahuzoğlu Dursun, Kürdoğlu Mahmud, and Ömerzâde Mehmed.146
The Armenians of Khodorchur were deported in five convoys. The first two set out early
in June. The first was made up of 300 families comprising 3,740 individuals from the villages
of Khodorchur. There were 200 families comprising some 1,500 individuals in the second,
almost all of them from Kudrashen and Kiskim; they were massacred between Kasaba and
Erzincan.147
The third convoy, made up of villagers from Garmirk (pop. 600) and Hidgants, set out
on 8 June 1915. It was soon incorporated into the second caravan from Erzerum, and shared
its fate. Twenty survivors, after passing through Bayburt, Erzincan, Kemah, Eğin, Malatia,
Arapkir, Samsad, Suruc, Raffa, Birecik and Urfa, were registered in Aleppo on 22 December
1918.148
The fourth convoy, which included villagers from Mokhrgud (pop. 350), Kotkan, Atik,
Grman, Sunik, Gakhmukhud, Keghud, Jijaroz/Jijabagh, Gisag, Michin Tagh and Khantatsor,
followed a route much like that taken by the third convoy as far as Samsad. It was then deci-
mated on the banks of the Euphrates between Ğantata et Ğavanluğ by regular troops and
çetes under the command of Samsadlı Haci Şeyh Içko.149
The fifth and final convoy included only a few deportees, the last inhabitants of the vil-
lages all but emptied by the fourth convoy, above all old people and the infirm. They were
massacred in Poşin, on orders from the mutesarif of Severek, by Severeklı Ahmed Çavuş and
his çetes. Eight of those in this convoy survived. A total of around 100 people from all the
Armenian localities in the kaza survived.150
Deportations from the Sancak of Erzincan

The sancak of Erzincan, which, with its 66 Armenian villages and a total Armenian popula-
tion of 37,612, was rather sparsely settled, played an important role as a zone of transit for
convoys of deportees from the vilayet, while the district’s Kemah gorge served as a killing
field. The main organizers of the massacres here were the mutesarif of the sancak, Memduh
Bey, and the parliamentary deputy from Kemah, Halet Bey. They were backed up by Muhtar
Bey, the commander of the gendarmerie of Erzincan, Mecid Bey, the mutesarif’s secretary,
and the commanders of the çetes of the Special Organization, Ziya Beg, Adıl Güzelzâde
Şerif, Nazıf Bey, Nazıf’s nephew Mazhar Bey, Eçzaci Mehmed, Kürd Arslan Bey, a cousin
of Halet Bey’s, and Kemal Vanlı Bey.151 In a written deposition submitted to the Mazhar
Commission, General Vehib Pasha, who succeeded Mahmud Kâmil at the head of the Third
Army, stated that the officers of the gendarmerie received the order to deport the Armenians
from “Memduh Bey, the former mutesarif of Erzincan,” and that “those who committed the
murders had received their instructions from Dr. Bahaeddin Şakir Bey.”152
Both the general mobilization and requisitions were carried out with special rigor in this
sancak. A witness reports that, when the requisitions were made in her village, which had

300 Armenian and 50 Turkish households, “it was plain that not much at all was taken from
the Turks.”153 As elsewhere, the April 1915 order to collect arms was executed with extreme
violence and accompanied by torture, bastinados, and arrests. None of the villages on the
plain of Erzincan were spared these operations.154
On Sunday, 16 May, the last service was celebrated in the cathedral of Erzincan. In his
sermon, Father Mesrob informed the population that the government had decided to deport
it and that the most affluent 16 families had to go to Konya. On Tuesday, 18 May, the Der
Serian, Papazian, Boyitian, and Susigian families, among others, were deported. On 21 May,
they were followed by 60 other families whose names figured on a list drawn up by the local
authorities. A few days later, the Armenian bishopric of Erzincan received telegrams, sent
from Eğin, announcing that these families had arrived there safe and sound.155 In Erzincan,
the authorities had confiscated three of the city’s four churches, leaving Surp Prgich Cathedral
to the Armenians.156 According to Kurken Keserian, Erzincan’s Armenian quarter was now
transformed into a veritable chaos; its schools and churches were systematically pillaged.157
A week before the deportation of the Ezincan Armenians, Halet Bey had the city’s notables
arrested; among them were Krikor Chayan and Apkar Tashjian. These notables were mas-
sacred in Kemah and Sansar Dere soon after their arrest.158
On the evening of 23 May, the kaimakam of the kaza, Memduh, arrived on the plain of
Erzincan at the head of a group of gendarmes, çetes, and Turkish peasants from the surrounding
villages, a force of some 12,000 armed men. They surrounded the villages and monasteries. A
few young men managed to flee to the mountains, but the men from the households on the
plain were methodically killed on Sunday, 23 May, and Tuesday, 25 May, while the women and
children were sent to Erzincan’s Armenian cemetery.159 According to eyewitnesses, surprise
attacks were launched on the villages after the forces that had been mobilized for this operation
had carefully isolated them from each other. The men were then executed in small groups –
they were either shot or had their throats cut in trenches that had been dug in advance.160
Once this operation had been terminated, the authorities began, on Tuesday, 25 May, to
concentrate the Armenian population of Erzincan in the Armenian cemetery of Kuyubaşi,
a quarter of an hour from the city. By the evening of 27 May, the whole population of the
city and nearby villages had been interned there, where they were guarded by çetes. The
Armenians of the Surmen neighborhood, who had a reputation for unruliness, were the only
exception: they were to be dealt a special fate. The deportees were sorted into groups by
neighborhood.161 Men between 40 and 50 were separated from the others and massacred
by the gendarmes and çetes.162 On 28 May, under the supervision of the parliamentary
deputy Halet Bey, the remaining deportees were set marching at one-hour intervals in little
groups down the road that led to Kemah; the aim was to prevent visual contact between
the different groups.163 The caravan in which one survivor found himself got as far as the
khan belonging to Halet’s brother Haci Bey; there the squadrons of çetes were reinforced
by Kurds from seven villages in the Ceferli district. Deportees from the villages of Karni,
Tortan, and Komar were integrated into the convoy. Further on, this convoy, escorted by
Captain Mustafa Bey, was attacked by a squadron of çetes under the command of Demal
Vanlı Bey, Kürd Aslan Bey, and Mazhar Bey, a cousin of Halet’s; they extorted large sums
from the deportees and carried off six of the prettiest young women.164 The gorge that lay
three hours distant from the city and extended as far as Kemah, eight hours away, became
the graveyard of the deportees from Erzincan and its plain, who were thrown into it. Only
a few women who had been abducted and taken to Turkish villages in the area temporarily
cheated death.165
One by one, the groups of deportees piled into the Kemah gorge, actually a series of
gorges that extend over an area that it takes four hours to traverse on foot. It was as if the
Armenians were caught in a trap from which there was no escape: on the one side was the

turbulent Euphrates and, on the other, the cliffs of the Mt. Sebuh mountain chain. As the
deportees entered the gorge, they were stripped of their belongings by çetes under the com-
mand of Jafer Mustafa Effendi, who had squadrons of the Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa under his orders.
Deeper in the gorges, veritable slaughterhouses had been set up, in which some 25,000 people
were exterminated in one day. Hundreds of young women and children joined hands and
leaped into the void together. A few young women even dragged çetes who were trying to
rape them down into the waters of the Euphrates with them. At regular intervals, the butch-
ers clambered down to the narrow banks of the river in order to finish off wounded people
who had not been swept away by the current.166 Almost all the convoys of deportees from
Ispir, Hınis, Erzerum, Tercan, and Pasin passed through these gorges, one of the main killing
fields regularly used by the çetes of the Special Organization.
The fate of very young children seems to have differed from that of all the others. A
conscript employed, along with his colleague Garabed Vartabedian, as the secretary of a
captain in the army noticed that Turks were picking up “abandoned” children in the streets
of Erzincan and taking them home. The next day, the same witness obtained permission
to leave his barracks and go to his home in the city’s Armenian quarter. On the way, he
passed by the Armenians’ municipal park, where 200 to 300 children between the ages of
two and four had been gathered; they had been given neither food nor water, and some
were already dead.167 A pharmacist from Erzerum who was serving in the Erzincan garrison,
Dikran Tertsagian, told our witness that six-month-old or seven-month-old babies were less
fortunate: they were being collected in sacks in the villages of the plain and thrown into the
Euphrates.168 In the week following the massacres, policemen and gendarmes hunted down
people hiding in the orchards and fields of the plain of Erzincan. In one house, two young
men fought off 100 gendarmes, killing seven of them before being burned alive.169
On Monday 14 June, there were still 800 Armenians in Erzincan who were employed in
the army workshop located in the outskirts of the city; another 150 Armenians were work-
ing as street sweepers, while three more were serving as nurses or nurses’ aids in the military
hospital. They did not know what had become of their families. Other men from the region
who had been arrested before the deportation were still rotting in jail; the authorities had led
them to believe that the deportees had been transferred to Mosul in perfect safety.170 It was
on this day, 14 June, that Mamud Kâmil ordered that all Armenian conscripts working in
the hospitals, military workshops, and street-sweeping brigades be confined in the Erzincan
barracks, to be guarded by çetes. A few of these conscripts remained there; the others were
gradually, day by day, tied together in small groups and led off. They were conducted east-
wards to the Cerbeleg Bridge, where they were shot and thrown into trenches that had been
dug in advance.171
The conscripts from the region who were working in the amele taburis were massacred
in two different places. Approximately 5,000 of them were slaughtered in a plain lying a
short distance to the east of Erzincan; their bodies were thrown into mass graves.172 A sec-
ond group of about the same size was slain in the Sansar gorge, located eight hours east of
Erzerum on the boundary of the kaza of Tercan, at the mouth of the mountain pass. It seems
that 15,000 old people from the vilayet were also put to death there.173
According to a conscript who survived the massacre, when the Russians arrived in the
area in spring 1916, there were only a few dozen women left; they had been taken into the
households of the gendarmes and the dignitaries with the heaviest responsibility for the
massacres, now having finally been given permission to “marry” Armenian women.174 Also
left alive were some 300 indispensable craftsmen, such as Avedis Kuyumjian and the seven
members of his family, and Nshan Buludian and the six members of his (the former was a
goldsmith, the latter a tailor). These men directed state workshops. There were also some 50
doctors on the staff of the hospital in Erzincan, among them Sarkis Sertlian, an eye doctor

from Constantinople, and Dr. Mikayel Aslanian of Harput. The authorities sent Aslanian
on to Harput and Sıvas just before Erzincan fell to the Russians.175
Deportations from the Kazas of Kemah,

Refahiye/Gerjanis, Kuruçay and Koziçan
In early June, the 15 Armenian towns and villages in the kaza of Kemah, with a total popula-
tion of 6,396,176 were also attacked by squadrons of approximately 200 çetes, under the com-
mand of Armedanli İsmail, Erzinganli Kasab Memduh, Ziya Hasan Çavusoğlu and Boyağlı
Sefer, who had also taken part in the massacres in Tercan, Kıği, and Erzincan. The victims
were massacred where they were found. A few young Armenian men nevertheless man-
aged to cross the çetes’ lines and flee to Dersim, as did 200 women from the little town of
Kemah.177
In the kaza of Refahiye/Gerjanis, the eradication of the Armenians began on 3 June 1915.
Three Armenian villages in the district – Gerjanis, Horopel, and Melik Sherif, with a total
population of 1,570178 – were surrounded by çetes, who killed their inhabitants on the spot.179
The inhabitants of the six villages of the kaza of Kuruçay, which had an Armenian
population of 2,989 – Greater Armdan, Lesser Armdan, Apshda, Hasanova, Tughud, and
Dantsi – as well as those in the six towns and villages of the district de Koziçan, which had
an Armenian population of 4,700,180 were not massacred in their villages, but deported. Most
of the men were exterminated near Lecki Bridge while the women and children had their
throats slit in the vicinity of Acem Dağ under the supervision of the parliamentary deputy
from Kemah, Halet Bey, together with Şevki Abbas Oğlu, Hüseyin Ağa of Gerjanis, Elias
Oğlu Mehmed Ağa, and Hüseyin Bey Zâde Hasan. Şevki Abbas Oğlu personally murdered
the brothers Parsegh and Markar Avoyan and sent their heads to the mutesarif, Memduh, as
a form of homage.181
The 862 Armenians living in the kaza of Pülumur/Polormor – in the villages of Perkri,
Gersnud and Dantseg – were massacred there in late May.182
The Army’s Role in the Eradication of the Armenians and

the Fate of the Draftees from the Vilayet of Erzerum
We have already seen that the Armenian draftees from the eastern provinces, whom we
clearly distinguished from those native to other vilayets, were assigned to both combat and
transport units in the first months of the war. We must now say something about the treat-
ment reserved for them after the deportations and massacres began in the Erzerum region.
Let us start by pointing out that their fate was in the hands of the commander-in-chief of
the Third Army, Mahmud Kâmil, as was that of the civilian population, inasmuch as the
government had officially left it up to the army to decide how “urgent” the “displacement” of
the “suspect” populations from the war zones to “the interior” was. Yet it was largely on the
Armenian population that the Ottoman troops stationed in the vilayet of Erzerum depended
for their maintenance; the Armenians billeted them in their own villages – the lack of bar-
racks was no secret from anyone – fed them, provided them with draft animals, transported
supplies for them on its backs, gave them medical care, and furnished them with products
turned out by its craftsmen. In “displacing” the Armenian population “to the interior” –
that is, in cutting off this source of logistical support – Mahmud Kâmil risked making the
position of the Third Army untenable in very short order, as the vali of Erzerum, Tahsin,
pointed out. In other words, from a strictly military point of view, the elimination of the
Armenian civilians could be regarded as sheer folly. From a political and ideological point

of view, on the other hand, it was perfectly consistent with the objectives of the Young Turk
Central Committee, which sought to exclude non-Turks from the eastern provinces. Can
we, moreover, imagine even for a moment that the handling of the Armenian question was
really entrusted to Mahmud Kâmil or the army? This was impossible in a system in which the
party’s Central Committee reviewed all decisions. We must rather assume that the “security
of the army’s rear base” was merely an alibi designed to legitimize the extermination policy
by providing it with a legal facade – the more so as the political decisions made in Istanbul
clashed with the immediate interests of the military.
That said, we must ask who controlled the fate of the tens of thousands of Armenian
conscripts who had been plucked from their natural environment and separated from their
families. The examples at our disposal indicate that the army maintained its right to revise
decisions bearing on these soldiers at least until May 1915, although we saw that, from winter
1914–15 on, the treatment meted out to them bordered on a policy of elimination by exhaus-
tion or, for the less docile, incitation to desertion. During the deportations, the authori-
ties sometimes even considered not deporting soldiers’ families, although this held only for
recruits from the provinces of western Anatolia, who fought in the Dardenelles or on the
Syrian-Palestinian front. None of the contemporaneous accounts we have suggest that simi-
lar measures were ever considered in the eastern vilayets. It was as if the fate of the popula-
tions living in the Armenians’ homeland had been clearly dissociated from that of the groups
scattered throughout the west.
We have already seen that, from late February on, draftees in combat units who were
natives of the vilayets of Erzerum and Bitlis were executed in small groups. However, the fate
of these groups of combatants, who represented a minority of the Armenian draftees, has to
be distinguished from that of the soldiers serving in the amele taburis or labor battalions. It
would seem that the doom of the latter was sealed when that of the civilian populations was.
Thus, the decision to liquidate them in the area under the jurisdiction of the Third Army was
made around 15 May.183 The most frequently used method consisted in turning them over
in groups of 200 to 300 to çetes, who saw to their execution in the killing fields that we have
already mentioned. This held, for example, for the 200 conscripts from Hınis massacred in
Çan, near Kıği,184 as well as the 4,000 worker-soldiers from Harput who had been put to work
on the road between Hoşmat and Palu; a deportee fleeing for his life saw their corpses, still
in an early stage of decomposition, as he was making his way toward Dersim.185 There were
also intermediate cases, such as that of the drafted artisans employed directly by the army
or in military workshops; the treatment of these people was less systematic. Thus, 60-year-
old Eghia Torosian of Mamahatun, drafted despite his age, worked first in the hospital in
Erzincan and was then, in May 1915, assigned to the 800-man-strong 35th Labor Battalion.
These workers were employed in a military firm located 20 minutes from the center of the
town of Mamahatun.186 Despite the critical demand for experienced craftsmen, even this
battalion was gradually shorn of a majority of its members, who were taken beyond the city
limits at night in groups of 15 to 20 and quietly executed by çetes of the Special Organization.
Nonetheless, 235 artisans survived.187
We also know about the case of Rupen Toroyan, a draftee from Erzerum. Along with
his Muslim comrades, Toroyan was responsible for transporting supplies from Erzerum to
the front. He witnessed the looting of the Armenian villages of Pasın, the sacking of the
church in Olti, recently occupied by the Ottoman army, and the mistreatment of the 200
Armenians taken hostage in Olti.188 In Odzni, where his regiment was based, he saw how
Armenian villagers were expelled so that their homes could be taken over and their food
stocks plundered.189 In the nearby village of Ilija, he witnessed the expulsion of the inhabit-
ants by gendarmes as well as the suffering these homeless peasants endured outside the vil-
lage for six days before all of them were executed a short distance away. One of his Turkish

companions, Corporal Ibrahim, confirmed what Toroyan had seen when he complained that
he had had nothing of the windfall associated with the massacre of these Armenians, who
were carrying a great deal of gold, “especially the women.”190
After his return to Erzerum, Toroyan witnessed the departure of the convoys of deportees.
Until then, he had not been molested in any way. His corporal nevertheless offered to save
him if Toroyan brought him “a pretty girl.” Arrested, like all the other Armenian draftees, he
was sent off in a convoy comprising around 1,000 people, guarded by 60 gendarmes. The fol-
lowing morning, near Aşkale, çetes and soldiers encircled the caravan, stripped the deportees
of their belongings and transferred the 200 to 300 conscripts in the convoy to the prison in
Aşkale. Four or five of them starved to death every day. A few days afterwards, the conscripts
from Erzerum – a detail in Toroyan’s account indicating that there were other soldiers in the
prison – were sent to work on the roads. They joined other Armenian workers under the sur-
veillance of soldiers: one soldier for every ten recruits. Toroyan notes that he worked under
these conditions for a period of five months, during which many of the Armenians, includ-
ing his brother, were so badly mistreated that they died. The authorities then separated out
craftsmen like Toroyan and sent the others “to the slaughterhouse of Kemah Deresi.”
The remaining 200 men, who continued to work under appalling conditions, offered to
convert to Islam. The question, says Toroyan, was referred up the hierarchical ladder until it
reached the vali. Two days later, the men received a favorable response and a mullah arrived
to initiate them into their new faith. Three months later came an order to assemble all the
Armenian converts of Aşkale and send them to Erzerum. With seven of his companions,
Toroyan worked in the state ironworks in Erzerum for some time. Ultimately, however, all
of them were taken to a gorge near Aşkale, where hundreds of conscripts were shot on 15
February 1916. Toroyan, along with one of his comrades from Bitlis, escaped with his life
because he had hidden under the corpses of his companions. He succeeded in finding ref-
uge with a Turk from Aşkale who told him: “From now on, you’re going to protect me: the
Russians are coming.”191 There is every reason to believe that the sudden advance of the
Russian army sealed the doom of the Armenian recruits still employed by the local authori-
ties: they were liquidated despite their conversion to Islam.
There are a number of rather interesting stories of survival among the conscripts. The
story of Krikor Keshishian from Pakarij is an example. When the general mobilization was
announced, Keshishian was in prison. Although he was released in November, his status as
a former convict meant that he could not legally serve in the army. He was mobilized none-
theless and sent to Mamahatun, where he joined the recruits assigned to transport military
supplies to the front on their backs. Of a pragmatic turn of mind, Keshishian thought that
it was ridiculous to impose an ordeal of that kind on soldiers, and bought three mules that
could be used to transport supplies. The military authorities did not appreciate this display
of initiative: they confiscated Keshishian’s mules and he deserted. His parents then asked
him to turn himself in, knowing that if he did not their house would be demolished. On 24
January 1915, the Keshishian family home was burned down with all the occupants inside,
except for the men, who fled. According to Keshishian, 366 people from the villages of
Tercan who had paid the bedel to avoid military service were arrested as deserters and sent to
Erzerum on 15 February.192
Thus, it would seem that the commanders of the Third Army collaborated with the Special
Organization, which was apparently responsible for executing the orders to eliminate the
Armenian conscripts in the amele taburis. In certain instances, however, the military was able
to retain a minimal number of craftsmen to ensure that its logistical needs would be met.
We do not have much material on the transmission of deportation-related orders in the
area under the Third Army’s jurisdiction. However, it seems that, at least until mid-summer,
the commander-in-chief of the Third Army, Mahmud Kâmil, sent many cables ordering that

Armenians be exterminated, as was later admitted by General Süleyman Faik Pasha, com-
mander of the garrison in Mamuret ul-Aziz.193 Yet, beginning on 8 August 1915, the military
authorities received orders no longer to concern themselves with the deportations but simply
to cooperate with local government officials. It is likely that this decision was reached after
an 18/31 July 1915 meeting in Erzincan attended by the valis of Erzerum, Trebizond, Harput,
and Sıvas, as well as many mutesarifs and kaymakams, such as the kaymakam of Bayburt.194
This meeting was without a doubt chaired by Bahaeddin Şakir. We do not, of course, know
the substance of the discussion that took place in the fief of Şakir’s main collaborator, in the
sancak where most of the massacres of the vilayet’s Armenians were carried out. However,
given the date of the meeting, there is every reason to assume that it was called in order to
draw up a preliminary balance sheet of the eradication of the Armenian population in the
eastern provinces and, probably, assign the civilian authorities the task of completing the
project conceived by the Ittihadist Central Committee. More particularly, the aim was to
mop up the last Armenians who had somehow managed to elude the machine that Istanbul
had put in place.
The circular telegram that the commander of the Third Army, Mahmud Kâmil, sent from
his headquarters in Tortum on 10 July 1915 to the valis of Sıvas, Trebizond, Van, Mamuret
ul-Aziz, Dyarbekir, and Bitlis195 is the only official document on the question that we have.
Submitted to the court-martial at the session of 27 April 1919, it is of inestimable value, for
it provides proof of the Ittihadists’ determination to pursue their project of destruction until
they had eliminated the last Armenians left alive, even those who had converted to Islam or
benn “integrated” into Turkish or Kurdish families:
We have learned that, in certain villages the population of which has been sent to the
interior, certain [elements] of the Muslim population have given Armenians shelter
in their homes. Since this is a violation of government orders, heads of households
who shelter or protect Armenians are to be executed in front of their houses and it
is imperative that their houses be burned down. This order shall be transmitted in
appropriate fashion and communicated to whom it may concern. See to it that no
as yet undeported Armenian remains behind and inform us of the action you have
taken. Converted Armenians must also be sent away. If those who attempt to protect
Armenians or maintain friendly relations with them are members of the military, their
ties with the army must be immediately severed, after their superiors have been duly
informed, and they must be prosecuted. If they are civilians, they must be dismissed
from their posts and tried before a court-martial.
The Commander of the Third Army, Mahmud Kâmil, 10 July 1915.
This telegram bears a revealing annotation, dated 12 July and probably made by the vali
or a high-ranking official of the vilayet of Sıvas: it requested that the order be transmitted
“secretly, and in writing only in exceptional cases.”196
The content of this circular leaves little room for doubt about the intentions of the com-
mander of the Third Army, who probably did no more than carry out orders received from
Istanbul to apprehend the last Armenians who had eluded the deportations by conversion
to Islam, flight, or some other expedient. The severity of the punishment risked by Muslim
families who were tempted to protect Armenians is a measure of the Ittihadist regime’s deter-
mination to eliminate the entire Armenian population without exception. Revelatory in this
regard is the case of two Armenians who were close to the German vice-consul of Erzerum –
Sarkis Solighian, the owner of the building in which the consulate was housed, and Elfasian,
the former dragoman. The vice-consul, Scheubner-Richter, was harassed for weeks by Hulusi
Bey, the Erzerum police chief, who demanded that these two protégés of the consul’s be

deported without delay. They were finally arrested on 1 July 1915. Scheubner-Richter’s appeals
to Vali Tahsin notwithstanding, he proved unable to save the two Armenians, who, as eve-
ryone knew, were his only independent source of information about events in the region. As
Hilmar Kaiser points out, the authorities’ behavior was meant to demonstrate to local public
opinion that even the German vice-consulate was incapable of protecting anyone.197
It is clear that the steps taken by the civilian and military authorities around mid-July
1915 were designed to carry the deportations to their term, eliminating the last Armenians
in the vilayet. Witness two circular telegrams sent on 20 July by the interior minister to the
local authorities, including those in Erzerum. They requested a precise assessment of the
demographic situation in these regions before and after the deportations, as well as infor-
mation on the number of Armenians who had converted to Islam and local government
officials’ attitude toward them. The aim, no doubt, was to evaluate the results of the work
already accomplished, the better to decide on new measures.198
Conversion to Islam or the Struggle for Survival

In the preceding pages, we have noted instances (the most common) of conversion to Islam
that took place while the deportations were underway; they involved, above all, women and
children “adopted” by Turkish or Kurdish families. We have not, however, discussed the fami-
lies that agreed to convert in order to escape the deportations or keep their property. While
some of these families were sent to their deaths a few weeks after their compatriots, others,
especially in the countryside or among the craftsmen of the urban centers, did indeed sur-
vive. As the reader will readily imagine, these converts who were allowed to remain in their
homes did not often talk about their experience. One of the rare exceptions was Hovhannes
Khanzarlian, a native of Erzerum, who confessed that he had been “compelled to abandon
Christianity and adopt Islam.”199 Anticipating his critics, Khanzarlian says that they do not
know what it means to spend days on end in a prison filled with nauseating odors, to be tor-
tured daily, or to see one’s companions strangled or sent off to die: “Ordinary mortals like me
abandon their religion easily when they see that every other way out has been blocked and
that conversion offers a glimmer of hope.” Khanzarlian also notes, however, that he felt inde-
scribable shame when he went to the mosque for the first time and began to pray; he had the
feeling that “his ancestors shuddered.” Our witness does not, however, refer only to his line-
age. He also recalls what his teachers taught him and affirms that his national feelings also
made it impossible for him to remain a Muslim. He points out, quite reasonably, that “in this
infernal Turkey, nationality and religion are indissolubly linked.” He also evokes the violence
inflicted on his relatives, adding that he could not bear the fact that he bore the name “of
those who had murdered his father and raped his sister”; that he felt as if he had “betrayed”
their memory. The last argument advanced by Khanzarlian is, as it were, theoretical. It shows
rather clearly how the Armenians of the provinces perceived their Muslim environment and
the consequences of a possible conversion: “I was going to deprive myself of the benefit of
exchanges with powerful minds.”200 In other words, he thought that if he accepted the law
of the Prophet, he would be denied all access to modernity and the world of ideas – that to
which the Ottoman Armenian world precisely aspired in this period.
The Banque Ottomane, the Local Authorities and

the Spoliation of Armenian Property
The confiscation of Armenian property in the vilayet of Erzerum seems to have been
a process that unfolded in several stages, depending on the type of assets in question.

Initially, it was doubtless the secret provisions of the Temporary Deportation Law201
that provided an official as opposed to a legal framework for the operations of the local
authorities; for the “Law on Abandoned Property” and its decree of application were
not promulgated until fall 1915 – that is, well after the Armenian population had been
deported.202 It is probable that the extortion and various abuses from which civilian and
military officials personally profited, and also the prevailing uncertainty as to who now
owned what, compelled the Ittihadist authorities to adopt basic laws to protect the inter-
ests of the state and party, at least as far as real estate went. General Vehib Pasha, in the
deposition he submitted to the Mazhar Commission, forthrightly stated how the cash
and other valuables in the possession of the deportees from Erzerum and Trebizond were
parceled out in the Kemah gorge:
After [the deportees] were stripped of their money and jewels on the edge of the gorge
there [and then] massacred and thrown into the waters of the Euphrates ... the sums
that had been taken from them were divided up on the basis of one-third for the Party
of Union and Progress, one-third for the government, and one-third for the heads of
the bands that carried out the massacres.203
In other words, those responsible for the deportations were invited, in some sense, to pay
themselves for their labors out of what they took from the exiled Armenians.
Two men played key roles in organizing the seizure of Armenian assets in the vilayet of
Erzerum: Hakkı Bey, the director of the customs office and future president of the local com-
mission of the Emvalı Metruke, and Hüseyin Tosun Bey, the Ittihad’s delegate in Erzerum
and also “Milli agens müdiri” (head of the Milli Agency).204 These two Ittihadist officials
took a particular interest in the regional capital’s well-to-do families – that is, in their real
estate, stocks of merchandise, and bank accounts.
The information about the assets of these affluent families that Kaiser has brought to
light – in particular, material from German consular archives205 – shows that early in June,
after it had been established that these families would be deported, the local authorities
were obviously not prepared to handle issues related to their property. When the question of
the confiscation of their holdings was raised, the director of the local branch of the Banque
Impériale Ottomane (BIO), Pierre Balladur, went to Vali Tahsin with the suggestion that a
mixed commission be created and charged with safeguarding the deportees’ assets, although
the bank would not insure them against loss.206 Balladur fairly quickly obtained approval for
the plan from his board of directors in Istanbul. Approval from Tahsin Bey’s superiors was
somewhat longer in coming: on 9 June, Tahsin received rather precise instructions from the
Interior Ministry to the effect that all property belonging to the Armenians was to be auc-
tioned off.207 The stocks of Erzerum’s major wholesale merchants had, however, already been
transferred to the Armenian cathedral on the BIO’s authority.208 It seems that it was the
BIO board, made up of three administrators in Istanbul – two of them Armenian209 – which
turned to the minister of finance (Talât had become interim finance minister after Cavid’s
resignation) with the request that he settle the dispute over the Armenian assets held by the
bank. The board demanded that “a ruling be made to protect the bank’s interests.”210 André
Autheman, in his history of the BIO, notes that the question was more pressing in Erzerum
than elsewhere because the bank had been entrusted with a “considerable amount” of prop-
erty in that city – merchandise worth over 400,000 Turkish pounds – while “the Armenians’
assets, after their departure, had been taken in hand by the local authorities, but under con-
ditions that had not been defined.”211
In other words, Talât no doubt conceived the idea of passing a Law on Abandoned
Property after being thus approached by the BIO While the “considerable amount” of

property entrusted to the bank was ultimately confiscated after the creation of the local
commission of the Emvalı Metruke in October 1915,212 over the stiff resistance by Pierre
Balladur, it proved much harder for the authorities to lay their hands on the bank accounts of
the Armenians deported from Erzerum and elsewhere. The only way to do so was to nation-
alize the BIO, which was distinguished by the fact that most of its capital was held by two
enemy countries, France and Great Britain, while it continued to perform the crucial func-
tion of a bank of issue. On 11 July 1915, the Council of Ministers did indeed decide to take
over administration of the bank – not, as Autheman rather naively seems to think, “in order
to secure advantages from it,”213 but rather in order to be able to deal with the Armenians’
accounts as it saw fit. Let us add that the BIO decided in February 1916 to freeze the accounts
of these “clients currently traveling,” some of whom before then had succeeded in obtaining
advances from its branches in Syria and Mesopotamia.214
According to a report written after the war by a well-informed survivor from Erzerum,
the Armenians of the vilayet of Erzerum controlled 80 per cent of local commerce, as well
as trade with the other provinces of the empire and foreign trade; they owned some 60
commercial firms with an annual turnover of more than 30,000 Turkish pounds, 500 firms
with a turnover between 10,000 and 15,000 Turkish pounds, and 2,500 firms with a turno-
ver between 800 and 1,000 Turkish pounds. The author of the report also underscores the
generally elevated educational level of the Armenian population, the knowhow of its arti-
sans, and the substantial amount of property belonging to national institutions, particularly
monastic communities such as Garmir Vank and Lusavorichi Vank, as well as the cathedral
of Erzerum.215
According to Alphonse Arakelian, the property “abandoned” by the Armenians of the
vilayet had a total value of 17,503,000 Turkish pounds. The value of that held by merchants
was 7,300,000 Turkish pounds; civil servants, 1,000,000 Turkish pounds; the three big reli-
gious institutions and 37 monasteries, 850,000 Turkish pounds; the diocese of the Armenian
Apostolic Church of Erzerum, 310,000 Turkish pounds; the diocese of the Armenian
Catholic Church, 50,000 Turkish pounds; and the Armenian Protestant Church, 10,000
Turkish pounds. To these sums we must add 372 village churches, with their properties, rep-
resenting a value of 581,000 Turkish pounds; the holdings of 19,000 peasant families, with a
value of 5,730,000 Turkish pounds; and the assets of 8,390 artisan families, with a value of
1,672,000 Turkish pounds.216
The Human Balance

In February 1916, when the Russian army took control of the better part of the vilayet of
Erzerum, there remained only a few dozen Armenian craftsmen and doctors, together with
200 or 300 survivors, most of whom had found refuge in the mountains of Dersim. As we
have said, 33,000 people from the vilayet, almost all of them from the sancak of Bayazid,
had fled to the Caucasus, and somewhat over 5,000 women and children had survived in
the places to which they were deported: Mosul (1,600), Urfa (300) and Aleppo (1,000), with
another 2,200 scattered through Syria and Mesopotamia. Virtually the whole of the surviv-
ing male population consisted of 120 men.217

Chapter 4
Resistance and Massacres in

the Vilayet of Van
W
ith its 450 towns and villages and a pre-war Armenian population of 110,897, the
vilayet of Van, characterized by its many mountains and rugged topography, was
thinly populated. It had, however, an Armenian majority. The kaza of Van, with
its 116 Armenian villages and 53,589 inhabitants, accounted by itself for almost half the
total Armenian population.1 In an environment of this sort, the Armenian committees had
considerable influence on the decisions of the local authorities. As we have seen, down to
early April 1915, outside the border zones, the kazas of Mahmudiye/Saray and Başkale,2 the
Armenian population suffered only from the excesses spawned by the war requisitions. Such
excesses were, in the final analysis, common in conflicts of this sort.
An examination of the events that led the Armenian population of Van to entrench itself
in the old city of Aykesdan on the morning of 20 April 19153 indicates that in all probability
Enver’s brother-in-law, Cevdet, returned to the region from Persia late in March with a mis-
sion: to have done with the Armenians of Van once and for all, and to begin by liquidat-
ing its three Armenian leaders, who had until then, in their role as intermediaries, helped
smooth over the minor conflicts that cropped up here and there in the vilayet. The vali
obviously knew, when he decreed on 18 April that the population had to turn in its arms,
that he was facing the Armenians with a difficult choice. They knew that they were doomed
if they obeyed; yet, if they failed to, they would provide the vali with the pretext he needed
to attack the city’s Christian quarters and the rural areas. In other words, the Armenian
leaders’ strategy of temporization had become obsolete. The murder of Ishkhan on the night
of 16 April and the arrest of Arshag Vramian – Van still did not know that he had been
murdered – probably convinced the last Armenian leader left alive, Aram Manukian, to
reject the authorities’ injunctions and prepare the city for an attack that was now certain to
come.
In examining the course of events in Van, we cannot ignore the incidents that occurred
from 11 April onwards in the administrative seat of the kaza of Shadakh/Şadakh in Tagh,4
a little town with an exclusively Armenian population of 2,000 that was located in the
mountainous area that towers up to the south of Lake Van. Here, Hovsep Choloyan and five
other young men were arrested on 11 April 1915 on orders from the kaymakam, Hamdi Bey.
The people of Tagh interpreted these arrests as a provocation. Choloyan was the director
of the district’s Armenian school system and also the head of the local Dashnak commit-
tee.5 This was the first time that the authorities had arrested an Armenian leader from the
ARF’s ranks. There was no apparent reason for their action, which met with sharp protests
from the inhabitants of Tagh. According to A-To, whose book on the events in Van, written
shortly after they occurred, is the best-documented study of the subject, it was Cevdet who
ordered Hamdi Bey to have Choloyan and the five other activists arrested. In A-To’s view,

Erciş/Arjesh
Pergri
Adilcevaz/Ardzge
•
Mahmudiye
Khoy
Lake Van •
Van Dilman/Salmast
Karcikan/Garjgan
•
Kiavaş/Vostan
• Hoşab
Elbağ/Aghpag
Şadakh
Moks
Urmia
it is inconceivable that the kaymakam could have taken such a step on his own.6 The direc-
tor of the American hospital in Van, Dr. Clarence Ussher, affirms for his part that Cevdet
“thought this a good opportunity” to suggest that Ishkhan go to Shadakh and conduct an
inquiry so that he could have him murdered en route.7 In other words, Cevdet had staged
this provocation, which targeted a regional Dashnak leader, in order to step up the pressure
without precipitating an immediate break with the ARF in Van. Moreover, there are indica-
tions that in late March Kaymakam Hamdi had already ordered the local Kurdish tribes who
had recently returned from the Caucasian front to “hold themselves at the ready.”8
On 12 April, the authorities in Tagh demanded that the Armenian population turn in
its arms. It was common knowledge that the Kurdish tribes roamed this region armed; hence
obeying the order would, according to A-To, have been tantamount to “committing suicide.”9
The messages exchanged between Hamdi and Cevdet, discovered in the sub-prefecture after
the Turkish evacuation of the area, seem to indicate that the kaymakam and the vali were
aware that calling on the Armenians to disarm amounted to instigating a confrontation.10 A
native of Tagh, Dikran Baghdasarian, an officer who had been educated in Istanbul’s Military
Academy and had recently returned from the Caucasian front after being wounded in Köprüköy,
was one of the first to meet with Hamid Bey, with whom he had maintained friendly relations
until then. Baghdasarian, who would become a few days later the soul of the defense of the
Armenian eagle’s nest and its environs, suggested in vain that Hamdi free Hovsep Cholayan.
On 14 April 1915, the kaymakam demanded that the Armenians of Tagh open their shops and
go about their business as usual. The leaders of the self-defense committee agreed to do so on

Resistance and Massacres: Van 321
two conditions: that Choloyan be set free and that the gendarmes and militiamen stationed
in positions threatening the town be pulled back.11 Until 16 April, the status quo was more
or less respected: the kaymakam was apparently waiting for orders from Van. The day before,
the villages located in the eastern part of the kaza – Vakhrov, Arikom, Akrus, Kerments,
Sheghchants, Arosgi, Gvers, Baghg, Babonts, Paghchgants, Shino, Shamo and Eritsu, with a
total population of about one thousand – had been attacked by Kurdish tribes; the inhabitants
had been forced to take refuge in the villages of Kerments and Babonts.12 The skirmishes in
the administrative seat of the kaza, Tagh, did not begin until 17 April, when militiamen tried
to surround the upper section of the Armenian town.13
It goes without saying that the two parties interpreted these early incidents in radically
opposed ways. Cevdet was in the process of methodically laying the groundwork for his
plan to liquidate the Armenians, who, for their part, scrutinized the authorities’ gestures
and acts in an attempt to make out their intentions and react accordingly. The incident at
Tagh, which gave Cevdet the opportunity to eliminate two of the three Armenian lead-
ers, certainly helped crystallize the Armenians’ energies, while convincing Cevdet to make
moves that would bring on a rupture. In any case, if we examine the violence that erupted
in the surrounding districts beginning on 18 April, we can understand much better why, in
the days leading up to 20 April, the Van Armenians prepared to withstand a siege of their
neighborhoods.
Massacres in the Nahies of Arjag and Timar

The violence that preceded the siege of Van was not limited to the kaza of Shadakh. The
nahie of Arjag (Erçek), located on the shores of Lake Arjag two hours to the northeast of Van,
learned on 16 April from the Kurd Nuro Pisoğlanı, a notable who maintained close relations
with Armenian circles, that the kaymakam of Perkri, Ziya Bey, had called a meeting of the
muhtars of the area in order to warn them that, should massacres occur, Kurds must not give
refuge to Armenians or protect them, on pain of being shot. The kaymakam of Mahmudiye,
Kâmil Bey, had been assigned the task of massacring the inhabitants of the nahie; he was
accompanied on his mission by 150 gendarmes, backed up by Kurdish contingents under the
chieftains Şaraf Beg of Khanasor, Nacib Ağa of Mugur, and Arif Beg of Şav. The first village
to be attacked, on 18 April, was Mandran (pop. 390), which had made a name for itself in the
past by resisting Kurdish attacks. Fifteen people were killed and the village was mercilessly
plundered, but the women and children managed to flee without being seriously threatened.
On 19 April, Arjag was attacked by çetes under the command of the kaymakam of Perkri,
Ziya Bey: one hundred people lost their lives, houses were burned down and many women
were raped.14 However, when, on the afternoon of the same day, these irregulars attacked
the village of Kharagonis (pop. 1,525). Some 200 people were concentrated there, with the
refugees from Mandran, Hazara, and Boğazkiasan, and they were met with heavy gunfire.
On 20 April, all the forces under the kaymakams of Perkri and Saray were regrouped before
Kharagonis, but did not launch their second assault until 21 April, when they attacked a vil-
lage in which only old men, women, and children remained – a good part of the population
had fled to Mt. Kızılja in the area north of the lake – slaughtering around 50 of them and
burning the village to the ground.15
On 19 April, the villages of the northeastern part of the nahie of Timar, which were located
on the eastern shore of Lake Van, were attacked in their turn: the villagers of Ardavez (pop.
118), Goj (pop. 137), Atikeozal (pop. 226), Giusnents (pop. 825), Seydibeg (pop. 56), as well as
those from two villages bordering on the kazas of Perkri, Keaparig (pop. 379), and Kharashig,
also sought refuge on the flanks of Mt. Kızılja. On 22 April, 300 Kurdish çetes attempted
to attack them from the north, but were beaten back by heavy gunfire. On 23 April, the

throng of refugees on Mt. Kızılja was further swollen with peasants from Napat (pop. 165),
Yalguzarach (pop. 49), Kızılja (pop. 423), Boghants (pop. 451), and Paytag (pop. 195), who
were fleeing the çetes.
The lack of hygiene and food, however, made the situation of those who had found
refuge on Mt. Kızılja literally untenable, leading the village headmen to organize a with-
drawal toward the little town of Averag (pop. 1,061), located on the plain, on the morn-
ing of 24 April. The result was that some 8,000 people in all found themselves crowded
together in Averag, where they were notably joined by the inhabitants of Shahpagh.
That afternoon, Averag was surrounded by squadrons of irregulars and a few gendarmes.
They met with powerful resistance.16 During the night, 7,000 people, escorted by a few
young men under arms, made a successful attempt to break through their encirclement
and reach Van.17 On 25 and 26 April, the forces that had surrounded Averag went on to
attack Tarman and Gokhbants, where the inhabitants of Lim (pop. 143), Zarants (pop.
240), Sevan (pop. 439), Ermants (pop. 24), Bakhezeg (pop. 98), Farugh (pop. 210), and
Osgerag (pop. 270) had taken refuge, bringing the total number of people in Tarman
and Gokhbants, defended by 70 men, to 3,000. Adopting the same tactics as the refugees
who had been concentrated in Averag, this group succeeded in reaching the slopes of
Mt. Varak, further south; villagers who had come from localities southeast of Lake Van
were also concentrated here.18
The villages in the northern part of the nahie of Timar, Aliur (pop. 1,955), Marmet (pop.
811), Ererin (pop. 938), Khzhishg (pop. 775), Giusnents (pop. 825), Boghants (pop. 451),
Khavents (pop. 633), and Janik (pop. 714), were not spared by the militiamen and squadrons
of hamidiyes under Captain Amar and Arif Beg, reinforced by members of the Şavetli tribe
(from Perkri). Inhabitants of mentioned villages were attacked on 21 April. They met with
resistance, however, at Asdvadzadzin/Diramayr (pop. 462), Khzhishg, Aliuret, and Marmet,
where the inhabitants of the surrounding villages had come together. Seventy people were
killed in Asdvadzadzin and 73 more in Janik.19 It was in this district, the furthest from
the administrative seat of the kaza, that thousands of people who had come from the vil-
lages of Pirgarib, Sosrat, Shahkialdi, Janik, Asdvadzadzin/Diramayr, Norashen, Kochan,
Norovants, and Koms found themselves massed on the lakeshore opposite the island of Lim
toward the end of the day of 21 April. On 22 April, militiamen and hamidiyes, followed by
a crowd attracted by the prospect of plunder and acquiring young women, marched on the
encampment that had been hastily set up on the shores of Lake Van.20 A few dozen armed
men fended off the attackers while the villagers were transferred to the island by boat. It
took a full three days to transfer all of these 12,000 people to the island of Lim, where the
situation soon became critical for lack of food. On 25 April, after having cleaned out the
Armenian villages of Upper Timar, the kaymakam of Perkri, Ziya Bey, with his militiamen
and çetes, laid siege to Aliur, the biggest town in the district. Concentrated here were vil-
lagers from Paylag/Paytag (pop. 195), Adnagants (pop. 247), and Derlashen (pop. 657), pro-
tected by 160 armed men.21 Unable to break their resistance, the kaymakam offered to spare
the village if the armed men agreed to leave. As in other localities, the notables accepted
the proposal; the militias and Kurds thereupon proceeded to lock the 160 men in the church
and began looting the village. The population fled. On 28 April, the men in the church
were tied together and taken in small groups to a place called Ekbağ, where they were mas-
sacred in the usual fashion with knives, bayonets, and axes.22 On 27 April, the men who had
conducted this attack, led by Ali Beg of the Şavetli tribe, launched an assault on the village
of Marmet, whose mayor, Raïs Hovhannes, chose to negotiate. He asked the 60 armed men
present to leave. One hundred men were thereupon arrested, locked into the church, and
then led to Zhagatsi Tsor, half an hour from Marmet, where they were liquidated at the
same time as 25 men from Zhirashen.23

Massacres in the Kaza of Erçiş

Located on the northeastern shore of Lake Van, the kaza of Erciş/Arjesh boasted 54 Armenian
towns and villages on the eve of the war, with a total population of 10,381.24 In the admin-
istrative seat of the kaza, Agants (2,078 Armenians), the kaymakam, a Young Turk from
Istanbul, Ali Rıza Bey, ordered on 19 April that all the Armenian men in the small town
gather before the sub-prefecture. Four hundred men were locked up on that day in the town
jail. In the evening, the men were bound together in groups of ten and conducted by gen-
darmes and militiamen toward the lakeport, near the village of Khargen (pop. 285), where
they were shot.25 The same day, 700 to 800 men from the neighboring villages who had been
confined in the barracks near the town’s southwestern exit met the same fate. Among the
men detained in the town jail and executed in the evening were the auxiliary primate, Father
Yeghishe, and the other leading citizens of the town: Nicolas and Sarkis Shaljian, Harutiun,
Nshan, Khosrov, and Serop. An eyewitness remarks that in the evening the kaymakam deliv-
ered a solemn speech to the militiamen assembled on Agants’s central square, urging them
to pursue their operation to help save the fatherland.26 In the course of the day, these çetes of
the Special Organization had systematically attacked all the Armenian villages in the kaza
and massacred the rest of the population.27
According to A-To, of the 10,381 Armenians in the kaza, 2,378 had been massacred by 19
April, 518 (for the most part young women and children) had been abducted, 953 had been
carried off by disease or starvation, and 693 were missing. This represented 4,542 people,
nearly 45 per cent of the total Armenian population.28 The survivors managed to flee north-
east behind the Russian lines, which were then situated on a line running through Dyadin.
Thus, a method that would be used elsewhere in the following weeks had already been applied
here: it consisted in first liquidating the men and then wiping out the towns and villages.
Massacres in the Kaza of Perkri

According to a survivor from the Perkri area, Mushegh Mgrdichian of the village of Yegmal,
most of the men of the 41 towns and villages of the kaza of Pergri/Perkri, which had a
total population of 5,152,29 had been working in the region’s amele taburis since the August
1914 general mobilization. In early April, gendarmes nevertheless scoured the villages of this
kaza, located at the northeastern extremity of Lake Van, in order to “mobilize” all the males
over 15, “so as to beef up the battalions of worker-soldiers.” The same informant states that
approximately 1,000 men were working in the amele taburis at the time; they were repairing
the roads in the Abagha Valley, where the snow was beginning to melt. On 19 April, these
men were massacred in groups of 25 in the narrowest part of the Pante Mahu gorge, which
extended to a point “two versts” southwest of Perkri, near the medieval Golod Bridge. Their
executioners were gendarmes and militiamen commanded by Milis Iso Telun. A Kurdish
commander of a squadron of hamidiyes, Tahar Beg, had been poisoned at a meal with the
kaymakam and the commander of the gendarmerie, Amar Bey, for trying to protect some
of these men.30 On the same day, 80 men were murdered in the village of Khachan (pop.
600), including Usta Mgo, his five brothers, two sons, and several of his nephews.31 On the
morning of the 19 April, the village of Kordzot (pop. 790), located on the boundary of the
nahie of Timar, received a visit from the kaymakam, Ziya Bey, and the commander of the
gendarmerie, Amar Bey, accompanied by 200 men and the auxiliary primate, Der Manvel.
The villagers scraped up 50 Turkish pounds and ten rifles, in the belief that that would be
enough to satisfy the authorities. Eighty-six men were nevertheless arrested and locked up in
the Meloyan family home. On the morning of 20 April, the gendarmes set them marching
toward Yeghunatsor, where they were all massacred.32

The neighboring village of Bzdig Kiugh (pop. 447) was occupied on the morning of
20 April by 300 militiamen and hamidiyes under the orders of Süleyman from Irishad
(Arjesh); 120 men were arrested in the village and shot in the vicinity, while the village
itself was looted and 60 people were slaughtered. Those who attempted to flee down the
road to Perkri were shot as they ran or executed on the Golod Bridge in the Pante Mahu
gorge. The next villages to be attacked were Engizag (pop. 311), Surp Tatos (pop. 211),
Antsav (pop. 108), and Panz; 60 men from these villages had their throats slit, while the
villages were looted and burned down.33 Some of the inhabitants of these villages found
refuge in Kordzot; among them were 50 armed men. When, on 25 April, Kurdish çetes
went to Kordzot to seize its wheat reserves, they were met with heavy gunfire. Doubtless
busy wiping out the other villages in the area, Amar Bey and several hundred militiamen
waited until 7 May to attack the village. They were met, this time, with spirited resist-
ance that lasted three days. When the Armenian volunteers arrived in the village on 15
May, they were confronted with a morbid spectacle: its central square was strewn with
corpses.34
Massacres in the Kaza of Adilcevaz

In 1915, there were 25 Armenian villages in the last kaza on the north shore of Lake Van –
the one furthest west, Adilcevaz/Ardzge, which had a total population of 6,460.35 As we
have already seen, Rafaël de Nogales, a captain who had been assigned to the Third Army,
arrived in Adilcevaz on the evening of 20 April, where he witnessed the massacre of the 500
Armenians who lived in the administrative seat of the kaza. The next morning, he watched
as their quarter was looted and then burned down on direct orders from the kaymakan,
who “thanked me effusively for having saved the town from the tremendous Armenian
attack.”36
The villages of the kaza of Adilcevaz had already come under attack on 19 April. In
Norshechur, 40 men managed to flee to a mixed Kurdish-Armenian village, Kızıl Yusuf,
located in the neighboring kaza of Manazgerd/Melazkırt (in the vilayet of Bitlis), where the
massacres had yet to begin. The kaymakam of Adilcevaz, however, sent gendarmes after
them; they killed the 40 fugitives in the village.37 It thus appears that the orders received
from Erzerum and Istanbul concerned only the Armenians of the vilayet of Van, and not at
all those of the neighboring districts.
Massacres in the Kaza of Kiavaş/Vostan

and in Hayots Tsor
In the kaza of Kiavaş/Vostan, which boasted 25 Armenian villages with a population of
6,851,38 generalized massacres began on 18 April in Hirj (pop. 205), where Ishkhan had been
assassinated the previous day. Forty-six men were slain here. The same day, the other villages
in the eastern part of the kaza, Atanan (pop. 372) and Spidag Vank (pop. 124), were attacked
and set ablaze. A day later, Edhem, a captain in the gendarmerie, arrived in Van at the head
of 300 militiamen equipped with two cannons and shelled Beltents (pop. 386). On 18 April,
the Kurdish chieftain Lazkin Şakiroğlu attacked two localities in Hayots Tsor, on the Norduz
road. In Angshdants (pop. 411), the notables, including the mayor, Murad, who tried to
reason with the Kurdish leader, were shot. Twenty men, however, defended the village well
enough to prevent the attackers from taking control of it.39
The same day, Lazkin and his men plundered the neighboring village of Eremeri (pop.
432), which was defenseless, and then massacred 80 people. A young man barricaded in a

house, Sahag Kaprielian, was the only one to hold his own with the çetes; he killed seven
Kurds. After nightfall, he led the survivors to Gurubaş.40
The next day, 19 April, Angshdants was encircled again. Its defenders fled that night,
leaving the way open before Lazkin and his çetes. Seventy people were killed in the village,
while the others fled northeast toward the mountainous region of Varak and the Kurdish
village of Temkos. Lazkin’s third target, Gghzi (pop. 312), was counting on the protection of
a local Kurdish beg, Mahmad Şarif. Şarif intervened, but to no avail: on the afternoon of 19
April, 60 people were massacred in Gghzi, including Hovsep Aloyan, Harutiun Garabedian,
Vartan Manukian, and Father Mgrdich. Retrenched in a house, eight young men resisted
until nightfall, when they fled to Pertag and Varak.41
On 20 April, Lazkin attacked Gem (pop. 547) and Ankgh (pop. 678), which lay south of
Van in Hayots Tsor. He was backed up by two other çete leaders, Jıhankir and Sadul. He had
two cannons at his disposal. The inhabitants of Musgavents/Mashdag (pop. 394) and Gzltash/
Kızıltaş (pop. 314) had also thronged into Gem, where they were defended by 60 armed men
who were unable to fend off the çetes’ attack. The survivors poured onto the road to Ankgh,
where 150 people were massacred.42 The same day, Ankgh was attacked in its turn; 270 vil-
lagers were slain there, while 300 fled toward the Khoshap River, where 100 more perished.
Thus, a total of 700 people were massacred on 20 April.43 What was left of the population
of the villages in the vicinity gathered in Ishkhani Kom (pop. 409), located between the
Semiramis Canal and the Khoshap. On the afternoon of 20 April, Lazkin, Jıhankir, Sadul,
and their çetes, who had been joined by the contingent under Captain Edhem to form a force
of around 1,000 men equipped with four cannons, attacked the village, defended by 80 men.
Eight hundred men of all ages retreated to Varak, to the east, while the women and children
set out for Ardamed, where 300 were massacred. Three thousand people, however, succeeded
in reaching either Van or Varak.44
A total of some 2,000 survivors from Beltents, Gghzi, Spidag Vank, Atanan, and Kızıltaş
took refuge on Mt. Gghzi, where they remained for around three weeks. On 10 May, the
kaymakam of Kiavaş arrived with 200 militiamen and attacked the Armenian villagers.
Some fled toward Van and Varak; the bulk of the group succeeded in reaching the plain
of Pzantashd in the northwestern part of the kaza of Şatak/Shadakh, where people from
Karcikan/Garjgan and the villages in the western part of the kaza of Kavaş had gathered.45
Massacres and Resistance in the Nahie of Varak

Varak, a mountainous district lying one hour east of Van, containing the monastery of
St. Gregory and the villages of Tarman (pop. 482), Gokhbants (pop. 218), Tsorovants (100
Armenians and 240 Kurds), and Shushants (pop. 559), offered a haven to thousands of vil-
lagers from both the immediate vicinity and Hayots Tsor in the first days of the massacres
in the area. This mountainous zone was the more important in that it communicated with
the nahie of Arjag and the Persian border, while dominating the Khoshap/Hoşab-Başkale
road, which the inhabitants of Van regarded as a possible escape route.46 This no doubt
explains why some 30 gendarmes took up positions in the monastery of Varak at a rather
early stage in the fighting. On the evening of 20 April, these gendarmes murdered the
monastery’s two monks, Father Aristakes and Father Vrtanes, along with their four serv-
ants, and then, oddly enough, abandoned their position and returned to the city. It was
precisely at this moment that 3,000 fugitives from Hayots Tsor, Nor Kiugh (pop. 413), Lim
(pop. 143), Zarants (pop. 240), Sevan (pop. 439), Ermants (pop. 24), Bakhezeg/Baghezig
(pop. 98), Farugh (pop. 210), and Osgerag/Osgipag (pop. 270) arrived in these heights,
defended by 60 men. The 6,000 refugees on Mt. Varak even succeeded in establishing a
nighttime link with the city.47

Spared by the early fighting, the mountainous area was attacked on 8 May on orders from
Vali Cevdet by a substantial force, the “Erzerum Battalion,” which comprised 300 cavalrymen
and 1,000 militiamen and çetes, equipped with three batteries of cannons. The Armenian
defenders facing them were deployed in three positions: 50 men under Hagop Blgoyan were
stationed in Gokhbants; 250, under Toros’s orders, were posted in the monastery at Varak;
another 250, commanded by Shirin Hagopian of Arjag, had taken up positions in Shushants.
The first attack was launched against Shushants, which was taken and burned down after
putting up a feeble defense. The attackers then turned to Gokhbants and its monastery of St.
Gregory, which also gave way; the ancient monastery of Varak and its collections of medieval
manuscripts were given over to the flames. In the space of three days, the 6,000 people who
had been concentrated here managed to reach Van, traveling by night.48 One Armenian
source has it that Cevdet made no attempt to hinder the refugees’ flight into the city, “so
that he could starve the population and overcome the obstinacy of the defenders faster and
more easily.”49
The Siege of Van

While most Armenians in Van were concentrated in the quarter known as Aykesdan (the
“Gardens”), located in the eastern part of the city just below the fortress, some of them
lived in the fortified old city, where the shops and main government offices were located.
Between the two neighborhoods lay a virtually uninhabited area. Thus, the resistance move-
ments that the Turkish forces battled for three weeks – one in the old city and the other in
Aykesdan – could not, practically speaking, communicate.50 The first clashes occurred on
20 April in Aykesdan, at dawn; the Armenians barricaded themselves in the old city three
hours later, when Van was shelled from the western part of the Urartuan citadel in which
one of the city’s barracks and the ammunitions depot were found.51
Dr. Clarence Ussher, who had been the private physician of Tahir Pasha, the former vali
of Van, had known his son Cevdet well when Cevdet was still a young man, as well as his
wife, the sister of Minister of War Enver. In his description of this modern, refined Young
Turk, the American physician remarks that he “had proved himself past-master of the art
of concealment and dissimulation” by convincing the Armenians of his good intentions in
order to assassinate Ishkhan the more easily, and by maintaining “pleasant social relations”
with the missionaries before shelling this den of “infidels” and frankly voicing his real feelings
about them.52 In the missionary’s view, everything went to show that Cevdet “had planned
for 19 April a massacre of all the Armenians in the vilayet.” At the missionaries’ insistence,
however, he agreed to discuss with them his proposal to station gendarmes in the American
mission “for [their] protection,” and even postponed executing his plans for the city for 24
hours, a “delay [that] had been responsible for the effective defense.”53 Of all the participants
in these events, Ussher is the only one to have suggested this hypothesis. However, the
chronology of the massacres in all the kazas of the vilayet of Van, with the exception of the
Shadakh/Şatak massacre, seems to corroborate it.
Van’s defenders, albeit heavily outnumbered and poorly armed, had an advantage – they
found themselves in a densely urban environment – and a disadvantage: their positions com-
municated directly with all the government buildings in the city, such as the Administration
of the Public Debt, the courthouse, the police station, and the regional government building,
which constituted so many positions from which the Turkish forces could attack them. This
explains why the leaders of the resistance decided on the very first day of the fighting to send
out commandos with the mission of burning these buildings down.54
Shortly after the fighting began, during the night of 21–22 April, an eyewitness and cen-
tral participant in the Van events, Rafaël de Nogales, the Venezuelan officer who had been

put at the disposal of the vali of Van, arrived on a boat in the city’s lakeport. After witness-
ing the massacre of Adilcevaz’s Armenians the day before, he saw, while he was still cross-
ing the lake, the bright light emanating from the “burning villages,” especially the village
of Ardamed, where affluent families from Van spent the summer (the village church was
blazing “like a torch”).55 The next morning, while Nogales was inspecting positions in both
parts of Van, he witnessed the arrival of several hundred Kurds who were supposed “to help
in killing all the Armenians” and take part in the “bacchanal of barbarity” – a manhunt for
the handful of Armenians who had not been able to make their way to one of the quarters
that were resisting. A brave attempt notwithstanding, de Nogales was unable to rescue two
young men from the hands Kurdish çetes, who ignored his orders to desist and killed both of
them.56 In the outskirts of Aykesdan, in front the American mission, he averted his gaze so
as not to have to witness the spectacle of dogs fighting over corpses. Further on, he observed
“the Musulman populace during [its] zealous search for treasure” in the Armenian homes
outside the combat zone. He also noted the care the authorities took to have the corpses of
the Armenian victims burned, in order to wipe away “the other traces of their crimes.”57
When, a little later, de Nogales went to dine with Vali Cevdet, he discovered “a panther
in human form” in his luxurious villa, dressed “à la dernière mode parisienne.” Cevdet was
flanked by one Captain Reşid and his battalion of Laz “Janissaries.” Reşid’s task was to carry
out all the vali’s “secret orders.” The Venezuelan officer was struck by the contrast between
the violence raging a few dozen yards away and the refined surroundings of the residence of
the vali, who was an educated man. Among the guests was “a gentleman called Achmed
Bey,” who fascinated Nogales. Wearing a well-cut English tweed suit and fluent in several
languages, “with his aristocratic manners and his rather blasé expression,” this was “none
other than the notorious bandit” Çerkez Ahmed, the leader of a group of “Circassian” çetes.58
A native of Serez in Macedonia, this fedayi of the Ittihadist Central Committee and major in
the army had made headlines a few years earlier by assassinating high-ranking government
officials and journalists who had denounced the political practices of the Young Turks, and
also by taking part in the 23 January 1913 coup d’état that cost the minister of war his life.59
After fading back into anonymity for a time, the major was named one of the officers of the
Special Organization and dispatched to Van with his squadron of butchers in order to lend
Cevdet a hand.60
Nogales was well aware that the “only political offense ... of hundreds of innocent women
and children consisted in being Christians.” This by no means prevented him from accept-
ing the mission Cevdet assigned him: he was to take “the direction of the siege” and coordi-
nate two companies of artillery that he set up in the citadel.61
A considerable force had been put at his disposal. It consisted of battalions of Circassian
and Turkish volunteers, battalions of gendarmes, including a mounted battalion, regular
troops, and 1,200 to 1,300 Kurdish çetes, almost all of them “attracted by the hope of sack-
ing the town.” Thus, he had the rough equivalent of a division at his command – 10,000 to
12,000 men.62
One of the major problems that the other camp, the Armenians, had to contend with
was the Turkish artillery, which pounded their two fallback positions without let-up. The
network of deep trenches that they had dug went only part of the way toward solving the
problem: every night, brigades of masons repaired the holes that Turkish shells had ripped in
the defense lines. The other major problem that the defenders of Aykesdan had to overcome
was the fact that the Hamudağa barracks butted up against the eastern part of the Armenian
quarter; from there the Turkish forces chipped away at the Armenian positions. However, a
few audacious Armenian soldiers succeeded in making their way to the basement of the bar-
racks, which had been built in 1904 in order to control Aykesdan; they crawled through the
network of kanas, the tunnels traditionally used for the distribution of water in the city. On

22 April, at 4 p.m., mines that were placed with great precision under the foundations of the
barracks exploded, setting off a fire that reduced the building to ashes and forced the Turkish
troops to abandon the adjacent position of Şahbender.63 This swift success both relieved and
galvanized the Armenians. Nogales, for his part, noted that “the resistance of the Armenians
was terrific ... Each house was a fortress that had to be conquered separately.” He even had the
feeling that the Armenians were always able to guess his intentions, because the positions
that he considered attacking were consistently defended by men in large numbers.64
On the Venezuelan officer’s own admission, Cevdet was unnerved by the “heroic resist-
ance of Van” – the expression is Nogales’s – which withstood the fierce assaults conducted by
regular forces or çetes as well as the déluge de feu that rained down on the city. After five days
of fighting and a by no means negligible loss of human life, the Turkish and Kurdish volun-
teers were visibly demoralized, as their commander observed: the Kurds “evaporated by the
dozens, and toward the last by the hundreds, as the siege was prolonged.”65 Among the other
measures taken by Cevdet, Nogales notes that he ordered the American mission shelled,
although the vali himself claimed that the shelling resulted from an error; subsequent events
showed that he was determined to liquidate the “American giaours [infidels].”66 Cevdet also
ordered the bombardment of St. Peter and Paul Cathedral, a building in the old city that had
“a monument of unquestionable historical” value.67
Of course, relations between the authorities and the Armenians were broken off in the
first days of the fighting. The Italian consular agent G. Sbordoni was the only European dip-
lomat still working in Van. He had maintained friendly relations with Cevdet to this point,
and decided on 24 April to attempt to intercede with him.68 Sbordoni reminded the vali that
his sole motive was a desire to restore peace and that he had already had occasion, during
their conversations of the previous few weeks, to call his excellency the vali’s attention to the
fact that “regrettable incidents could arise in consequence of the militias’ attitude and lack
of tact,” since the militiamen “were incapable of acting in strict accordance with [Cevdet’s]
orders.” After assuring the vali that he had perfect confidence in him in view of his extensive
experience and that he was certain that he would find a “solution,” Sbordini added that he
was convinced that his proposals “would be well received in Armenian circles.” He empha-
sized, however, that there was no chance of bringing the Armenians to accept a proposal
to lay down their arms “and unconditionally surrender in the prevailing situation.” “If the
Armenians have had recourse to arms,” the Italian told the vali, “it is because they are con-
vinced that the government, using military service as a pretext, wishes to eliminate every last
one of them [and have therefore decided] to defend the lives of their families.” “Five cannon-
balls,” he went on to complain, “have struck our consulate.” They had, however, caused only
material damage, and the consul was happy to learn that the vali had now ordered that the
cannons be pointed in a different direction. Finally, speaking on behalf of the American and
German missions, he told the vali that they wished to inform him that they had not given
shelter “to armed individuals,” but only to women, children, and the ill, and asked that he be
so good as to take “the measures required to ensure their protection.”69
In Aykesdan, the Defense Committee had now been organized, but had to deal with the
throng of 7,000 refugees who arrived on 25 April from the villages of the nahies of Arjak and
Timar and the surrounding areas. The overriding concern was to feed all these people. The
committee also had to use its ammunition sparingly or else replenish it; it therefore impro-
vised a cartridge factory, a gunpowder factory (directed by a chemist), and an arms factory.
A smithy was even converted into a cannon foundry. Although this project was of merely
symbolic value, it seems to have sustained the morale of the populace, which was invited to
donate its copper pots and pans; they were melted down to make an “Armenian cannon”
that was used to shell the Hacibekir barracks on 4 May, albeit to no great effect.70 Like the
firing of this cannon after days of memorable effort, another feat of arms left its mark on

people’s minds, beginning with Nogales’s: on 28 April, the Armenians dug a tunnel and blew
up the Reşidieh barracks, where the notorious kaymakam of Perkri was stationed with his
çetes, whose exactions in the Perkri district we have already examined.71 In response to these
acts of force, Cevdet ordered Çerkez Ahmed and his çetes to go to the villages in the environs
of Van and liquidate the women and children still to be found there. According to Nogales,
this squadron committed acts of such violence that even Cevdet felt obliged to give Major
Ahmed a dressing down, “sincerely or not,” for the horrors he had perpetrated.72
In early May, when the news from the front had begun to alarm the Turks, and both
Kurdish çetes and Turkish volunteers were abandoning the city, Cevdet attempted one last
maneuver: he told de Nogales that he had just signed an “amnesty” with the Armenians.73
The Armenians’ situation, too, was critical: by now, 15,000 refugees had poured into the
city from the rural zones of the sancak of Van.74 It was for this reason that they agreed to
negotiate the terms of an “amnesty,” although they were persuaded that this was another
ruse of the vali’s. Cevdet, for his part, ordered a cease-fire in all combat zones on 3 May.75
The written proposal that he submitted to the Armenians is worth examining in detail,
for it is symptomatic of Cevdet’s turn of mind and the methods of disinformation he used.
Maintaining his accusatory tone, the vali complained about the Armenians’ “insurrection,”
which he said had produced a bloodbath. The district of “Arjag and part of the district of
Timar have received the punishment they deserved,” he went on, thus creating the impres-
sion that the massacres in this region had been retaliatory measures, although they took
place on 19 April, before the Armenian population of Van had retrenched itself in its quar-
ters. However, he struck a magnanimous pose, announcing that he was granting “a respite to
the refugees on the island of Lim and in Timar”; he promised that if they surrendered, “no
harm would be done to their women and children” – although he was perfectly aware that
the 12,000 refugees who had flocked onto the island of Lim were doomed to perish for lack
of an adequate food supply.76 He then returned to the “insurrection” in Van, launching out
on a discourse designed to justify his actions by presenting them as legitimate measures. He
first affirmed, in defiance of all logic, that he had given orders not to return the “insurgents’
fire”; however, when it became apparent that “these imbeciles continued to fire away to the
sound of drums and trumpets,” he had “given the order to shoot back.” In other words, the
assault launched against Aykesdan at dawn on 20 April had been a riposte. Continuing in
the same tone, the vali accused the Armenians of having “fired on the guards” and of killing
“a few policemen and passers-by,” which left him with no choice but to use cannons. To lend
credibility to his thesis that the Armenians were the aggressors, he added: “I know that there
are many people from the villages in the city. I am convinced that they want to attack the
fortress” – although the Armenian quarter was besieged, and had been saved thanks only to
its defensive posture.
Cevdet employed a threatening tone in the rest of his missive: “Be warned that the artil-
lery is on the way ... As soon as the cannons arrive, they will be turned on the city and will
fire away until it is nothing but a pile of rubble.”77 The vali then listed his military exploits,
as if trying to convince himself of his own strength: he announced that he had captured
the villages of Tarman and Gokhbants, whose inhabitants, as we have seen, had fled to the
slopes of Mt. Varak, and then described the exploits of those of his troops who had taken
control of a zone stretching from the Hamudağa barracks to Cross Street. Here, too, he said,
“we have proved to be stronger, and have burned everything down.” In question, however,
was an area of the city that was essentially unsettled.
Compounding threats with lies, the vali then told the Armenians, who had no external
source of information, that Halil Bey’s troops, “sweeping aside the Russian troops they had
encountered on their path, had entered Khoy” the day before. In fact, Halil’s Expeditionary
Corps was in retreat after a heavy defeat in Dilman.78 In his conclusion, Cevdet betrayed

the true purpose of his letter: “Please understand that you must abandon all hope of being
saved.” The coda was a set of proposals prefaced with a preamble formulated in classically
Ottoman style:
To the present day, we have loved and protected this people as if it were the light of our
eye; its sole response has been ingratitude and treachery. It must be punished. Think
of your innocent families. What sin have they committed? If you have no pity on your-
selves, take pity on them, at least.
In other words, if the defenders of Van did not surrender, “innocent families,” who had
already fallen victim to massacres throughout the vilayet, would suffer official retaliatory
action brought on by the “insurrection.” Cevdet accordingly proposed to the Armenians that
they “1) give up all weapons and 2) surrender, placing [their] confidence in the generosity of
the government to which [they had] to swear fidelity.”79
The vicar Eznik, to whom Cevdet’s letter was formally addressed, answered in his response
on 4 May that the Armenians had never ceased to recognize the sultan’s sovereignty80 –
that is, that they had simply reacted to the threat facing them. Rafaël de Nogales adds that
the Armenians were willing to leave the city and go to Persia, but demanded that the vali
accompany them in person to guarantee their safety. Nogales accordingly proposed, in vain,
to accompany them in the vali’s stead. “We all knew,” the Venezuelan captain observes, “that
Cevdet was hoping that the Armenians would leave the city “so that he might have them
slain on the way.”81
Even as he was negotiating, Cevdet ordered the execution of seven Armenians who had
served in the mounted gendarmerie without the least criticism from anyone.82 He also ordered
that Armenian prisoners be executed, beginning with the Hnchaks whom he had had arrested
well before the onset of the events. Their throats were cut in the city’s outskirts.83
Sbordoni provides us with information that precisely contradicts the affirmations of the
vali, who, the Italian consul wrote, “sought to create the impression that the government had
extended its benevolent protection to the peaceful populations.” “Unfortunately,” he added,
we are receiving, from outside sources, reports of acts of unheard of cruelty perpe-
trated in villages that were absolutely unarmed. The Armenians lost all confidence
when they heard these reports; they are increasingly convinced that the government
is pursuing a program of generalized massacre and are increasingly inclined to defend
themselves.
Finally, Sbordoni gave the lie to the vali’s denial that the inopportune shelling of the
Americans had been deliberate, after he had personally inspected “the damage that the
shells had done to the American church.”84
Nogales, too, observed the practices of the local administration when he visited Van’s mil-
itary hospital on 1 May. There, two nurses – a German named Martha, and Grisell MacLaren,
an American – told him that the hospital’s senior physician, İzzet Bey, had “gotten rid” of his
Armenian personnel and let his Christian patients die of gangrene, refusing to provide them
with the least treatment.85 But Nogales witnessed another spectacle that shocked him still
more profoundly: Cevdet had the women and children who had been rounded up by his çetes
during their raids on the villages brought to the city, where he had them executed in full view
of the besieged Armenians.86
In his last letter to Cevdet, dated 4 May, the Armenian prelate gave him to understand
that he had not been fooled by the vali’s talk of a possible “amnesty.” He reminded him
of what really mattered: “If you truly wish to save my unfortunate country, put an end to

the massacres of women and children – of an innocent population in its entirety.”87 The
Armenians’ problem was that the committees in the old city, where the prelate lived, and in
Aykesdan, where Aram Manukian was, were unable to communicate, so that neither knew
anything about the other’s mood and intentions. For information, they accordingly depended
on the affirmations of the vali, for whom, as we know, they had no great esteem, and, perhaps,
the Italian consul, whose services Cevdet called on in negotiating with Aykesdan. When the
vali warned the prelate that he was expecting a “definite answer” the following day, 6 May,
reminding him that, “as he very well knew, the government could not contract agreements
with its subjects,” the military situation was alarming from the Turkish point of view.88 Halil
and his Expeditionary Corps had retreated toward Başkale after their defeat at Dilman and
established their headquarters further to the south, in Tokaraga, in the upper Zab valley.89
Moreover, the battalion of Armenian volunteers commanded by Vartan, backed up by sev-
eral brigades of Cossacks, had been authorized by Major-General Nikolayev, the commander
of the corps of the Russian army operating in the Igdir area, to open an offensive on Perkri,
where violent fighting had occurred in early May.90 As we have seen, Cevdet, who had prob-
ably given up hope of overcoming the resistance in Van, had on 8 May ordered the “Erzerum
battalion” to attack the Armenian positions on Mt. Varak. It is true that the arrival in Van of
several thousand refugees from this mountain district had further complicated the sanitary
situation and made it harder to feed the population. Nonetheless, Cevdet no longer had the
forces he needed to crush the Armenian resistance. All indications are that, by 7 May or the
day after, the vali had understood that he could not bring the city to its knees. Nogales, at
any rate, had come to that conclusion by now, and asked Cevdet to relieve him of his com-
mand. He was not, however, given permission to leave until 14 May.91
It was also on 14 May that the Muslim population and Ottoman forces began to evacuate
Van. The last troops left the city on 16 May after burning down their barracks. According to
Nogales, Halil had ordered Cevdet to abandon Van and link up with Halil’s Expeditionary
Corps by way of Khoşab.92 The Armenian sources report the besieged Armenians’ joy upon
learning that the Turks had left, but also, with consternation, how the inhabitants of Van
pillaged and sacked the city’s deserted Turkish neighborhoods.93 The vali had clearly antici-
pated the 18 May arrival from the north of the Russian vanguard, with the volunteer battal-
ion under Vartan’s command at its head. The next day, Major-General Nikolayev’s division
arrived. To avoid a political vacuum, the Russian commander appointed Aram Manukian
provisional governor of Van and authorized him to create a local administration. It func-
tioned to the end of July.94
Resistance in the Kaza of Şatak/Shadakh and

the Fate of the Armenians of Moks
The kaza of Şatak/Shadakh, with its rugged relief traversed by deep gorges, was located in
the foothills of the Taurus. In 1915, it boasted 65 Armenian localities with a total population
of 8,433.95 The administrative seat of the kaza, Tagh, which straddled the eastern branch of
the Tigris, had just over one thousand inhabitants, almost all of them Armenian; a few gov-
ernment officials also resided there, including the kaymakam, Hamdi Bey.96 It was in Tagh,
as we have seen, that the first tensions between the authorities and the local population
sprang up, beginning on 11 April, with the arrest of Hovsep Choloyan and the kaymakam’s
attempt, the next day, to confiscate the weapons held by the population.97 Although an
armed peace prevailed here until 17 April, information that arrived in Tagh on 16 April
about the attack carried out by Kurdish çetes on the Armenian villages in the eastern part of
the kaza the day before only intensified the inhabitants’ suspicions of the authorities. At this

point, Dikran Baghdasarian, an officer who had been trained in Istanbul’s Military Academy,
decided to begin preparing Tagh to defend itself in case of attack. According to A-To, he had
70 Armenian fighters at his disposal, against the 150 gendarmes and militiamen present in
the village.98 On 16 April, the whole population was assembled in the quarter located on
the left bank of the eastern Tigris, by far the biggest quarter in Tagh, which stood facing on
the right bank the quarter known as “The Mills.” Here, the local government and the forces
at its disposal were to be found.99 In other words, both sides were camped at their positions,
and any attempt to enter one quarter from the other could only be perceived as an act of
aggression. The balance was upset on 17 April, when the young men who controlled access
to the upper quarter – that is, the three bridges linking the two parts of the town (only the
central bridge was made of stone) – refused to let militiamen cross one of the bridges. The
ensuing exchange of gunfire announced the beginning of hostilities. In the upper quarter of
the town, where the inhabitants now dug in, communication took place through holes in the
party walls of adjoining houses.100
The self-defense committee headed by Dikran Baghdasarian established a general defense
plan that took account not only of the inhabitants of Tagh, but also those of the kaza’s vil-
lages. To cut off access to the area from the south, the committee decided to seize control of
the Khlkdun/Hlkdun Bridge, which spanned the Upper Tigris. Only by crossing this bridge,
located two hours south of Tagh, could the Kurdish Halili, Havşdun, Eztini, and Alani tribes,
which were based in the south, reach the Tagh area. Thus, the safety of all the villages
located on the right bank of the eastern Tigris was assured.101
A second defensive position was established at Pols, northwest of Tagh. It controlled the
road from Moks and another road farther to the north, as well as two dams – one near
Hashgants, an hour to the north, the other near Sozvants, half an hour to the west. These
were the only access routes to the hinterland, in particular the plain of Pzantashd to the
northwest, the key to communications in the area.102
On 20 April, the Armenians in Tagh burned the wooden bridge leading to “The Mills” in
order to forestall an attack from the rear. On 22 April, their northern position at Hashgants
was captured by Kurdish çetes, but Pols continued to resist, while the bridge located at the
exit from Hashgants succeeded in holding off the Kurdish tribes until 1 May. The kaymakam
let it be known that Hovsep Choloyan and his five comrades had been executed the same
day in the jail in Tagh.103
By early May, the pressure brought to bear by the Turkish forces had become so intense
that the self-defense committee decided to regroup its forces – joined by villagers from the
valley of Gaghbi (to the southwest) – in an area near Dzidants, one hour west of Tagh.
The objective was to reduce the length of the front.104 On 19 April, the kaymakam of
Norduz, Halet Bey, had arrived in the kaza with reinforcements of 60 men. Concentrating
the Armenians from the surrounding villages in Tagh and other defensive positions had led
to the desertion of the Kurdish contingents; the pressure on the Armenians did not, how-
ever, diminish as a result.105 On 29 April, the fighting grew more bitter when the notorious
Kurdish chieftain Lazkin Şakiroğlu, who had just finished attending to business in the vil-
lages in the kaza of Gevaş, arrived in Shadakh by way of Norduz and took Arikom and then
Krments, forcing their inhabitants to flee to Tagh.106 Cevdet, however, seems to have been
late in delivering the ammuntion and two cannons that he had promised to kaymakams
Hamdi and Halet. It was not until 5 May that he informed them that this materiel would
soon arrive, while recommending to the two officials that they maintain Lazkin and his
çetes in the area.107
At this point in the confrontation, control of the northern front, the key to access to the
plain of Pzantashd, where a good number of refugees from the kaza of Gevaş were concen-
trated, constituted a major stake of the battle. This position was the more critical in that

it dominated the access route from Vostan and Van. Beginning on 17 April, fierce combats
took place here. They continued until 20 April, even as thousands of fugitives from the vil-
lages in the southern part of the kaza of Gvaş, such as Nor Kiugh, Mokhrapert, Kantsag,
Varents, and Entsag sought haven in the district. They were joined at the end of the month
by refugees from Hayots Tsor and Timar, raising the number of displaced persons in the area
to approximately 6,000. Levon Shaghoyan led the resistance here, which was mounted by
fighters from the kaza of Gvaş. It cut off direct access to Tagh for the reinforcements that
had been sent from Van, forcing them to take roundabout routes.108 The fighting focused on
two key points in the valley: Shahrur Castle, which was subjected to the fiercest attack by
Hüseyin Ağa on 29 April, and Paratodig, which was threatened the same day by 500 men
equipped with a cannon, who had been sent from Van to reinforce the government troops.
Unable to break the resistance at these two points, the reinforcements had to make their way
through the rugged eastern Tigris river valley, and thus did not reach Tagh until 18 May.109
The other fronts did not hold up as well. In Pols, northwest of Tagh, and at the Hashgants
Bridge on the road from Moks, Kurdish forces pushed the Armenian fighters back to
Dzidzants, where there was extremely fierce fighting on 9 and 10 May. It was, however, the
11 May fall of Sozvants, to the west of Tagh, which destabilized the Armenian resistance
and led to the complete encirclement of Tagh. Only the forces positioned to the north, in
Sindgin and on the plain of Pzantashd, were able to break out of this encirclement.110 On 18
May, these forces tried to recapture Sozvants. Meanwhile, the cannons dispatched from Van
finally arrived in Tagh, where they immediately went into action.111 Their belated arrival no
doubt prevented the kaymakam from better exploiting his advantage. On the morning of 21
May, Armenian rearguard forces recaptured Sozvants and thus broke the siege of the town.
On 23 May, Hamdi Bey and the müdir of the Alani, Şevket, resigned themselves to abandon-
ing Tagh because Tro’s (dashnak military chief) battalion of Armenian volunteers from the
Caucasus had already reached Sindgin.112
By the end of the day, when Shadakh came under Russian control, all the villages of the
eastern and western parts of the kaza had been razed. Their inhabitants were now crowded
into Tagh. As for the villagers from the southern part of the kaza, they had either regrouped
in Gaghbi, Gajet, and Armshad or fled to Moks and Sindgin.113 The fate of the 45 villages of
the kaza of Moks and its 4,459 Armenians114 offers a telling indication of the influence of local
officials or tribal chieftains: these Armenians were never molested, thanks to the protection of
a Kurdish chieftain, Murtula Beg, who refused to execute orders he had received from Van.115
Balance Sheet of the Events of April–May 1915

According to the general balance sheet drawn up by the Russian army after it took control
of the vilayet of Van, the advancing Russian forces discovered 55,000 corpses in May 1915,
which they burned as they went.116 This represents a little more than 50 per cent of the
vilayet’s Armenian population. In addition to the human losses, the vilayet’s Armenian vil-
lages had been systematically plundered and then burned down, leaving the refugee popula-
tion, concentrated in Van, Shadakh and Moks, in a precarious state. Indeed, the region had,
for all practical purposes, been depopulated, inasmuch as its Muslim inhabitants had fled in
the wake of the retreating Turkish army.117
The Turkish Retreat and the Russian Advance

Over the month of May, the military situation in the region evolved rapidly. After the defeat
suffered by the Ottoman Fifth Expeditionary Corps, the troops led by Lieutenant-Colonel Halil
(Kut) were forced to retreat to Tokaraga, south of Başkale,118 fighting General Nazarbekov’s

Sixth Russian Division and the auxiliary forces of the first battalion of Armenian volunteers
as they withdrew.119 Expressly dispatched from Istanbul, Halil’s Expeditionary Corps was
much better equipped than the other Turkish forces,120 yet it did not obtain the expected
results. Quite the opposite: it sustained the second major Turkish defeat on the eastern front,
denying the Young Turks their primary objective of encompassing the local forces of Iranian
Azerbaijan within their Pan-Turk strategy, to which they had given a Pan-Islamic patina.
When Rafaël de Nogales arrived in Tokaraga on 15 May, Halil, a fanatical and jeal-
ous individual,121 had just given orders that his headquarters be transferred further south
to Sova (today Sinova), which was apparently easier to defend.122 At this point, the Sixth
Russian Division was in Başkale. Nogales, who was retreating with the vanguard of the
Expeditionary Corps, notes that they set out in the direction of the Norduz Mountains on 26
May, bivouacking on the way in Kişham, a village inhabited by semi-nomads of the Jewish
faith who spoke a mixture of Kurdish and Armenian. It reached Şağmanis on 29 May.123 On
that day, the Russian vanguard was still in contact with the Ottoman Expeditionary Corps
in the gorges of Norduz, but Halil seems to have abandoned the idea of putting up a defense,
opting instead for a rapid withdrawal westward toward Siirt.124 So as to retreat faster, the
Expeditionary Corps lightened its load by jettisoning its war booty along the way. Sebuh,
who was in the Russian vanguard that had set off in pursuit of the Turkish forces, had the
impression that he was at an “open-air market”: strewn along the edge of the road were costly
Persian rugs, household goods, clothes, and so on.125
After weighing the possibility of returning to Vostan, Halil decided, probably in view
of the Russian drive toward the northern shore of Lake Van, to follow the eastern Tigris
river valley south of Şatak.126 En route, the vali of Van and his troops, passing by way of
Khoşab, linked up with the Expeditionary Corps.127 According to Sebuh, the Turkish troops
systematically slaughtered the inhabitants of all the Armenian villages they found on their
path.128
After making a number of detours toward the southwest, the purpose of which was to take
them ever further from the Russian forces, the Turkish troops crossed the Tigris on 7 June,
arriving in Khisgir/Hisgir on 9 June, the same time as Colonel Isak and the “famed tribune”
Ömer Naci,129 an eminent member of the Special Organization who was probably returning
to Turkey from Persia in order to take part in operations planned for the vilayet of Bitlis. As
the Expeditionary Corps approached Siirt, in the kaza of Şirvan, it slew some 20 Armenian-
speaking Nestorians in Gundeş/Gunde Deghan.130 This violence was a harbinger of the
crimes that would be committed throughout the vilayet of Bitlis in the following weeks.
The Russian Withdrawal and the Evacuation

of Van and Its Environs
Altogether unexpectedly, on 24 July 1915, as the Russian forces advancing along the northern
and southern shores of Lake Van met up at its western extremity, Tatvan, the offensive came
to an abrupt halt and the Russians pulled back, beginning on 27 July, to Akhlat and Sorp.131
According to A-To, there was a heavy concentration of Turkish forces on the northern front
near Olti and Sarıkamiş. The Russian general staff, when it ordered the evacuation of the
region on 30 July, gave fear of encirclement as the official explanation for its decision.132
Although military imperatives might conceivably explain the Russians’ prudence, it
remains puzzling that St. Petersburg ordered the evacuation of the whole Armenian popula-
tion of the vilayet of Van, including its capital. Moreover, the Russian authorities’ decision,
which was at the very least unexpected, also seemed strange to certain experts at the time.
Thus, the American military attaché, E. F. Riggs, noted in a report that it was the battalions

of Armenian volunteers who went to great lengths to aid Van and, above all, that unneces-
sary retreats were twice organized,
probably on purpose. For 24 hours the Turks were left to enter the city and wreak their
will on the inhabitants. Those remaining in the city were subjected to indescribable
misery while those attempting to escape were attacked on their way into Russia by
Kurds. In this manner about 260,000 people, mostly women and children, were turned
on the public charge in the Caucasus, who if left protected in their own country could
have aided the Russian armies in Armenia by furnishing them with supplies from their
farms.133
The Russian forces abandoned Van on 3 August, forcing the local Armenian government
to evacuate the population of both the city and the surrounding rural zones. Several tens
of thousands of people set off toward the north. They were attacked by Kurdish çetes and
Turks in a gorge in the region of Perkri, where more than 1,600 people were massacred.134
Cevdet Bey even recaptured Van, accompanied by 400 to 600 Çerkez and Kurdish çetes, who
slaughtered a few hundred old men and sick people unable to leave the city.135 However, a
new defeat inflicted on the Turks on the Olti-Sarıkamiş-Alaşkert front changed the general
situation a few days later, and the Russians again took control of the Van region, which was
now deserted.
The refugees from Vasburagan and the survivors from Manazgerd and Mush who now
arrived in the Caucasus swelled the ranks of those who had already found haven there –
former inhabitants of the eastern zones of the vilayet of Erzerum and Armenians fleeing the
advance of the Turkish troops in Iranian Azerbaijan. The result was a terrible humanitar-
ian crisis.136 In a two-week period from late August and early September, 2,613 deaths were
recorded in the city of Echmiadzin alone, due essentially to epidemics. The situation of those
who had fled to Yerevan and Igdir was no better.137

Chapter 5
Deportations and Massacres in

the Vilayet of Bitlis
T
he massacres of the Armenian populations of the vilayet of Bitlis are generally presented
as a direct effect of the “events” in the neighboring region of Van, as an act of revenge
for the military defeats suffered by the Turkish forces in Persian Azerbaijan and during
the subsequent retreat of Halil’s Expeditionary Corps. However, the fragmentary information
available to us indicates that, from 25 to 27 April 1915, a long meeting took place halfway
between Siirt and Bitlis between Dr. Nâzım and the vali of Bitlis, Mustafa Abdülhalik.1 This
provides grounds for supposing that the order to extirpate the Armenian population of the
region, as well as the methods to be used in doing so, were discussed much earlier.
In Bitlis, late in April, Vali Abdülhalik had three local Armenian leaders arrested and
hanged.2 This was no longer the harassment or violence that typically accompanied the
military requisitions or general mobilization, but a move designed to condition the popula-
tion psychologically. The Dashnaks were the direct target, although curiously they were still
being treated respectfully in Mush. The authorities probably posed the problem in terms of
power relations. After deciding to eradicate the Armenians, they had to find the necessary
means to carry out the operation. There was a tremendous difference between what was
required in Bitlis and on the plain of Mush. In Bitlis, there was practically no danger that
the Armenians would react if they were attacked, because there the ARF did not have a
network worthy of the name. The plain of Mush, in contrast, was almost entirely Armenian
and a Dashnak stronghold. Abdülhalik could do practically whatever he wanted with the
forces at his command in Bitlis; he knew that he would have to mobilize a much stronger
force to liquidate the Armenians of the plain of Mush and the mountains of Sasun. Close
examination of the situation prevailing in the vilayet of Bitlis until early June 19153 leaves
little doubt that there was a shortage of troops in Mush. In other words, the retreat of the
Fifth Expeditionary Corps under Halil (Kut) and the 8,000 men in Cevdet’s “butchers’ bat-
talions” (kasab taburis) – as we have seen, the two forces linked up in the eastern Tigris river
valley – may be regarded as the result of a decision taken in consultation with Istanbul; it
made it possible seriously to envisage translating plans into action in the vilayet of Bitlis. The
sole foreign witness to this retreat of Cevdet’s and Halil’s joint forces, Captain de Nogales,
describes the mood of the two Young Turk leaders and the massacres that their troops perpe-
trated on their retreat through the kaza of Hizan/Khizan. On 12 June, when the bulk of the
troops struck out for Siirt, to the northwest,4 several officers in the battalion from Başkale
took a different direction, along with the Venezuelan. “With an air of great satisfaction,” they
told Nogales that the Bitlis authorities were preparing to commit massacres, and were only
waiting for the final order from Halil to begin.
Rather than an act of vengeance, then, what was involved was the implementation of a
pre-established plan. It was made possible by the arrival of Halil’s and Cevdet’s forces, whose

Eastern
Euphrates
•
Varto •
Malazgird N
Genc
• Bulanik
Chabaghchur
• • Mush Ahlat/Khlat•
Western Euphrates
• • Lake Van
Sasun BITLIS
•
•
Modgan/Mutki
•
•
• •
Siirt
Hizan
•
Dyarbekir Harzan •
Şirvan
Tigris • Pervari •
Eruh/Bohtan
connections with the Special Organization were no secret. As Nogales was approaching
Siirt, the massacres began. He discovered “thousands of half-nude and still bleeding corpses”
of all ages, and in such numbers that he and his companion had to “jump our horses over
the mountains of cadavers which obstructed our passage.”5 In the city, the Venezuelan also
witnessed the sacking of “the houses of the Christians” by the police and the “populace.”
In the konak, he stumbled upon a meeting to which the kaymakams of the region had been
summoned; it was chaired by the commander of the gendarmerie of Siirt, Erzrumli Nâzım
Hamdi, who had directed the massacres in person. One can guess what the meeting was
about. Nogales confesses that it was only now that he understood the true significance of the
revelations that the officers escorting him had made the day before.6
The presence of a foreigner, even one in the right camp, had obviously not escaped
the attention of the Young Turk military leaders, who probably arranged for him to take
another route so that he would not witness massacres like the one at Siirt. According to
Nogales, Halil, too, tried to have him killed, as Cevdet had in Van, to “prevent my reveal-
ing later on, in Constantinople or abroad, what had taken place.”7 Halil was planning, the
Venezuelan claims, to have him assassinated at two or three days’ distance from Siirt so that
the murder could be attributed “to bandits or Armenian rebels.”8 Aware that he was “the
only Christian ... to witness things that should never have been witnessed by any Christian,”
Nogales lost no time leaving the city. As he did, he passed groups of children and old men,
both Armenian and Syriac, who were being taken out of town under guard.9 But merely leav-
ing Siirt did not suffice to extract this embarrassing witness from the clutches of Halil Bey.

Deportations and Massacres: Bitlis 339
Reporting a conversation that he had further west with the mayor of the village of Sinan,
located several miles south of Beşiri, Nogales tells us that his interlocutor insisted on learn-
ing his “personal opinion about the massacres.” Noticing that Nogales was not much inclined
to say what he thought, the mayor, who was persuaded that Nogales did not understand a
word of Turkish, ordered his secretary to call the minister of war immediately in order to
inform him of the imminent arrival of this foreigner and his “full knowledge of everything”
(hepsi biler).10 In the end, Nogales emerged from this adventure unscathed; but it showed the
lengths to which the leaders of the Special Organization were prepared to go in order to be
able to act without witnesses or eliminate the witnesses who might talk.
We have another indication that the “blood-red general staff”11 had arrived in the area
in order methodically to liquidate the Armenians in the vilayet of Bitlis: Vali Mustafa
Abdülhalik, who happened to be Talât’s brother-in-law (his wife’s brother), had for weeks
been recruiting çetes among the Kurds and other groups. The recruits were put under
the command of Behcet Bey, commander-in-chief of the Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa in Bitlis.12
Abdülhalik had also ordered, in the first half of June, the systematic arrest of Armenian
notables throughout the vilayet, as well as systematic massacres in the kazas in the northern
part of the sancak of Bitlis.13
Nogales learned, moreover, from “résidents étrangers,” that Abdülhalik had told them
that Halil had issued the extermination order in person, and that his “vengeance” was in fact
the realization of a “carefully laid-out plan.”14 Between mid-June and late July, 681 Armenian
localities, with a total population of 218,404, and 510 churches, 161 monasteries, and 207
schools,15 were to be wiped off the face of the earth with extreme violence.
Massacres in the Sancak of Siirt

As we have just seen, the event signaling the start of the massacres in the vilayet of Bitlis took
place in Siirt. The sancak of Siirt, a mountainous region sandwiched between the Armenian
and Kurdish settlement areas, had a mixed population: the Armenian presence was more
pronounced in the kazas in the northern part of the sancak and very widely dispersed in
the kazas in the south, which was also home to 15,000 Orthodox and Catholic Syriacs. On
the eve of the war, there were 146 towns and villages in the sancak, inhabited by 21,564
Armenians, who maintained 45 churches and three monasteries.16
Side by side with the “blood-red general staff,” the local Ittihadist club, led by İhsan and
Servet Bey, took an active hand in organizing the massacres in the area. The club’s efforts
were seconded by government officials – Serfiçeli Hilmi Bey, the mutesarif of Siirt; Erzrumlu
Nâzım Hamdi Bey, the commander of the gendarmerie; Rifat Bey, an officer in the gen-
darmerie; Emin Basri, a captain in the gendarmerie; Arslan Bey;17 and Bitlisli Ali Effendi,
the police chief; as well as several leaders of squadrons of çetes in the Special Organization
(Ali Ziya, Haci Mustafazâde Ahmed, Abdüllah Sadık), making a total of some 40 local offi-
cials.18 It was with the active cooperation of these men that Cevdet and his “butchers” set
about executing the orders given them by Halil, who plainly outranked the valis Cevdet and
Abdülhalik.
On their way to Bitlis, Halil and Cevdet carried out mass liquidations in the Siirt area.
The 35 villages of the easternmost kaza of the vilayet – Pervari, Bohtan/Eruh and Şarnag,
with a total population of around 6,000 Armenians – were literally annihilated when the
forces commanded by Halil and Cevdet passed through them; the inhabitants were slaugh-
tered on the spot. In Siirt, the local authorities had anticipated the arrival of Cevdet and his
butchers. Four days previously, on 9 June, the Armenian primate of the diocese, Yeghishe,
the Catholic Syriac bishop, Addai Şer, the orthodox Syriac Abuna, Ibrahim, and ten of the
leading men of Siirt were arrested and shot the next day, half an-hour from the town. On

11 June, 670 men from Siirt, out of a total Armenian population of 4,032, were summoned to
the barracks, ostensibly to transport military supplies to Bitlis. They were, however, arrested
and shot the next day, at a half-hour’s distance from the town in the Vedi Ezzreb gorge. When
Cevdet arrived on 13 June he finished the job: over the next few days, he rounded up the
remaining older men, whose throats were cut on the town’s central square.
The women and children were assembled a few weeks later at the exit from the town and
offered to the Kurdish population. Of those the Kurds did not fancy, some were massacred on
the spot with axes and knives; around 400 people were deported toward Mardin and Mosul.
No one in the group that was set marching in the direction of Mardin survived; its last sur-
viving members had their throats cut a short distance from town. Fifty deportees in the other
caravan reached Mosul alive.19
Nobody knows what became of the several hundred villagers from the eight villages in
the vicinity of Siirt, or of the 2,853 Armenians from the villages and towns of the kaza of
Şirvan/Shirvan.20 It is known, however, that the 5,000 Syriacs in the sancak of Siirt, both
Catholic and Orthodox, received the same treatment as the Armenians.21 As for the 8,343
villagers from the 76 towns and villages of the kaza of Harzan,22 they fled to the mountains
of the neighboring district of Sasun, where they suffered the same fate as the local popula-
tion. However, as was revealed at the Istanbul trials in 1919, it should be noted that Serfiçeli
Hilmi Bey, the mutesarif of Siirt, was transferred to Mosul because he had displayed little
enthusiasm for eliminating the Armenians or Syriacs in his prefecture. He was later to draw
up a full report on the massacres in Dyarbekir and Mardin and submit it to the German
vice-consul in Mosul, Walter Holstein, for transmission to the German ambassador, Hans
von Wangenheim.23
Massacres in the Sancak of Bitlis

After “cleansing” Siirt of its Armenians and Syriacs – all things considered, rather rapidly –
Cevdet and his “butchers’ battalions” promptly set out for Bitlis, with Halil’s Expeditionary
Corps hard on their heels, for the Russian troops were also marching on the city. In the
regional capital, Vali Abdülhalik had already taken the initiative by waging a campaign
of destruction against the villages to the north. The members of the big American mission
in Bitlis, which included a hospital and an Armenian girls’ school, witnessed events in the
region, as did a nurse in the military hospital who had recently arrived from Van, Grace H.
Knapp. Knapp was the only one to leave a written account of what she saw.24
On 16 May, Knapp’s boat arrived in Tatvan, located at the western extremity of Lake
Van, at the same time as thousands of wounded or exhausted villagers from the 56 vil-
lages of the kaza of Bitlis, which had a total population of 16,651, and the 22 villages of
the northern kaza of Akhlat, inhabited by 13,432 Armenians.25 These Armenians, among
whom there were virtually no men, had been attacked by Kurds and had fled to Bitlis to
seek the protection of the government. “They had no idea,” Knapp wrote, “that the affair
had been ordered by the government.” The American missionary was in fact witnessing the
results of the first massacres in the northern areas of the sancak of Bitlis. She also noted that
every evening the Kurdish squadrons returned from their expeditions to the villages after
finishing “their work of murder and destruction.”26 In the space of a few days, some 12,000
refugees, many of them wounded, had thronged into Bitlis. Seven hundred of them were
taken into the American mission,27 while the others found a place in Armenian institutions
in the last days of May 1915. The bishopric and the mission fed and cared for these refugees
as best they could.
When the missionaries asked the vali for explanations of what they were hearing from all
the rural zones of the sancak about atrocities perpetrated against the Armenians, Abdülhalik

affirmed that Kurdish brigands were sowing disorder there and that he was doing all he could
to “put an end” to it. Early in June, however, the throng of refugees in Bitlis was gradually
moved out of the city on the road leading south, guarded by gendarmes. A woman who
escaped from one of these convoys and fled to the American mission revealed that the con-
voys were being attacked and decimated en route by Kurds. At a meeting with Abdülhalik,
Grace Knapp’s father, George Knapp, the head of the American mission and a Protestant
minister, and the Armenian Protestant minister in Bitlis, Khachig Vartanian, requested that
he authorize the caravans to take the road to Mush so that they could avoid the Kurdish
attacks – but to no avail.28
On 22 June, at a time when Bitlis was under serious threat from the Russian troops and
the vali and local government were already making plans to leave, panic gripped the city
with the arrival of the Kurdish chieftains of Modgan/Mutki. It was later learned that, shortly
before coming to Bitlis, the Kurds had destroyed the 27 Armenian villages in their kaza,
massacring the 5,469 villagers where they found them.29 The same day, the destruction of the
Armenians of Bitlis began. The first step was the arrest of Reverend Vartanian, followed a
day later by an operation targeting the American mission: it was surrounded by soldiers and
gendarmes, who took the handful of Armenian pharmacists, nurses, and teachers employed
there into custody.30 It would appear that the presence of these foreign missionaries was
extremely troublesome from the authorities’ point of view. When they proceeded to arrest
all the males in Bitlis the same day, Reverend Knapp immediately went to see Abdülhalik
to demand an explanation. Courteous as always, the vali justified the arrests by citing infor-
mation to the effect that letters from Van had been received by “some Armenians” in the
city: “the object of arresting all the men was to discover who the recipients [of these letters]
were.”31 These feeble excuses, inspired by the official discourse, could hardly hide the true
objective of the systematic round-up, accompanied by unprecedented acts of violence, of all
males over ten from the streets, schools, bazaar, and houses of Bitlis32 – namely, to eliminate
all possibility of resistance from the outset. From 22 June on, the men were led out of the city
under escort in small groups of between 10 and 15 individuals, depending on the length of
rope available to tie them up. They were then shot to death or killed with axes, shovels, or
sharp stakes. It took a full two weeks to liquidate the Armenian male population of Bitlis.33
In the testimony that Colonel Nusuhi Bey, a witness for the prosecution who had served in
the Bitlis region, gave to the court-martial in 1919 about the activities of the commander-in-
chief of the Third Army, Mahmud Kâmil, he noted in passing that the Armenians of Bitlis
were killed “in a valley at a half-hour’s distance from the city,” where “they poured oil on
them and burned them.”34
On 25 June, Cevdet arrived in Bitlis with his 8,000 “human butchers.” The effect was not
only to keep the Russian forces, then one hour away in Han Alam,35 from marching on the
city, but also to cut off the city’s communications with the outside world. The authorities
could now go serenely about their business. Cevdet, the better to mark his arrival, immedi-
ately had Hokhigian and a few other Dashnak leaders in the city tortured. They were sub-
sequently hanged on a nearby promontory, Taghi Klukh.36 He then turned his attention to
the imprisoned Armenian notables, from whom he extorted 5,000 Turkish pounds37 before
demanding the “hand” of the daughters of two of them, Araxi and Armenuhi.38
Doubtless in order to bring matters to a conclusion as speedily as possible, 700 men were
conducted to a spot six miles from the city, slain, and then thrown into pits that they had
been made to dig themselves.39 Not even very young children, it seems, were spared: all the
boys from ages one to ten were taken from their families, led out of the city, thrown into a
huge pit, doused with kerosene, and burned alive, “in the presence of the vali of Bitlis.”40
A different fate was reserved for women, and the children from the city and surrounding
villages who did not fall into this category – some 8,000 people in all. The police began

rounding them up on 29/30 June. They were initially left for two days in a few spacious houses
in the city or in the courtyard of the cathedral, and then, early in July, conducted by gen-
darmes and policemen to the southern exit from Bitlis, at the entrance to the Arabi Gorge
near the bridge of the same name, where they remained for two weeks. The gorge served
as a market where anyone who wished to could help himself to the woman, girl or child of
his or her choice. At the end of this vast auction, at which 2,000 people found takers, the
6,000 unfortunates who had not were attacked at dawn by Cevdet’s çetes; several hundred
perished. The survivors were led in a caravan down the road to Siirt, guarded by gendarmes.
The caravan was again harassed by çetes at Dzag Kar. What was left of it trekked past Siirt to
Midyat, where approximately 1,000 deportees were murdered, leaving some 30 survivors with
the option of continuing on their way.41
By mid-July, only a dozen Armenian men were left in Bitlis – artisans whom the army con-
sidered indispensable42 – together with the women and girls held by the former parliamen-
tary deputy Sadullah, the mal müdir, the chief of the post office, Hakkı, the proprietor of the
hamam, and others.43 The authorities also had to hunt down a few children still roaming the
streets of the city; they were thrown into the river, or into pits whose sides were so steep that
they could not climb back out of them.44 Finally, Cevdet and Abdülhalik insisted on evict-
ing the handful of women who had found refuge in the American mission, together with the
girls at the school. Grace Knapp’s detailed report about the harassment to which the mission
was subjected bears witness to the two Young Turk leaders’ resolve to fulfil their mission: to
wipe out the Armenian presence in Bitlis without leaving a trace behind.45 Thus, we are told
that gendarmes regularly called on the mission to arrest the women who had found refuge
with the Americans. Some managed to stay where they were by bribing the gendarmes, but
only for a few days, after which they met the common fate.46 The arrest in the American mis-
sion of an orphan girl aged two or three, the daughter of an Armenian schoolteacher from
Tatvan, illustrates the zeal displayed by the local police. It is true that the girl kept repeat-
ing, to whomever cared to listen, the name of the Kurd who had murdered her father.47 The
well-educated, polyglot girls at the American school aroused the desires of Young Turk offic-
ers, who even seem to have put pressure on the vali – this, at least, is what the Americans
affirm – to turn the girls over to them.48 It seems more likely, however, that these girls were
destined to disappear like the others, even if the biological conception of Turkism then pre-
vailing did not rule out such alliances. In the end, the girls of the American school escaped
with their lives thanks to the chief physician at the Turkish Military Hospital, Mustafa Bey,
an Arab who had been educated in France and Germany. Aware that “the presence of these
girls in the school was a constant thorn in the flesh to the government,” he nevertheless
stubbornly opposed their deportation on the grounds that the hospital was absolutely inca-
pable of operating properly without them: a stand that earned him the enmity of the Turkish
officers who were impatiently awaiting their prize.49 Thanks to Mustafa Bey’s resistance, the
matter took on a certain importance, so that Mustafa Abdülhalik was left with no choice but
to refer the question to Cevdet, who came only occasionally to Bitlis because he had other
business to attend to on the plain of Mush. We may thus note in passing that Cevdet, both
a military leader and a former vali, outranked Abdülhalik. In any event, Cevdet decided in
favor of the army physician.50
Around 15 July, when the liquidation of the Armenians of the sancak was virtually com-
plete, the Russian forces stepped up their pressure and the local government made serious
plans to evacuate the city. To this end, a battalion of 1,000 Armenian conscripts was sent
southward with the vali’s library and archives. All these men were massacred at some dis-
tance from Bitlis, and the governor’s archives were destroyed.51 The authorities would later
accuse George Knapp of having hoisted the American flag over the roof of the hospital in
which wounded soldiers and Muslims suffering from typhus were being treated in order to

“guide the enemy.” Yet the Turks were the first to express surprise when they learned on
24 July that the Russian troops had pulled back.52 After this brief moment of panic, two
staff members of the local branch of the Banque Impériale Ottomane returned to Bitlis and
reported on the ghastly scenes that they had witnessed on the road leading south. The banks
of the Bitlis Çay were covered with piles of rotting corpses; in many places, mountains of
dead bodies blocked the road and the sides of the road were littered with the remains of the
deportees from Bitlis and the surrounding region.53
We have little information about the fate of the villages in the vicinity of Bitlis, with the excep-
tion of the important town of Khultig, lying two hours southeast of the city, with an Armenian
population of 2,598.54 In May, gendarmes went to Khultig to collect arms; in exchange, they
promised the villagers protection. With the first acts of violence in Bitlis, on 25 June, some of
these villagers fled, only to be massacred in the countryside. It was not until 2 July that Khultig
was occupied by 100 soldiers and Kurdish militiamen. The inhabitants were then packed into
barns and burned alive by Humaşli Farso and his men.55 Thirty young men managed to escape
and subsequently joined the volunteer battalions. Some 100 women and children from the vil-
lage were later found among the Kurdish tribes of the region, and another five women and ten
orphan girls were found in Bitlis when the Russians took the city in 1916.56
Thus Rafaël de Nogales’s estimate that 15,000 Armenians were massacred in the sancak
of Bitlis alone seems quite plausible.57
The Butchers of Bitlis

In the first days of July, while the last convoys of women and children were being massa-
cred at Dzag Kar (which means “perforated stone” in Armenian), those who bore the main
responsibility for these crimes – Lieutenant Colonel Halil, the uncle of the minister of war;
Cevdet Bey, the minister’s brother; Mustafa Abdülhalik, brother-in-law of the minister of the
interior; and Turfan, the police chief – were at a banquet with the main butchers in an inn
located near the scene of the slaughter. To entertain the guests and put the finishing touches
on their work, the Armenian prelate and a few of the leading men of the city who had been
spared until then were shot there by gendarmes that night.58
The massacres organized in the vilayet of Bitlis cannot, however, be explained simply
as a consequence of the activity of these high-ranking personalities, close to the highest
state authorities. An entire political, administrative, military, and local governmental hier-
archy was mobilized to perpetrate this violence. The executioners in the front ranks were
to be found, of course, within the leadership of the local CUP club: Muftizâde Sadullah
and Gidozâde Resul, Ittihadist parliamentary deputies, and Muftizâde Nasrullah, also an
Ittihadist deputy and the president of the club. Among the civilian officials who played
important parts, beside Mustafa Abdülhalik, were Hamdi Effendi, the president of the
municipality, and Şemeddin Fatullah, the director of the Evkaf; both were members of the
commission responsible for abandoned property (emvalı metruke), and were especially heav-
ily involved in plundering Armenian assets. Among those in the military or related organi-
zations, Behcet Bey, the commander-in-chief of the squadrons of the Special Organization
in Bitlis, held the fairest claim to the title of chief organizer, closely followed by the Bitlis
police chief Turfan Bey, who organized the arrests in the city and dispatched his men to
execute the Armenians; he received help from Ahmed Refik, a police captain. Edhem Bey,
the commander of the gendarmerie, and his assistant, Faik Bey, organized the convoys
of deportees and provided them with their escorts; they took a direct hand in the mass
slaughter.
In the Bitlis region, with its essentially Armenian and Kurdish population, tribal chief-
tains and local clans played a direct role in the massacres. Among them were Ilikzâde

Abdurahmanoğlu Şemseddin Şamo, Yaralızâde Mehmed Salih, İbrahimzâde Haci Abdül

Gani, Yusufpaşazâde Musa Effendi, Haci Melikzâde Şeyh Abdül Bek Effendi, Tüfrevizâde Şeyh
Abdül Bak Effendi, Haznodarzâde Tevfik Effendi, Kadri Şeyh Haci İbrahim, Terzi Naderzâde
Haci Şemseddin, Fuadağazâde Haci Şemseddin, Karsondlizâde Haci Kasim, Karsondlizâde
Haci Fato, and Molla Said.59
A captain at the staff headquarters of the Ottoman army in the Caucasus who visited
Bitlis in fall 1915, after its Armenian population had been wiped out, reports that there
were still 300 young Armenian women in the city. Placed under guard in Bitlis’s Armenian
cathedral, they served the pleasure of the officers and soldiers passing through town on
their way to the front. By the time the captain visited Bitlis, most of these women had
contracted venereal diseases. The local military commander felt obliged to eradicate this
scourge, which was negatively affecting the soldiers. He had the young women poisoned or
otherwise put to death, with the approval of Mahmud Kâmil, the commander-in-chief of
the Third Army.60
Events in Spargerd in the Kaza of Hizan

In the kaza of Hizan, which straddled the vilayets of Bitlis and Van, there were no fewer than
76 Armenian villages, with a combined population of 8,207 in 1915. The available sources
all discuss the district of Spargerd, in which there were 26 villages with an approximate total
Armenian population of 2,600. The district lay in the southernmost part of the kaza.61 There
is every reason to believe that the fate of the Armenians of the other nahies was similar to
that of the inhabitants of Spargerd.
According to our main witness, conscription was a painful process in this district, because
many men of draftable age were working far from home or even abroad, as was common in
the rural areas of Armenia. The conscripts were sent to Van and from there to the Caucasian
front. None came back alive. Despite the tensions that arose during the military requisitions,
the leader of the local ARF committee, Lato, succeeded in maintaining relations with the
müdir of Spargerd and in obtaining guarantees that the militias formed in the region would
not mistreat the Armenian population.62 As happened elsewhere, the authorities in this
nahie organized a second conscription campaign late in March; its purpose was to enlist men
over 45 years of age, who were supposed to serve in the military labor battalions.63 When
the Van events occurred, it seems that the local Kurds began to make preparations for war,
perhaps in response to orders from their superiors. At the same time, Lato mobilized 120
armed men to ensure the safety of the population. Around 20 May, the region found itself
under threat from “Kurds and Turks fleeing Van.” However, the Armenian fedayis checked
the offensive by maintaining control over a pass in the southern part of the nahie, the sole
means of access to it. An agreement between the müdir and Lato finally resolved the mat-
ter. Our witness reports that in the same period a battalion of volunteers from the Caucasus
had advanced as far as the neighboring kaza of Moks, but that the people of Spargerd were
unaware of this until Tro’s contingent arrived in Spargerd.64
The Russian forces effectively controlled the region for almost two months, between late
May and late July. In July, however, the Russian general staff ordered the evacuation of all
the inhabitants of Spargerd and Khizan. It is likely that the return of Halil’s and Cevdet’s
unified forces alarmed the Russian commanders, who preferred to evacuate these villages
to save them from certain death. After waiting for three weeks in Vostan, on the shores of
Lake Van, the Armenians of Khizan set out on their exodus, bound for the Caucasus.65 Like
the refugees from Van, they fell victim to massacres in the Perkri pass. Over the following
weeks, many others were mowed down by epidemics in Echmiadzin, where they had found
refuge.66

Massacres in the Sancak of Mush

The eradication of the 141,489 Armenians of the sancak of Mush and the destruction of
the 234 towns and villages in which they lived67 constituted an objective that was incom-
parably harder to attain for the Turkish authorities than cleansing Bitlis and Siirt of their
Armenian populations. The two conscription campaigns of August 1914 and March 1914
had drained the area of its vital forces, as we have already pointed out,68 and considerably
diminished the Armenians’ ability to defend themselves. For the authorities, the priority was
obviously to extirpate the population of Sasun and take control of its mountain fastnesses.
In May, they launched their first attack on the area with support from Kurdish tribes – the
Beleks, Bekrans, Şegos, and so on – which they armed. This attack was repulsed.69 These
operations were carried out at the same time as those that targeted the civilian populations
of the kazas south of Sasun, Silvan and Beşiri,70 and in the northern part of the sancak of
Mush, in Bulanik. The timing of the two actions suggests that the next stage in the plan was
the liquidation of the “big piece in the middle” comprising the 103 villages of the plain of
Mush, with its 75,623 Armenians.71 The failure of the offensive against Sasun conducted by
the Kurdish çetes probably convinced the Young Turks to appeal exceptionally to “regular”
troops in order to get the better of this dense cluster of Armenians. Here, no doubt, lies the
explanation for the June lull in the action in Mush: the harassment and plunder of the vil-
lages in the district “suddenly ceased everywhere, and perfect order prevailed in Mush.” The
calm held for three weeks,72 during which Halil’s and Cevdet’s forces were busy liquidating
the Armenians of the sancaks of Siirt and Bitlis. They became available for other operations
only in early July, at which point Cevdet and Lieutenant-Colonel Kâsim Bey, accompanied
by a division, left Halil to finish his task in Bitlis and gained the plain of Mush.73 It was not
until 8 July 1915 that Halil and his Expeditionary Corps, equipped with mountain cannons,
linked up with them.74 But the authorities also needed to mobilize local forces to maximize
their chances of success. They were greatly aided in this by the June arrival in Mush of a
key personage, Hoca Ilyas Sâmi, a Kurdish religious dignitary and a member of the Ottoman
National Assembly. Sâmi, who galvanized the Muslim populations of the region, does not
appear to have returned from Constantinople by accident. One historian says that the mute-
sarif, Servet, called him to the rescue;75 in fact, he had just been named CUP inspector
in Mush.76 As in the other vilayets, an operational committee was created, and Sâmi was
named to head it; the other members included Servet; Halil (Kut); Falamaz Bey, Hoca Ilyas’s
first cousin; Derviş Bey; Haci Musa Beg, Hoca Ilyas’s uncle; Dido Reşid, the CUP delegate in
Mush; and Salih Bey – all of whom were tribal chiefs belonging to the Young Turk club in
Mush.77 The committee could also rely on the support of civilian officials such as Bedirhan
Effendi, the head of the land-registry office; İbrahim Effendi, the director of the hospital;
Esad Pasha, the kaymakam of Bulanik; Mahmud Effendi, the police chief; Kâzım Effendi and
Rıza Effendi, police officers; and military personnel such as Behcet Bey, the commander of
the gendarmerie, and Dr. Asaf, an army pharmacist.78
The Special Organization had squadrons of Kurdish hamidiyes at its disposal, as well as the
members of local tribes rallied by Haci Musa Beg, the commander-in-chief of the irregular
forces. Haci Musa Beg was seconded by the commanders of the çetes: Rustamoğlu Hayrullah;
the sons of Haci Yasin, Kazaz Mahmud, Kotunlı Dursun, Şükrü, Mustafa and Arif from Haci
Ali; Abdül Kerim; the sons of Topal Goto; Kotunlı Ahmed; Şeikh Niazi and his brother,
Cemil Effendi, from Beyrakdar; Nurheddin from Slo; Arif from Asad; Haci İbrahim; Bakdur
Hüseyin; and Deli Reşidoğlu Mahmud.79 Some of these officers of the Special Organization,
such as Dido Reşid, along with his 500 men, had already participated in the military opera-
tions at Van. Others were just arriving on the scene. All, however, received arms, ammuni-
tion and a salary from the prefecture, and were employed as “regular forces” on mission.80

Hoca Ilyas Sâmi continued to play an altogether central role in Mush. The fact that
he was a high religious dignitary endowed him with considerable prestige, which he used
to preach the jihad in the city’s grand mosque.81 Yet, like all the local notables, he was
doubtless only executing orders received from Lieutenant-Colonel Halil (Kut), one of the
leaders of the Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa. The first measure taken after the 8 July arrival of Halil’s
Expeditionary Corps in Mush was designed to bring all the access routes to the city under
control and cut off communications between the localities of the plain, which were attacked
the next day by squadrons of çetes under the command of Haci Musa Beg.82 In the days pre-
ceding the attacks, the same çetes confiscated arms in all the villages after systematically
torturing the villagers into revealing where they had hidden their rifles. In other words,
steps were taken to make it possible to swing into action as soon as the upper echelons of
the Special Organization gave the order. The task before these çetes was easier in that there
were hardly any young men left in the localities they were to attack.83 The various survivors’
accounts at our disposal indicate that much the same method was applied throughout the
plain. The çetes would encircle a village, round up the men, tie them together in groups of
10 to 15, lead them from the village, and kill them in a nearby orchard or field. Then they
would shut the women and children up in one or more barns, picking out children and the
“prettiest” young women for themselves before dousing the building(s) with kerosene and
burning those inside alive. Finally, they would plunder the village and then burn it to the
ground.84
An eyewitness account given to a French press correspondent who was in Istanbul during
the trial of the Young Turk leaders describes the case of 2,000 women who were surrounded
by these Kurdish çetes and “sullied and looted.” The women were suspected “of having swal-
lowed their jewels to keep them out of the bandits’ hands.” Disemboweling them proved to
be too time-consuming a job. They were therefore doused with kerosene and burned alive.
The next day, their ashes were run through a sieve.85
No fewer than six days, from 9 to 14 July, were required to extirpate the Armenians from
the plain of Mush and the northwestern kaza of Varto (nine villages with a total Armenian
population of 649). Roughly 20,000 people managed to flee to the Sasun highland, near
Havadorig, where they crowded into an area with a circumference of three to three-and-a-
half miles, a veritable trap in which they found themselves surrounded, along with the rest
of the Sasun mountain district.86
A few people from villages in the northeastern part of the plain, such as Vartenis, suc-
ceeded in fleeing to the Russian lines near Akhlat.87 Colonel Nusuhi Bey, in the testimony
on the violence on the plain of Mush that he gave to the 1919 court-martial, states that he
suggested to Mahmud Kâmil that the women and children be “left in peace.” However, on
his return to Mush, he found that preparations for the violence were in progress and met the
leader of the çetes “charged with killing the Armenians,” Musa Beg, together with his band.88
This would seem to indicate that the orders to eradicate the Armenians were issued by an
authority independent of the army, most probably the leadership of the Special Organization,
whose highest-ranking representative in the region was Halil (Kut).
The chronology of events shows, moreover, that Halil personally supervised operations.
Whereas the villages on the plain were razed on 9 July, he gave his men the order on 10
July to take control of the Armenian houses on the heights dominating the city, the stra-
tegically located quarter known as the “Citadel,” with a view to setting up his mountain
cannons there.89 On 11 July, the local authorities had the munedik (town crier) announce
that all males over 15 had to register for their departure, with their families, for Urfa, in
compliance with government orders. The next day, 200 people who had shown up to reg-
ister were arrested and sent the following night to a village on the plain, Alizrnan, where
they were slaughtered.90 The day before, the mutesarif, Servet Bey, had had 300 worker-

soldiers from Mush, who had already been enrolled in amele taburis, executed on the road
to Chabaghchur (in the sancak of Genc). He also turned a battalion of 700 worker-soldiers
over to the police chief, Kâzım; the men were locked up for two days without food or water,
tied up, and then sent to Garmir, where they were shot.91 These initial operations were
designed to complete the arrangements to eliminate all those who might offer resistance
to the program of destruction. After the vicar and a few leading men of the city begged
the mutesarif to spare the women and children, he finally agreed to grant them a respite of
three days, until 14 July.92 It seems reasonable to suppose, however, that the 12 July arrest
of the bishop of Mush, Reverend Vartan, and 100 other people, all of them subsequently
taken under guard to Khaskiugh and shot, was part of the general plan put in place by the
authorities, who had never intended to deport the Armenian population of the region, but
rather meant to liquidate it on the spot.93
Only after bringing these initial operations to their term and beginning to cleanse the
Armenian villages on the plain of their population did the Young Turk leaders in Mush give
the order, on 12 July, to shell the Armenian neighborhoods of the city, and then to send
units of the army and squadrons of çetes into action against them. The 3,000 inhabitants
of the neighborhoods located in the lower part of the city, Chikrashen and Prudi, were the
first to be rounded up and escorted to Arinchvank, a short distance northwest of the city.
Here they were separated into two groups: the men were shot in the village orchard, while
the women and children were shut up in barns that were then set on fire.94 Çetes and soldiers
went through these neighborhoods house by house; they broke down doors and, without
further ado, massacred all those who had barricaded themselves in their homes, using axes
or bayonets.95
Part of the population of the city and the inhabitants of the villages near Mush suc-
ceeded in fleeing to Veri Tagh, Tsori Tagh, and St. Marineh, where resistance was organized
around a core of some 60 armed men, led by Hagop Godoyan. The cannons in the upper city
pounded these neighborhoods as the regular troops and çetes steadily advanced, taking first
St. Marineh and then Veri Tagh. The civilian population fled in panic to the last Armenian
enclave, Tsori Tagh, the “Quarter of the Little Valley.” Many of the refugees were caught as
they tried to escape, and were either killed on the spot or locked into houses “doused with
kerosene” and burned alive.96 Thus, a group of 1,100 women and children was detained in
the courtyard of the police station and then sent to Karist, where these Armenians were shut
up in barns and burned alive on the orders of Behcet Bey, the commander of the gendarme-
rie, who saw to it that the gold and jewels found in the ashes were collected.97
After several days of desperate resistance, the fighters defending the Tsor neighborhood
abandoned their positions on 17 July, leaving the çetes and regular soldiers a clear field. The
soldiers were followed by a mob intent on looting. Many of the Armenians perished in an
attempt to flee into the mountains on the night of 17/18 July; those who survived were taken
under guard to Komer, Kashkiugh, Norshen, Arinchvank, or Alizrnan, where 5,000 people
were packed into barns and burned alive.98 The heads of certain households opted to poison
themselves and all the members of their family; others managed to escape to the mountains
of Sasun. The stragglers and the wounded left behind in the city were stacked up on a “huge
pyre” and set ablaze. This cycle of violence was brought to a close when the Armenian neigh-
borhoods were systematically burned down.99 Some 10,000 women and children from the
villages on the plain of Mush – Sorader, Pazu, Hasanova, Salehan, Gvars, Meghd, Baghlu,
Uruj, Ziaret, Khebian, Dom, Hergerd, Norag, Aladin, Goms, Khachkhaldukh, Sulukh,
Khoronk, Kartsor, Kizil, Aghatch, Komer, Sheikhlan, Avazaghpiur, Plel, and Kurdmeydan –
were “deported” westwards by way of the eastern Euphrates valley (the Murat Su) under
Kurdish escort. Some of the women died or were abducted on the way. Others were mas-
sacred by Kurds who had come from Jabahçur in the gorges of the Murat Su, the entry to

which lies west of Genc. These were the only Armenians of the sancak who were not put to
death in their native region.100
Even the children and teaching staff of the Deutscher Hilfbund’s orphanage in Mush,
where the Swedish missionary Alma Johannsen (1880–1974) worked, were targeted for
destruction. A squadron of regular soldiers went to see the Swedish missionary under the lead
of a commanding officer who presented her with “a written government order” to “turn over”
the orphan girls and Armenian women present in the institution (many women had found
sanctuary there during the massacres) to him so that they could be “sent to Mesopotamia.”101
Apparently under no illusion as to the fate in store for these women and girls, Johannsen
attempted to resist the orders of the commanding officer. The next day, she discovered that,
apart from the handful of her protégés who had “found a protector,” the others, several hun-
dred in all, had been “assembled in a house and burned alive,” or else buried alive in big mass
graves outside the city.102 Combing the city in search of possible survivors, she heard a gen-
darme boasting that he had burned the “little girls” of her orphanage alive.103 The authorities
had shown a certain respect for the formalities in dealing with this conscientious mission-
ary, the only “foreign” witness to events in the region, who, moreover, worked for a German
institution; they presented her with an official written order. They did not, however, succeed
in preventing her from reporting on the bloody practices of the government and army, which
here showed themselves to be pliable tools in the hands of the Ittihad’s Central Committee.
Johannsen notes, moreover, that Servet Bey tried to evacuate the German woman and
another Swedish woman who ran the Deutscher Hilfsbund’s orphanage with her to Harput,
but that only the German obeyed his order to leave. The few conversations Johannsen had
with the mutesarif also contain the only first-hand descriptions we have of the mood of
this militant Young Turk. Johannsen made an attempt to save her orphan girls by wring-
ing permission from Sevret to take them to Harput. He consented, but added, “Since they
are Armenians, their heads may be, and indeed will be, lopped off on the way.”104 Thus, all
pretences had been dropped; no further attempt was made to hide the CUP’s true objectives.
The Swedish missionary observes that, after the slaughter was over, “all the officers were
boasting about how many victims they had personally massacred, thus helping rid Turkey of
the Armenian race.”105
Here, as elsewhere, the economic dimension of the program to eradicate the Armenians
has to be taken into account. Certain local notables, such as the parliamentary deputy Hoca
Ilyas Sâmi, even managed to reconcile their “patriotic” duty with their personal interests. On
friendly terms with the leading Armenians of Mush, Sâmi had, from the very beginning of
the massacres in the city, suggested to several of these notables that they come to stay in his
home, where they would be safe. Nazaret Keshishian, Dikran Mezrigian, Aram and Bedros
Baduhasian, and Mgrdich Amrighian and their families accepted the offer. In this fashion
Sâmi succeeded in getting his hands on their property; he then turned his guests over to the
government, which had them murdered on the edge of town.106
This handful of advantages in kind, like the goods that the mob of looters took from
the Armenians’ homes and boutiques, amounted to very little in comparison with the lion’s
share of the booty that the four men who organized and carried out the carnage took for
themselves. A witness observes that after the butchers had finished their work, Abdülhalik,
Hoca Ilyas, Cevdet, and Halil left the city, “followed by a long string of camels loaded down
with eighteen big bundles. These bundles, covered with gaily colored sheets, were full of
gold, silver, precious objects and antiques.” The caravan was bound for Constantinople.107 It
is also easy to imagine the precious objects that were seized when the big monasteries were
plundered; their treasures, which had in some cases been accumulating for 15 centuries, were
of inestimable value, to say nothing of their unique collections of medieval manuscripts, of
which today only fragments survive thanks to the determination of a handful of people. It is

likely that the bulk of these stolen goods were earmarked for the Central Committee of the
Ittihad and its individual members.
That said, how are we to explain the weakness of the resistance in Mush? To begin with,
unlike the plain, Mush had a majority Muslim population, and the number of regular troops
stationed there was much higher than in Van: counting the squadrons of çetes as well, there
were more than 20,000 troops in the city. Vahan Papazian, who remained in Mush until
mid-June, writes in his memoirs that opinions diverged within the Dashnak leadership of
Daron about the steps to take to safeguard the population. Should the Armenians anticipate
the arrival of the Turkish regular forces by trying to seize control of the city, or should they
withdraw to the mountains of Sasun with the men capable of fighting?108 It seems that the
Armenian leaders had not definitely opted for one or the other alternative, but thought that
the authorities were planning to attack Sasun before turning to the plain of Mush. They con-
sequently assumed that it was preferable to withdraw into the mountains with the fighters
and all available arms, since it was the mountain district that was in any event going to serve
as a refuge for the villagers of the plain. The influence that the Russian advance had on the
choices made by both the Armenians and the authorities must also be considered. Late in
June, the Russian army occupied Manazgerd/Melazkırt, attaining on 18 July the westernmost
point that it would reach during the first phase of the war, the nahie of Liz (in the kaza of
Bulanik). From there, it was a 16-hour march to Mush.109 Even if the Dashnak leaders in the
region did not have exact intelligence, especially after their withdrawal to Sasun, they had
set their hopes on a prompt rescue by their cousins from the north, with whom they had only
recently had execrable relations.
Rafaël de Nogales, who continued to see Cevdet and Halil for the next few years despite
his negative experiences at Van and Siirt, put the number of Armenians massacred in Mush
and on the plain at 50,000. He did not count those who succeeded in fleeing to Sasun only
to be eradicated a few weeks later.110
Massacres and Evacuation in the Kaza of Manazgerd

In the kaza of Manazgerd, in the northeastern part of the sancak of Mush, comprising 39
Armenian villages with a total Christian population of 11,930,111 conscription spawned acts
of extreme violence, as it did in other areas as well. According to an Armenian witness, men
between the ages of 18 and 35 were inducted into combat units, while those between the ages
of 35 and 50 were assigned to transport units; most of the latter were killed by Kurdish çetes
upon their return from the front.112 Arms were collected in Manazgerd as early as mid-April,
which led to only limited violence. It was also in this period that the Turkish army beat a
hasty retreat under pressure from the Russian forces, which had advanced as far as Tutak, in
the northeastern part of Melazkırt. The army systematically plundered Armenian villages as
it withdrew, while incorporating an average of 30 to 40 men in each village.113
Guided by the kaymakam Halet Beg and two hamidiye officers, Sarti Beg and Süleyman
Beg, the army methodically looted the following villages: Noradin (pop. 1,671; 70 people
were killed), Kharaba-Khasmig (pop. 234; 20 killed), Erzaghi-Khasmig (pop. 663), Sultanlu
(pop. 116), Molla-Mustafa (pop. 217; 20 killed), Kotanlı (pop. 400; 20 killed), Terig/Gereg (pop.
922), Khanoghli (pop. 234), Rsdamgedig (pop. 1,800; 30 killed), Tundras (pop. 171), Agner-
Sheytanava (pop. 421), Pert/Manazgerd (pop. 945), Ekmal (pop. 160), Aynakhoja/Eknakhoja
(pop. 360), Oghzkhan/Okhkin (pop. 90), Mollapagh (pop. 110; 10 killed), Karakaya (pop.
725), Marmus (pop. 300; 20 killed), Dolazbash (pop. 300), Pakran (pop. 155) and Panzden
(pop. 237; 30 killed).114 Those killed in these villages were the young men still living in
them – as a rule, adolescents. They were “recruited” by the commander of the hamidiye çetes,
Haci Hamdi Beg, officially in order to carry out military transport. Conducted under guard

to a place near Kotanlı, in the valley of the Murad Su, they were, on the testimony of a few
survivors, shot and thrown into the river.115
One hundred families from the administrative seat of the kaza, Pert/Melazkırt, together
with 250 from the villages mentioned above, were grouped together in Agner by two Kurdish
chieftains, İbrahim Beg’s sons Abdüllah and Hüseyin, who protected them from harm. They
fled to Alexandropol in the Caucasus when the Russian forces took control of the region in
May; so did the Armenians from the villages of Hasse (pop. 72), Gushdian (pop. 52), Hasan
Pasha (pop. 47), Ganigor (pop. 54), Dugnug (pop. 438), Endris (pop. 105), Kharali (pop. 58),
Yaramish (pop. 73), Sardavud (pop. 49), Premasian (pop. 27), Hajipot (pop. 79), Khanek (pop.
51), Keranlegh/Kirali (pop. 82), Mkhchin (pop. 145), Khoshajin (pop. 43), Poyi-Chabghun
(pop. 57), and Dorokhan (pop. 268).116
Massacres and Evacuation in the Kaza of Bulanik

The kaza of Bulanik, which bordered on the kaza of Melazkırt, had, with it 30 towns and
villages and 25,053 Armenians, a very dense Armenian population on the eve of the war.117
The mobilization of men between the ages of 20 and 45 took place without noteworthy inci-
dent here. As elsewhere, so here, the younger conscripts were assigned to combat units and
the others were put in labor battalions that were used to effect military transports. These
labor battalions, which traveled back and forth between Bulanik and Hinis, had a high
mortality rate in winter 1914–15.118 Furthermore, the requisitions in Bulanik, supervised
by the kaymakam, Esat Bey,119 were so extensive that the area had suffered a severe grain
shortage.120
Thanks to the rapid advance of the Russian forces into the region in May 1915, the
population of the villages in Upper Bulanik escaped massacre: the inhabitants of the
principle town in the kaza, Gop (5,000 Armenians) fled to Melazkırt between 14 and 16
May when the Russians arrived there, as did those of the localities of Yonjeli (pop. 1,560),
Kharaba Shehir (pop. 572), Miribar (pop. 472), Sheykh Yakub (pop. 1,200), Plur (pop.
182), Odnchur (pop. 1,295), Teghud (pop. 1,168), Latar (pop. 700), Yegmal (20 house-
holds), Kekerlu (pop. 1,306), Plur (pop. 182), Khachlu (pop. 39), Shirvan Sheykh (pop.
1,300), and Maltlu (195 households).121 The only exceptions were Karaghel and Hamza
Sheykh. Hamza Sheykh, inhabited by 1,299 Armenians, was attacked by Kurds of the
Jibran tribe and local Çerkez, who massacred its inhabitants on the spot, leaving only 14
people alive.122 The villagers of Karaghel (pop. 1,312) fled along the banks of the eastern
Euphrates (Murad Su), protected by 30 armed men led by Kevork Khlghatian, but were
not immediately able to cross the river, which was in spate. Taking refuge on an island in
the river, they fought off the assaults of Kurdish tribes for two weeks, and then succeeded
in crossing to the other bank of the Euphrates, clinging to water skins that they had made
with sheepskin.123
The men of Gop opted to escort their women and children to the Russian lines when
they learned that the Russian army was in Melazkırt; meanwhile, under the command of
Gniaz Mkhitarian, Bedros Markarian, and Mushegh Seropian, the little town fought off
Musa Kâzım’s assaults. Some 100 Armenians lost their lives during the fighting, but the
others later managed to flee.124 The villagers of the 11 localities in lower Bulanik, which
lay much further to the southwest – Liz (pop. 1,499), Kerolan, Abri (pop. 203), Khoshkaldi
(pop. 1,018), Adghon (pop. 754), Prkashen (pop. 517), Goghag (pop. 472), Akrag (pop. 267),
Mulakend (pop. 200), and Pionk (pop. 457) – were less fortunate.125 Khoshkaldi came under
attack by Kurds commanded by Musa Kâsim Beg, the leader of the Jibran tribe, Haydar, and
a well-known bandit, Jendi. The Kurds first massacred the males over five, and then turned
to the women.126 As for the members of the 60 households in Kerolan, they were massacred

by Kurds under the command of local Kurdish sheikhs, with the exception of a few young
women and girls who were carried off to Liz by their torturers.
Some of the villagers of Abri, Adghon, Prkashen, Goghag, Akrag and Mulakend were
massacred in their villages around 10 May by Şeykh Hazret and Musa Kâsim. The survivors,
after trying in vain to cross the Turkish lines, fled to Liz, the principle town in the nahie,
where the commander of the local garrison protected them until 18 May, the day Russian
troops arrived in Upper Bulanik. At that point, 1,200 men were put in chains and shot
one verst (1,066km) from Liz; their bodies were dumped into two immense mass graves by
regular troops.127
It is, without a doubt, possible to see these massacres as connected with the operations
carried out in the same period in the neighboring kaza of Akhlat (in the sancak of Bitlis),
with a view to eliminating the Armenian population before the Russians arrived.
Guerilla Warfare and Massacres

in the Kaza of Sasun
Contrary to expectations, the high mountain district of Sasun, which dominated the plain
of Mush to the north and the valleys in the northern part of the vilayet of Dyarbekir to the
south, was not the first area in the vilayet of Mush to come under attack. Indeed, in summer
1915, Sasun even served as a haven for the tens of thousands of Armenians fleeing deporta-
tion and massacre in the vicinity. It seems as if the authorities’ strategy consisted in trap-
ping the survivors in this “mountain sanctuary.” Later they sealed it off. As we have seen,
on 2 June 1915,128 Kurdish irregulars launched an offensive against the district of Psank/
Busank in the southern part of Sasun in order to confiscate the arms held by the villagers.
The failure of this offensive made the authorities more cautious. They had no doubt also
learned the lessons of Cevdet’s defeat in Van; this time, they would take as many precau-
tions as they could to ensure the success of their plans. Alma Johannsen, while visiting the
Ottoman general staff in Mush, where she hoped to find surviving women teachers from her
orphanage, observed that all these high-ranking officers “were very proud that they had been
able to eradicate the Armenians so quickly ... and were sorry that such extensive preparatory
measures had been taken.”129
To wipe out the Sasun district’s 80,233 Armenians, who had repeatedly shown, notably in
1894,130 that they were not inclined to let themselves be killed without a fight, the authorities
took a series of measures. They managed to mobilize some 3,000 Armenian conscripts, who
were officially to be enrolled in the military transport service but were in fact taken under
guard to Lice and then split up into three groups that were executed between Harput and
Palu in May 1915.131 Early in May, they also organized the massacre of the Armenians of the
kazas of Silvan and Beşiri, to the south of Sasun, probably to make it easier to close off the
southern access routes to Sasun – to which several thousand of the Silvan/Beşiri Armenians
nevertheless managed to flee.132 That is, the authorities sought to bring all avenues of com-
munication with Sasun under control without, however, preventing survivors from the plain
from fleeing there. They hoped to starve the Armenians in the mountain district into sub-
mission, as they had tried to do in Van; for while Sasun had meat in abundance – it was a
cattle-and sheep-breeding district – it was utterly dependent on the neighboring regions for
its grain supply and salt.133 If we add to these refugees the 8,000 and more Armenians of the
kaza of Harzan (in the sancak of Siirt), who fled the first massacres in their area perpetrated
in mid-June by Halil and Cevdet and found haven in Sasun,134 we can readily imagine how
critical the sanitary situation of these people must have been. It became far worse a month
later, in mid-July, when, in their turn, some 20,000 villagers from the plain of Mush poured
in through the pass of Havadorig.135

As soon as he arrived in Mush, Lieutenant-Colonel Halil (Kut) sent part of the forces
under his command – several squadrons of cavalry – to bolster the siege of Sasun, which
Kurdish irregulars had been maintaining unaided until then. In any case, it was only after
the regular troops had finished cleansing the plain of Mush of its Armenians that they
arrived in large numbers to crush the resistance in Sasun. The operation put in place to
eradicate the tens of thousands of Armenians who had taken refuge there resembled a verita-
ble military campaign. The Şeg, Beder, Bozek, and Calal tribes took up positions to the east
of the mountain district; the Kurds of Kulp, led by Hüseyin Beg and Hasan Beg, dug in to
the west, along with the Kurds of Genc and Lice; Khati Bey of Mayafarkin and the Khiank,
Badkan, and Bagran tribes took up their positions to the south; finally, the regular army,
equipped with mountain cannons, set out to take Sasun from the north. Additional troops
were dispatched from Dyarbekir and Mamuret ul-Aziz to reinforce those already on hand.136
Ruben Ter Minasian, one of the two leaders of the Armenian resistance, estimates that the
Kurdish-Turkish force encircling Sasun comprised around 30,000 troops.137 In the besieged
district were approximately 20,000 natives of the kaza and some 30,000 refugees who, as we
have seen, had come from the plain of Mush and areas to the south. According to Vahan
Papazian, the other main Armenian leader, the self-defense effort was mounted by about
1,000 men who had very few modern weapons and a great many hunting rifles.138
The first general assault was launched on 18 July 1915. It was renewed the next day by way
of Shenek. The attackers forced the Armenians to fall back to their second line of defense
on Mt. Antok, where they held firm for several days running. By 28 July, Sasun was running
low on ammunition and famine had begun to claim lives, especially among the refugees. On
2 August, the defenders decided to attempt a sortie with the whole population of the enclave.
A few thousand Armenians succeeded in crossing the Kurdish-Turkish lines and making their
way to the Russian positions in the northern extremity of the sancak of Mush, but the vast
majority were massacred, notably in the valley of Gorshik, after the hand-to-hand fighting of
the final battles of 5 August, in which the women, armed with daggers, also took part.139
A few days earlier, in late July, some of the refugees had gone back down to the plain in
desperation. They had convinced themselves that the sultan’s firman (order), in which he
granted the Armenians “his pardon” and promised to spare the lives of those who returned
to their homes, was no hollow promise. A few days later, the pyres on which the corpses of
some of these gullible villagers were burning in Norshen, Khaskiugh, and Mgrakom sent
up billows of foul-smelling smoke that polluted the whole plain.140 Other Armenians, a few
thousand in number, were deported, while a few hundred were “taken into” Kurdish fam-
ilies or seized as war booty by officers. At the time, the Russian lines, which ran through
Melazkırt, were only 25 miles from Mush. It was this distance that the fugitives crossed
at night in order to reach the front, when they were not intercepted. In mid-July, Vahan
Papazian, Ruben Ter Minasian, and a few fedayis succeeded in doing so, going by way of the
mountain district of Nemrud.141 Sasun had by this time been emptied of its inhabitants, and
its villages lay in ruins.
Massacres in the Sancak of Genc

The sancak of Genc, traversed by the eastern Euphrates, lay at the northwestern-most tip
of the vilayet of Bitlis. It had lost the great bulk of its Armenian population to massacre
or Islamicization in 1895. In 1915, there were only 23 modest Armenian localities left in
the sancak, with a total Armenian population of 4,344.142 The Armenians’ feeble numbers
facilitated the task of the main local Young Turk leaders – the parliamentary deputy Çerkez
Ahmed Emin Bey, Hasan Bey, and Ahmed Bey – who organized the massacres in the kazas
of Chabaghjur and Pasur under the supervision of Abdülhalik, and with direct support from

the army. There is no trace of survivors from this region. We have only meager descriptions
of the circumstances surrounding the massacres, which we owe to local Turks whom the
inhabitants of Mush later encountered in Aleppo. The deportees were for the most part mas-
sacred at Palu Bridge.143
Balance Sheet of the Massacres

in the Vilayet of Bitlis
In contrast to what transpired in the vilayet of Erzerum, very few Armenians were deported
from the region of Bitlis. The density of the Armenian population, especially in the sancak
of Mush, was one reason for the extreme violence with which the Armenians there were liq-
uidated, but the main explanation doubtless resides in the character of the principal Young
Turk leaders who carried out these operations, bound as they were by family ties to the min-
ister of war and the minister of the interior, and also in the tribal practices that prevailed in
the region. The inordinate military might brought to bear also indicates that the Ittihadist
leadership feared that its extermination plan might well fail in this region, under threat from
the Russian forces.
Statistics established by Armenian institutions after the war show that almost all the
Armenians in the sancak of Bitlis were killed in the sancak itself. Six thousand people, 130 of
whom survived, were deported to Mosul; 2,500 young women and children were “integrated”
into Muslim families; and approximately 6,000 people from the kaza of Hizan/Khizan suc-
ceeded in fleeing to the Russian lines (half of them survived the harassment to which they
were subjected on their retreat to the Caucasus). Of the Armenians from the sancak of Mush,
around 25,000 survived, most of them because they came from the kazas in the northeast-
ern part of the sancak and were saved by the Russian advance, another 5,000 because they
succeeded in gaining the Russian lines after breaking out of the siege of Mush, and a few
hundred more because they were deported to the Syrian desert and managed to survive the
conditions there. In the sancak of Siirt, a mere 150 deportees (here, too, the overwhelming
majority of the population was massacred where it was found) seem to have survived, along
with perhaps a few dozen inhabitants of the kaza of Harzan who were able to escape the
slaughter in Sasun. The few known survivors from Genc were all young women and children
who had been abducted.144
In his December 1918 deposition, General Vehib Pasha pointed out, in describing the
violence perpetrated in a village in the vilayet of Bitlis, that it represented “an example of
atrocity of a kind never before seen in the history of Islam.” Citing the role played by Mustafa
Abdülhalik Bey, “a man without fault and endowed with civic virtues,” Vehib said: “he was
not able to put a stop to these events, which I shall never be able to approve.” The general
even reported that this man, whom he called
resolute, caring, brave, charitable and human, devoted, patriotic and religious, began,
with tears in his eyes, to chant the prayers of the Koran when he learned the facts men-
tioned above, no doubt in the belief that the divine wrath provoked by these atrocities
was going to plunge the nation into catastrophes and ordeals that he sought to ward
off with his prayers.
Vehib nevertheless concluded by wondering: “Was Mustafa Abdülhalik Bey not capable of
calling a halt to these atrocities in his province, or of preventing them?”145
Whatever the truth of the matter, the Council of Ministers appointed Mustafa Abdülhalik
vali of Aleppo on 17 October 1915.146 Thus, he was given responsibility for the hundreds of
thousands of Armenian deportees from western Anatolia who had arrived in Syria.

Chapter 6

the Vilayet of Dyarbekir
I
n 1914, the vilayet of Dyarbekir had a mixed population consisting of Kurds, Orthodox
and Catholic Syriacs, and Armenians. The Armenians were basically concentrated in
the northern and northeastern parts of the vilayet, the southernmost zones of the terri-
tory they inhabited; they lived in 249 towns and villages, with a total population of 106,867,
according to the censuses of the Constantinople Patriarchate.1 The Armenians of the
northeastern kazas – Lice, Beşiri, and Silvan – were Kurdish-speaking. Their tribal mode of
life suggests that they had adapted to their predominantly Kurdish environment. These
regions, with a dense Armenian population that largely escaped the control of the central
authorities, had been a source of profound irritation for the CUP from a very early date. In
May 1913, French diplomatic sources observed an upsurge in the number of exactions per-
petrated by the Kurdish tribes against the Armenian population; the violence of these acts
can only have come about as the result of orders from the higher echelons.2 In the capital
of the vilayet, Dyarbekir, the situation was less tense. Since the assumption of power by the
Young Turks, ARF party leaders had maintained friendly relations with the city’s Ittihadist
club and the local authorities. The Armenians comprised nearly one-third of the total pop-
ulation of 45,000. But they had an economic weight beyond their numbers, and held a vir-
tual monopoly over Dyarbekir’s craft production and commercial exchanges. Although the
all-Muslim Association of the Renaissance (Intibah Şirketi) had been created on the CUP’s
initiative in Dyarbekir early in 1910 for the purpose of taking the local economy in hand, it
had not produced the expected results.3 In other words, one of the Ittihad’s major objectives,
the creation of a Turkish Millî İktisat (national economy), was, for lack of businessmen, not
easily realized in the provinces. However, the general mobilization announced in Dyarbekir
on 3 August 1914, together with the subsequent military requisitions, afforded local Young
Turk circles an opportunity to undermine the social position of Armenian entrepreneurs.
The mobilization emptied the city of part of its economically active Armenian population
and left a number of craftsmen working for the army and state without compensation.
Conscription had brought forceful interventions by the gendarmerie in the vilayet’s villages
and towns.4 Two thousand young men from Dyarbekir were assigned to labor battalions on
the front, in Hasankale and Karacasun,5 while the others worked in the region itself. It was,
however, the methods used during the requisitions that best illustrated the Ittihad’s desire
to ruin the local economy. Alongside the military commission responsible for “military
contributions” (teklif-i harbiyye), a civilian committee (Ahz ve Sevki Asker) was created,
officially for the purpose of collecting foodstuffs and other products to meet “the needs of
military.”6 All the members of Ahz ve Sevki Asker had been handpicked by the Young Turk
representatives in Dyarbekir, the responsible secretary of the Ittihad, Attar Hakkı, and the
party’s delegate, Circisağazâde Kör Yusuf. They in turn created branches of this committee

Western Euphrates
• DersimOvacık Eastern Euphrates
•
Eğin• • •
Pötürge
Hozat
Kyzilkilise
• ç• ç •
Arapkir
emişkezek Mazgirt
arsancak Palu
• • •
Kebanmaden
• • Lake Van
Harput Lice
•
Akçadağ/Arga
•
• Malatia Arğana Maden
•
• çınkuş •
Silvan
N
•ç ermik
Behisni
•
Adiyaman
•
Kahta
•
•
Severek
Dyarbekir • Tigre
Beşiri•
•
Savur • Midyat
•
•
Derik
Veranşehir Mardin
• ••
Cezire/Cizre
Euphrates Nusaybin/Nisibin Tigris
•
in all the kazas of the vilayet. The local branches were, in effect, delegations responsible for
collecting the teklif-i harbiyye.7 In other words, in carrying out these operations, the Ittihad
replaced the military authorities.
In a letter to the patriarch of Constantinople, the Armenian vicar, Mgrdich Chlghadian,
denounced the arbitrariness with which the commissions were emptying the shops and ware-
houses of Dyarbekir’s Christians and, especially, the violence with which the authorities had
confiscated, in the 110 villages of the kazas of Beşiri and Silvan, reserves of wheat, flour,
barley and oil, as well as horses, mules, sheep, and cows. They also denounced the resurgence
of attacks by plundering Kurds and the devastation of the tobacco fields, the region’s main
resource, that were located in the area between Beşiri and Bitlis.8 Furthermore, in certain
localities, villagers had been taxed for the “tithe” (actually one-eighth rather than one-tenth
of the harvest) three times in the space of a few months – here, too, in the name of patriotism
and the war effort.9 How should these methods be interpreted in a country in which arbitrary
behavior was a deeply rooted cultural practice? Should we ascribe them to the exceptional
circumstances brought about by the war, or should we consider them, rather, as one of the
first manifestations of the CUP’s plan to eradicate the Armenians? If we consider the proce-
dures used against the Greek population of the Aegean sea coast in the first three months
of 1914 – a combination of deportation and banishment to Greece accompanied by con-
fiscations of these Greeks’ property – we can have no doubt as to the Ittihad’s intention to
implement, to begin with, the economic component of its anti-Armenian plan. The Kurdish
tribalism prevalent in the region of Dyarbekir only aggravated the phenomenon, while reduc-
ing the share of the booty that the CUP had planned to take for itself. Even before war was
declared, the first phase of the plunder of Armenian goods took place behind a respectable
facade that was more or less based on legal rules, as interpreted by officials who did not have
an unduly strict respect for the letter of the law.
The act that was most symptomatic of the Ittihad’s real designs was the burning down
of the Dyarbekir bazaar on the night of 18/19 August 1914. The fire reduced 80 shops and
stands, 30 baker’s ovens, three hans, and 14 carpenter’s workshops to ashes. According to
witnesses, the operation was organized by the police chief Gevranlızâde Memduh Bey, under

Deportations and Massacres: Dyarbekir 357
the supervision of the president of the Association of the Renaissance (Intibah Şirketi) and
the parliamentary deputy from Dyarbekir, Pirincizâde Feyzi10 (Feyzi was, incidentally, an
uncle of a member of the Ittihad’s Central Committee, Ziya Gökalp),11 along with two local
Young Turk leaders, Attar Hakkı and Circisağazâde Kör Yusuf. Apparently no effort was
made to fight the fire; the police and gendarmerie even prevented shop owners from trying
to douse the flames or save their merchandise.12 The new vali, Hamid Bey, appointed on 1
October 1914, was able to dismiss Memduh, whose involvement in this act of arson was a
matter of common knowledge. Hamid Bey proved unable, however, to punish the three peo-
ple who were the main culprits.
Memduh, although indicted, was set free at the request of parliamentary deputy Fayzi,13
who was the most influential personality in the vilayet. The British vice-consul in Dyarbekir,
Thomas Mgrdichian, was well acquainted with Fayzi. In his memoirs, he reports the con-
versation he had with him in the deputy’s home on 27 August 1914 in the presence of his
maternal uncle, a mufti by the name of İbrahim. Feyzi affirmed his confidence in Germany’s
military might and the outcome of the war. He also declared that “Turkey’s higher interests
require that it side with Germany,” which had promised to help it recover the territories that
the empire had lost – Egypt, Tripoli, Tunisia, Algeria, Rumelia, the islands of the Aegean
archipelago, Crete, Cyprus, and the Caucasus, to say nothing of the Indies – and become a
powerful state of 300 million Muslims.14 Had Feyzi not been Ziya Gökalp’s uncle, we might
doubt the accuracy of the statement attributed to this deputy of Çerkez and Kurdish descent,
who soon turned to a subject he found equally fascinating – “the Armenians.” The British
vice-consul learned straight from the source how bitter Feyzi was over the Armenians’ refusal
to foment an anti-Russian uprising in the Caucasus; this indicates that the Dashnak leaders’
response to the recent proposals of Ömer Naci and Dr. Şakir had circulated rather quickly in
Young Turk circles. The question of the recently approved reforms also inspired a very lively
reaction from the Ittihadist deputy: “If the Armenians continue down this path, it will cost
them very dearly. England, France and Russia are no longer in a position to rescue them or
help them, whereas we can work our will on them; our German and Austrian allies will not
say a word.”15 Noticing the diplomat’s surprise at such candor, Feyzi informed him that he
had traveled to Germany in the spring with a delegation of the Ottoman National Assembly,
and that everything he had learned in the course of this voyage had brought him to these
conclusions.16
At a second meeting, which took place at the British consulate a few days later – the
parliamentary deputy Kâmil Bey was also on hand – Thomas Mgrdichian remarked that, at
the present rate, the commission of the teklif-i harbiyye would soon have finished ruining the
Armenians; that they would do well in their capacity as deputies representing all the inhab-
itants of the vilayet to have a word with the two heads of that commission, Attar Hakkı
and Circisağazâde Kör Yusuf; and that, in thus bankrupting the Armenians, the authorities
were ruining trade and agriculture, the sources of the region’s wealth. This came down,
Mgrdichian said, to “eliminating the source of the money needed to fight the war and, thus,
to destroying Turkey.” Feyzi’s reaction revealed the logic that dominated Young Turk circles
on the eve of the declaration of war:
The Armenians should give the matter a little more thought, for there are not many
of them. If they are liquidated, they will cease to exist. There are, on the other hand,
many of us, and if half of us disappear, the other half will still be there – the more so as
we are going to win back what we have lost in two hundred years, and then some.
The vice-consul said he was surprised at the aggressiveness of Feyzi’s words, and then riposted
quite undiplomatically: “Germany will swallow you up and make you one of its lackeys.”17

The nature of this dialogue between a Young Turk, who shared the hope in the resurrection
of the Ottoman Empire that his party had put at the center of its program, and a British
diplomat who was a native of the country but had shaken off the status of Ottoman subject
thanks to his functions, doubtless reflects the general state of mind reigning in the eastern
provinces just before Turkey’s entry into the war. One could express the threats hanging over
the Armenian population no better.
The nature of the CUP’s plans was confirmed by the testimony that the former civil-
ian inspector of the vilayets of Bitlis and Mosul gave before the Istanbul court-martial on
18 February 1920. He reported that he had made the return voyage from Constantinople
in August 1914 in the company of an eminent member of the Ittihad, Feyzi Bey, and an
Armenian deputy from Dyarbekir – this was Stepan Chrajian, who was to be murdered
in June 1915. On the way to the capital, Feyzi remarked to the Armenian deputy that the
Armenians “had treated us badly ... and appealed for foreign intervention.” “This will cost
you dearly, my friend,” he concluded; “your future is in jeopardy.” When the group reached
Urfa on 7 August and learned that the two inspectors, Hoff and Westenek, had just been
dismissed, Feyzi exclaimed: “Now you’ll see what it means to demand reforms.”18
On 10 September, Thomas Mgrdichian went to see the head of the commission of
the teklif-i harbiyye and the CUP delegate in Dyarbekir, Circisağazâde Kör Yusuf, in order
to point out that the accounts turned in by his commission indicated that Muslim and
Christian taxpayers were being taxed unequally: the Christians, who represented one-
third of the population, were being asked to pay for five-sixths of the war effort. “The
Armenians are richer,” Kör Yusuf pointed out in response; “the whole market of the city
and the vilayet, as well as trade, the crafts and agriculture are in their hands; they have
a lot of money and so they ought to hand it over.” The vice-consul’s reply – that the big
Kurdish landowners, the pashas and beys, were much richer and had huge cash reserves at
their disposal, does not seem to have changed his interlocutor’s mind any more than did
Mgrdichian’s conclusion: “In plundering the Armenians, [the Turks] are killing the goose
that lays the golden eggs.”19
Witnesses concur that Vali Hamid attempted the impossible in his six months in office
(October 1914 to March 1915) – to limit the excesses committed by members of Dyarbekir’s
Young Turk circles – but that he was powerless in the face of men such as the parliamentary
deputy Feyzi, who enjoyed the support of the Young Turk Central Committee. The official
nomination of Dr. Çerkez Reşid, one of the historical CUP’s founding fathers and a gradu-
ate of Istanbul’s Military Medical School, to the post of vali of Dyarbekir on 25 March
1915,20 was doubtless not unrelated to the decisions about the fate of the Armenians that
had just been made by the Ittihadist Central Committee. In his capacity as mutesarif of
Karesi (in the vilayet of Balıkesir), Reşid had actively contributed to the policy of liquid-
ating the “Rum” (Greeks) of the Aegean sea coast in the first three months of 1914. He
had applied a battery of rather efficient political and economic measures designed by the
CUP to eliminate concentrations of the Greek population.21 At the practical level, he
had taken part in the activities of the Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa, which was still cutting its teeth,
and had learned to appreciate the effectiveness of its methods of intimidation. His July
1914 nomination as counselor to the inspector general in Van, Nikolai Hoff, was a sign
of the confidence that Young Turk circles in the capital had in this high-ranking official.
While his stay in Van was too brief to allow them to evaluate his work there – he was
recalled on 13 August by the ministry to which he answered22 – we may nevertheless sup-
pose that Talât assigned him the mission of sabotaging the Armenian reforms, which the
CUP continued to regard as unacceptable interference by the powers in Turkey’s internal
affairs. In other words, when Reşid arrived in Dyarbekir on 28 March 1915, he had very
likely received precise instructions as to the operations to be conducted there. The fact

that he was accompanied by Colonel Çerkez Rüşdi Bey, who had been put in command
of the vilayet’s gendarmerie; Çerkez Şakir, an aide-de-camp; Bedreddin Bey, the secretary
general (mektubci) of the vilayet (later the mutesarif of Mardin); and some 50 Çerkez çetes23
sent to the area from Mosul, gives us some idea of the nature of his mission. That he had
links with the Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa is hardly open to doubt. The 20 December 1915 report
of Mazhar Bey, the president of the commission of inquiry established in Mamuret ul-Aziz
and Dyarbekir, clearly accuses Vali Reşid of having organized, altogether illegally, squad-
rons of irregulars that were guilty of pillage and massacre.24 A document presented at the
Unionists’ trial on 27 April 1919 also attests “that the massacres and atrocities perpetrated
in Dyarbekir were carried out at Talât’s instigation.”25 An Armenian source even affirms
that Reşid set up a telegraph station in his governor’s residence so as to be able to commu-
nicate directly with the Ministry of the Interior.26
Among the first steps the vali took was the creation of a “militia,” as is confirmed by many
witnesses, and Reşid himself;27 this “militia” would seem to have been nothing other than a
number of squadrons of çetes of the Special Organization. Early in April, the vali charged two
well-known Dyarbekir criminals, Cemilpaşazâde Mustafa and Colonel Yasinzâde Şevkı, with
the task of forming 11 battalions of çetes recruited from the ranks of the delinquents and fel-
ons in the region; these battalions comprised, on average, 500 men, except for the eleventh,
nicknamed the “butchers’ battalion.”28 Officers carefully chosen for their aptitude for vio-
lence were put in command of these units. According to testimony by the civilian inspector,
Colonel Rüşdi Bey, the vali’s right-hand man and commander of the gendarmerie, had super-
vised the process, while the local leaders of the Ittihad, with the deputy Feyzi at their head,
had actively contributed to the formation of these battalions of the Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa.29 The
leaders of these çetes were Feridzâde Emin Bey, Şeihzade Kadir, Mosuli Yehia Muştak Bey,
Fatihpaşaoğlu Haci Bekir, Allahutonoğlu Salih, Mardinkapulı Tahir Bey, Abdülkadirzâde
Kemal Bey, Osman Kanon Zabiti, Cemilpaşazâde Ömer Bey, Muftizâde Şerif Bey, Mosuli
Muhamed, Dellalzâde Emin Bey, Zazazâde Muhamed, Kasab Niko, Kasab Şeko, and Çerkez
Yaver Şakir, the vali’s aide-de-camp.30 Somewhat later, Pirincizâde Feyzi recruited two officers
of the Special Organization from the district of Cesire – Ömer and Mustafa, famous bandits
from the Ferikhanoğlu tribe who had been terrorizing the district for 20 years and repeat-
edly been condemned to death in absentia.31 Reşid also had the police chief Gevranlızâde
Memduh, whose role in the fire in Dyarbekir’s bazaar we have already seen,32 recalled from
Adana. Armenian observers point out that these battalions were basically made up of Kurds
and Çerkez émigrés from the vilayet.
The second measure taken by Reşid was the creation of a “supreme council” (meclisi alı)
chaired by the vali himself. The council’s vice-president was the deputy Pirincizâde Feyzi; the
other members were the commander of the çetes, Cemilpaşazâde Mustafa, and the local lead-
ers of the Ittihad and the delegates of the national government: Feyzi’s nephew, Pirincizâde
Sedki; Muftizâde Şerif; Harputli Hüseyin, Yasineffendizâde Şefki; Velibabazâde Veli Necet;
Zulfizâde Adıl Bey; Kâtibzâde Şevket; Zulfizâde Zulfi Bey, a Unionist parliamentary deputy;
Circisağazâde Abdül Kerim; Diregcizâde Tahir; Haciğanizâde Servet; Mosuli Mehmed;
Mehmed Emin; Cırcisağazâde Kör Yusuf; and Attar Hakkı.33 The creation of a council of
this sort, which, as we have seen, existed in Erzerum as well, was apparently part of a general
system, doubtless designed by the Ittihadist Central Committee to maintain control over
the political situation in the regions while coordinating the anti-Armenian persecutions and
providing justification for them. Since we do not have conclusive documentation, it is hard
to grasp the exact nature of the Supreme Council’s activity, but it seems reasonable to sup-
pose that it was a kind of political leadership body, enlarged to include government officials
and army officers, which represented both the CUP and government, and was charged with
carrying out the national authorities’ decisions.

The nature of the mission conducted by Pirincizâde Feyzi in Cezire from 29 April to 12
May shows that this council played a major role in diffusing the joint propaganda of the CUP
and the government. Witnesses say that the parliamentary deputy visited all the villages
he encountered on his way, exhorting the Kurdish tribes to perform their “religious duty.”
Feyzi incited these populations against the “infidels” with the help of religious references
and with the support of the hojas, rather than Turkic discourse. One slogan was repeated
everywhere: “God, make their children orphans, make widows of their wives through and
give their property to Muslims.” In addition to this prayer, legitimization of plunder, murder,
and abduction took the following form: “It is licit for Muslims to take the infidels’ property,
life and women” (“giavurların malı, canı ve namuse helal dir islamlara”). The last element
exploited by Young Turk propaganda – the fact that Turkey’s allies, Germany and Austria,
endorsed the policy of eradicating the Armenians34 – shows the credibility of this alliance in
the eyes of Turkish public opinion.
A civilian inspector who arrived in Cezire on 8 May 1915 reports that the kaymakam,
Halil Sâmi, was especially alarmed by Feyzi’s machinations. By that time, the deputy had
already been in the city for some two weeks. Dispatched on a special mission “by the vali
of Dyarbekir,” Sâmi summoned the chieftains of the Kurdish tribes of the region to a pre-
paratory meeting held in Cezire on 10 May. At this meeting, according to the inspector’s
testimony, he resorted to the kind of discourse described by Mgrdichian. The kaymakam,
however, is supposed to have refused to support the plan or dismiss the district’s Armenian
and Syriac Catholic civilian officials from their posts. He was dismissed from his post on
1 May 1915.35
The Preparation of the Massacres in Dyarbekir

In the first half of April, the authorities began hunting down deserters in the towns and vil-
lages of the vilayet of Dyarbekir. On the 16 April, the manhunt took on altogether different
proportions. The Armenian quarter of the city of Dyarbekir was surrounded by gendarmes,
policemen, Çerkez çetes, and “militiamen.” The object was to arrest the deserters who had
taken refuge on the adjoining terraces – the flat roofs – in the Armenian quarter, but also
to search for arms held in private homes, in accordance with the vali’s early April order
that the population surrender its weapons. Armenian witnesses observe that those arrested
were young men, some of them not yet of draftable age, and that the house searches gave
rise to extremely violent incidents, notably a series of rapes. According to the same sources,
300 men, a few notables included, were arrested during this operation and interned in the
city’s central prison. Three days later, on 19 April, members of the diocesan council, the
parish councils, and humanitarian organizations were arrested and jailed in turn, either for
“desertion” or for aiding and abetting deserters.36
On 20 April, in reaction to this first wave of arrests, a meeting was held in the Armenian
prelacy. Chaired by the vicar of the diocese, it brought together the main leaders of the
political parties and other Armenian notables, as well as the representatives of Dyarbekir’s
Catholic and Protestant communities. The purpose of the meeting was to settle on the
measures to take under the prevailing circumstances, and especially to decide whether the
Armenians should “put faith in the authorities’ promises and allow themselves to be dis-
armed.” The discussion dragged on for 24 hours. The vicar, the French vice-consul, Harutiun
Kasabian, the dragoman of the vilayet, Dikran Ilvanian, and the Dashnak, Henchak, and
Ramgavar parties, together with a few other leading personalities, argued for organizing a
self-defense effort – that is, “selling their skins as dearly as possible.” The Armenians should
put no faith, they maintained, in the government’s or the CUP’s promises. Other nota-
bles, however, headed by Khachadur Dikranian, a member of the city council (meclisı idare),

pointed out that the means of defense at their disposal were quite limited, and that in the
best of circumstances they could hold out for a month at most. The second group carried the
day; the Armenians decided to do nothing.37
On the morning of 21 April, the leaders of the political parties were arrested. Among
them were the Dashnaks Mihran Basmajian, Giragos Ohannesian, and Dikran Chakejian;
the Hnchak parliamentary deputy Stepan Chrajian and his sons Garabed, the müdir of the
Tur Abdin district, and Khosrov, a judge on the Dyarbekir court; the Ramgavars Hagop
Oghasapian and Dikran Ilvanian; the dragoman of the vilayet, Stepan Matosian; and Misak
Shirigjian, the authorized representative of the Singer Manufacturing Company.38 American
and Turkish witnesses confirm that these men were tortured and put on display in the city
streets.39 The heights of cruelty attained by the vali’s torturers, who were directed by the
police chief, Resul Hayri, are indicative of the atmosphere then reigning in Dyarbekir. This
torture must be interpreted as a preparatory measure, carried out on orders from Dr. Reşid,
the purpose of which was to liquidate the Armenian political elite before moving on to the
main phase of the extermination plan.
Massive arrests of the local Armenian elite began, accordingly, only 20 days later, on 11
May 1915. The targets were state officials, lawyers, intellectuals, merchants, bankers, archi-
tects, engineers, and landowners, famous and less famous. The last to be arrested were the
vicar Mgrdich Chlghadian, the Catholic archbishop Andreas Chelebian, the Protestant min-
ister Hagop Andonian, and other clergymen.40 The official purpose of the torture inflicted
on them was to bring them to reveal where they had hidden their weapons and to confess to
their plans to “revolt.” It seems the real reason that they were burned with red-hot irons, had
their fingernails pulled out, their skulls crushed in vices, and horseshoes nailed to the bot-
toms of their feet, or that, after being “proven guilty,” they were paraded through the streets
of Dyarbekir, was rather the authorities’ desire to terrorize the 10,000 Armenians still in the
city. This cruelty was perhaps also the violent expression of a collective frustration that had
various long-standing causes. For the vali, the torture was apparently also meant to provide
grounds for an indictment that would retroactively legitimate the recourse to brute force.
Thus, Dr. Floyd Smith observes that, under torture, an employee of the American mission
“confessed” that the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions was preparing
an insurrection in Dyarbekir and that he himself was their “agent.”41 The absurdity and
crudeness of this procedure should not be allowed to mask its ideological underpinnings –
the rejection of everything foreign – or the Young Turks’ desire to eliminate potential wit-
nesses, here too, on the eve of the mass slaughter.42
A 17 May 1915 telegram from Dr. Reşid to the vali of Adana, İsmail Hakkı,43 spells out
the criminal intentions of the Young Turk physician. After informing his colleague about
the situation in Van – Cevdet had just abandoned the city – Reşid insisted on the need
to exterminate the Armenians, stressing that he had himself already begun to carry this
policy into practice. But this was just a beginning. On 27 May 1915, a careful inventory
was taken of the 980 people who were still being held in Dyarbekir’s central prison (some
of those interned had already died under torture).44 A list was drawn up of 636 men for
whom Pirincizâde Feyzi had made special plans. On 30 May, these people were taken out
of the city at dawn, led toward the banks of the Tigris, and loaded onto 23 keleks (rafts
that floated on inflated water-skins). Officially, these men were being banished to Mosul.45
Reşid asked his aide-de-camp, Çerkez Yaver Şakir, to accompany them with his Çerkez
çetes. Someone was missing when roll was taken – the vicar, Chlghadian. Although present
when the keleks set sail, he had been taken back to prison. The torture inflicted on him
at his point could only have been the product of some indefinable pathology: his torturers
pulled out his teeth, pierced his temples with red-hot irons, gouged out his eyes, and then
exhibited him in the city’s Muslim neighborhoods in an atmosphere of collective revelry,

to the beating of tambourines. His ordeal came to an end in the courtyard of Dyarbekir’s
principal mosque, in the presence of government officials and religious authorities: he was
sprinkled with oil, a drop at a time, and then burned alive. Dr. Smith found him as he lay
in agony in the stable of the Turkish hospital, but was unable to save him. The next day,
the vali had an attestation drawn up and signed by several doctors; it stated that the prel-
ate had died of typhus.46
The caravan of keleks arrived at a point upstream of Beşiri on 9 June, after being subjected
to an attack by Kurdish “brigands,” the only objectives of which seem to have been to allow
Çerkez Şakir to obtain 6,000 Turkish pounds in “protection” money from the deportees, and
to convince them to abandon the keleks in order to make their way to the riverbank by foot.
The 636 men were taken ashore and pointed in the direction of the village of Shkavtan/
Çalikan, which belonged to the Ömer brothers (nicknamed Amero and, sometimes, Ëumeri)
and Mustafa Ferikhanoğlu, the chieftain of a clan of the Ramma tribe who had been recruited
by deputy Feyzi to deal with Dyarbekir’s Armenian elite. After being stripped naked, care-
fully searched, and tied together in small groups, the deportees were taken under guard to the
Rezvani gorge, where they had their throats cut or were shot by members of the Ferikhanoğlu
clan and the çetes of the vali’s aide-de-camp Çerkez Şakir, who personally oversaw the three-
hour operation. The deputy Stepan Chrajian, Diran Kazarian, Atalian, Garabed Khandanian,
and others were among the last victims; their executioners apparently wanted them to see the
spectacle before they were finished off in turn.47 The German vice-consul in Mosul later
confirmed that these massacres had occurred.48
The epilogue to the execution of Dyarbekir’s Armenian elite illustrates Reşid’s cynicism.
Around two weeks after the killings, on 24 June, the vali and Pirincizâde Feyzi invited the
man who had been mainly responsible for carrying out the massacre, Ferikhanoğlu Amero
(Ömer), to Dyarbekir to reward him for his services. A group of some ten Çerkez was sup-
posed to go out to greet him somewhere outside the city limits. On Reşid’s orders, they mur-
dered him instead, near the Anbar Çay fountain.49 It seems that the vali was incensed by the
fact that the Kurdish clan had kept all the Armenians’ property for itself.
Application of the Extermination Procedures and

Resistance at the Local Government Level
A few days after these events, a general meeting organized in the Ulu Cami mosque under
the chairmanship of deputy Feyzi was attended by all of Dyarbekir’s leading citizens. The
aim was apparently to associate the local elite with the decision to liquidate the vilayet’s
Armenians. At the meeting, the mufti, İbrahim, was asked to state whether the massacre
of women and children was in conformity with the precepts of the Koran. The clergyman
recommended sparing both children under 12, in order to Islamicize them, and the most
beautiful young women, who could be integrated into harems. Overriding his opinion, the
assembly decided to spare only the comely young women.50
Although the conditions required to liquidate Dyarbekir’s Armenian population had been
met, Reşid knew that certain kaymakams and mutesarifs in his province would be reluctant
to put his program into practice. Hilmi Bey, the mutesarif of Mardin, was one of the first to
refuse to carry out his orders. On 25 May, he was relieved of his post51 – having been in office
since 30 November 1914 – and replaced by Şefik Bey, who was himself dismissed one month
later for the same reasons.52 This time, Reşid took no chances. He had his right-hand man,
İbrahim Bedreddin Bey, appointed interim mutesarif of the city of Mardin53 and Captain
Gevranlızâde Memduh named police chief of the sancak of Mardin.54 If the mutesarif of
Mardin ultimately got off lightly, despite his audacity, this was not the case with certain

kaymakams. The kaymakam of Derik, Reşid Bey (who held office from 12 October 1914 to 2
May 1915), was not only dismissed for having demanded a written order from the national
government, but was murdered on the road to Dyarbekir by Reşid’s Çerkez.55 Hüseyin Nesimî
Bey and the Baghdad native Naci Bey, the kaymakams of Lice and Beşiri, respectively, were
also murdered on the vali’s orders.56 Naci’s successor was appointed on 20 June 1915 and
remained in office until 1 July 1917; this indicates, at the very least, that the minister of the
interior approved of his vali’s methods and was willing to replace officials who had too many
scruples. Reşid’s denials, when he found himself confronting the magistrates of the commis-
sion of inquiry set up after the armistice, did not suffice to exonerate him of these crimes:
Hüseyin Nesimî’s son Abdin explained to the commission how his father had been sum-
moned to Dyarbekir and assassinated on the way by an officer of the Special Organization,
headed up in Dyarbekir by the vali himself.57
It is probable that Reşid’s drastic methods had alarmed the province’s kaymakams and
mutesarifs, a considerable number of whom had demanded to see an order from the central
government before carrying out the vali’s instructions. In other words, Reşid’s orders were
so manifestly fraught with consequences that these officials sought to protect themselves
against the possibility of being charged with crimes later on. This would seem to be the
sole possible explanation for the exceptionally high proportion of kaymakams who were dis-
missed or executed in this province: in addition to the three sub-prefects who were executed,
Mehmed Hamdi Bey was replaced at the head of the kaza of Çermik by Ferik Bey on 1 July
1915; Mehmed Ali Bey, the kaymakam of Savur, remained in office only from 2 May to
1 October 1915; İbrahim Hakkı Bey, who held office in Silvan, was dismissed on 31 August
1915.58
Massacres and Deportations in the Sancak of Dyarbekir

In the first two weeks of June, Armenian men in the sancak of Dyarbekir were systematically
rounded up and taken daily in groups between 100 and 150 to the Mardin gate or the road
to Gözle (today’s Gözalan), where their throats were slit. A group of 1,000 men assigned
to do maintenance work or administer military requisitions was also liquidated in similar
conditions.59
Once the systematic elimination of the men had been completed, Dr. Reşid worked out a
method of liquidating the remaining population that proved much more sophisticated and
efficient than those utilized by some of his counterparts in other provinces. Armenian wit-
nesses noted that, every morning in the latter half of June, the colonel of the “militia,”
Yasinzâde Şevkı, accompanied by two other men, surrounded around 100 Christian homes in
Dyarbekir and subjected them to methodical “house searches.” Guards prevented the occu-
pants from leaving their homes until nightfall; at a predetermined hour, the vehicles used
for military requisitions arrived at the designated houses and the 100 families living in them
were loaded up and led from Dyarbekir in remarkably orderly fashion.60 This system had the
advantage of forestalling disturbances in the city and leaving members of the other Christian
confessions with the hope that they themselves would be spared. It was a method that made
it practically impossible for anyone to escape from the trap, while allowing the authorities to
call on a minimum of personnel to deal with the deportees.
The first group, deported by way of the road to Mardin, comprised the women and children
of the leading families of Dyarbekir, the Kazazians, the Trpanjians, the Yegenians, and the
Handanians; they were promised that they would be reunited with the male heads of their
households. Members of the richest families were separated from the rest of the convoy and
detained in a village, Alipunar, south of the city. They were not allowed to leave until they
had revealed where they had hidden their valuables. They were then taken to a place nearby,

where their throats were cut. The other members of this caravan, 510 women and children,
were killed and thrown into the underground cisterns at Dara – vestiges of the Byzantine
period located on the road to Cezire.61
The next convoys were sent in one of two directions – southwest, toward Karabahçe,
Severek, and Urfa, or due south, toward Mardin, Dara, Ras ul-Ayn, Nisibin, and Der Zor. It
seems that Kozandere, a place located one hour’s distance south of Dyarbekir near the village
of Çarakılı, was the principal slaughterhouse on the second of these two trajectories. Kurds
from the region and squadrons of çetes of the Special Organization were permanently sta-
tioned near this killing field, which went into operation with the second convoy of deportees
from Dyarbekir.62 The massacre of these Armenians was bound up with a propaganda cam-
paign orchestrated by Reşid, but no doubt ordered by Istanbul. Kozandere served as the stage
for a macabre spectacle: the corpses of Armenians tortured and killed there were dressed in
Muslim costume, capped with turbans, and photographed.63 The pictures were then repro-
duced and widely distributed, first in Dyarbekir, later in Istanbul, and even Germany. They
were supposed to show victims of atrocities committed by the Armenian “insurgents,”64 “in
order to incite the population against the Armeniens.”65 Rafaël de Nogales, who spent a
few days in the barracks in Dyarbekir in late June, notes that Reşid, whom he compares
to a “hyena,” “killed without ever risking his own life,” and that a commander in the gen-
darmerie, Mehmed Asim Bey, offered him two photographs of a scene that he had “com-
posed almost entirely of fowling-pieces easily disguised” with no other aim than to “impress
the public” and convince it that the Russians had, well before the war began, furnished to
“Armenians, Chaldeans, and Nestorians of the provinces of Van and Bitlis, Dyarbekir, and
Urfa, considerable quantities of arms and ammunition.”66 This documented example, which
is probably not an isolated case, gives us an idea of the propaganda methods that accompa-
nied the Young Turks’ crimes.
Another killing field was located to the east, in the Bigutlan gorge, between the villages
of Şeytan Deresi and Kaynağ. This spot, controlled by members of the Kurdish Tırkan tribe,
is supposed to have seen the massacre of 80,000 deportees.67 We do not, however, know
whether the victims were Armenians from other vilayets or Christians from kazas north of
Dyarbekir. The second hypothesis seems more likely.
The majority of deportees were massacred well before they reached the places to which
they were officially being deported. Some of the many available documents on the deserts of
Syria and Mesopotamia, where hundreds of thousands of deportees, above all from western
Asia Minor, were sent, show that eight women from Dyarbekir were registered in Rakka in
fall 1915,68 that a 12-year-old child from the province was registered in Aleppo,69 and that
a few women and young girls reached Der Zor in late August 1915.70 According to a local
source, 12,000 deportees from the vilayet of Dyarbekir reached Der Zor by May 1916.71 Those
who reached Ras ul-Ayn were dispatched by the Çerkez of this small town, who plaited a rope
25 yards long with the hair of young women whom they had killed. They sent it as a present
to their commander from the Caucasus, the parliamentary deputy Pirincizâde Feyzi.72
A few hundred Syriacs, both Orthodox and Catholic, were also deported from Dyarbekir,
together with all the clergymen of these two communities. According to Father Jacques
Rhétoré, more than 300 Armenian families in the city converted to Islam, together with
a few Catholic Syriac households. The mufti İbrahim seems to have earned a veritable for-
tune by delivering attestations of conversion in exchange for substantial sums. These newly
Islamicized Christians were nevertheless deported a few weeks later along with their com-
patriots, whose fate they shared.73 Some craftsmen who agreed to convert were, however,
allowed to stay on in Dyarbekir and a few villages in the vicinity.74
Around 400 children between the ages of one and three were rounded up and initially
placed in various institutions, notably the former Protestant school. It seems, however, that

such measures, which were supposed to make it possible to educate these children in conform-
ity with the Ittihad’s canons, remained in effect for only a short time. In the fall, these chil-
dren were deported in two convoys. Those in the first were thrown off the old bridge spanning
the Tigris near the exit from Dyarbekir. Those in the second were sent to Karabaş, one hour
from the city, where they were sliced down the middle and fed to dogs in the vicinity.75
When Nogales arrived in Dyarbekir around 25 June, the bazaar was deserted and the
silk-weaving and rug-weaving shops were closed. The economic life of the provincial cap-
ital had been paralyzed for lack of workers.76 The plundering of Armenian property had
already commenced. It was organized by a special committee created under the vali’s lead.
On it were Nebizâde Haci Said; Mosuli Mehmed; Harputli Hüseyin, the former police chief;
Cırcisafiazâde Kör Yusuf, the CUP delegate in Dyarbekir; Ferid Bey, the defterdar of the
vilayet; Muftizâde Şerif; Haci Hüseyin; Numan Bey, the chief prosecutor at the appeals court;
and Necimi, the principal of a model school. The commander of the troops of the Teşkilât-ı
Mahsusa, Yasinzâde Şevkı, and the commander of the gendarmerie, Colonel Çerkez Ruşdi,
personally took a hand in the pillaging of Armenian homes, often accompanied by Pirincizâde
Sedki. Gold, silver, and precious objects fell into their hands. Moveable assets were stored in
the church of Saint Giragos and the adjoining residences, then put up at auction “at derisory
prices.” Real estate went to “Turks” before all others, while the local Young Turks shared out
the most richly appointed homes among themselves: the Kazazians’ was taken over by Çerkez
Ruşdi, the Minasians’ by Bedreddin, and the Trpanjians’ by Veli Necet Bey.77 While it can
hardly be doubted that there were many cases of personal gain, it appears that Reşid organ-
ized the transfer of 20 vehicles loaded with the precious objects to Istanbul, had them sold
at auction, and turned the proceeds over to the Ittihadist network.78 Indeed, indications are
that the accusations of personal enrichment leveled at him in 1916 were baseless. According
to information presented by Hans-Lukas Kieser, he would even seem to have been one of the
rare Young Turks to have fought widespread corruption and shown himself to be a faithful
servant of the Turkish state under construction.79
A report that Reşid sent the interior minister on 15 September 1915 speaks of the
“deportation of 120,000 Armenians” from his vilayet.80 This exceeds Dyarbekir’s Armenian
population. Since Reşid conducted affairs with rigor, it seems improbable that he would
have made so loose an approximation, unless the vali had in mind not only Armenians but
also all the other Christians affected by these “measures.” In this province, the authorities
apparently made no distinction between Catholic and Orthodox Syriacs on the one hand
and Armenians on the other,81 even if indications are that only some of the Syriacs were
deported and massacred.
Reşid’s genocidal activity was a matter of public record. A congratulatory telegram was
sent to him on 19 October 1915 by a Young Turk magistrate from Mardin on the occasion of
Kurban Bayramı. In a way, this telegram marks the end of the liquidation campaign. Halil
Edip, somewhat too optimistically, but in a style revelatory of the spirit animating the Young
Turk elites and motivating their acts, credits Reşid with the liberation of the “six vilayets,”
an accomplishment “opening the way to Turkestan and the Caucasus.”82
Even as it perpetrated these atrocities, the Turkish administration displayed a certain
respect for legal and administrative formalities, in accordance with the usual Young Turk
practices. In July 1915, Ambassador Wangenheim seemed to take seriously information he
received about an investigation conducted by the court-martial in Dyarbekir “of several lead-
ers of the Dashnak party accused of high treason,” and also about the “suicide” of the city’s
Armenian bishop.83 In contrast, after the German press had published the official denials,
the vice-consul in Mosul, Walter Holstein, expressed his surprise “over the naiveté of the
Porte, which (festivity of the sacrifice) believes that it can efface the reality of the crimes
committed with crude lies.”84

Massacres and Deportations in the Kazas of

the Sancak of Dyarbekir
When Captain de Nogales left Dyarbekir for Urfa on 27 June, he saw charred and still-
deserted Armenian houses in the villages through which he passed.85 In June, the whole
Armenian and Syriac population of the kazas of the sancak of Dyarbekir was subjected to
treatment similar to that inflicted on the Christian population in the regional capital. This
holds, to begin with, for the 24 localities of the kaza inhabited by a few thousand Armenians,
and also for the Syriac villages.
The Kaza of Viranşehir

The Armenian presence in the kaza of Viranşehir was limited to the administrative seat
of the same name; 1,339 Armenians,86 and at least as many Syriacs belonging to different
denominations, lived here. Living in isolation in an essentially Kurdish environment, the
Christians of Tella (the Syriac name for the little town) were first and foremost craftsmen and
merchants who were rarely natives of the town. The first events of note occurred on 1 and
2 May: the Armenian and Syriac Catholic churches were subjected to police searches. We
do not know what motivated these operations, but it would seem that they were carried out
against the will of the kaymakam, İbrahim Halil, who had been in office since 29 February
1913. On 2 May 1915, he was replaced by Cemal Bey, very certainly on the instigation of
Dr. Reşid. From then on, as elsewhere, one event followed hard on the heels of the last. On
13 May, the Armenian and Catholic Syriac notables were arrested and accused of belong-
ing to a revolutionary committee. On 18 May, a second group of men was apprehended and
imprisoned. On 28 May, the first group of notables was executed. On 7 June, “Circassians” – a
term that probably designated Reşid’s Çerkez – proceeded to arrest all males between 12 and
70, a total of 470 people. On 11 June, at dawn, these 470 men were taken under guard to the
nearby village of Hafdemari and put to death. The same day, part of the remaining Armenian
population was rounded up, taken to the caves in the outlying area and massacred there. On
14 June, the same fate befell a second convoy made up of women. On 16 June, the third and
last convoy set out for Ras ul-Ayn, which a few survivors actually reached.87 These operations
were carried through to their term by the presiding judge of the court-martial in Dyarbekir,
Tevfik Bey, who had been delegated by Reşid; he continued his work at Derik thereafter. The
property of the Catholic and Orthodox Syriacs in the kaza was systematically looted, but the
Syriacs were not affected by the June 1915 massacres. On the testimony of Father Armalto,
at least some of them were expelled and sent to Mardin, where “men, women and children”
arrived on 25 August.88 Thus, the treatment reserved for the Syriacs differed somewhat from
that inflicted on the Armenians: two months after the Armenians, they were deported as
families and assembled in administrative centers such as Mardin. Though stripped of their
belongings, they were not methodically liquidated but abandoned to their fate without means
of support. Let us note in passing that this “soft” method would be utilized by the Kemalists
from 1923 on in order to cleanse the region of Dyarbekir of its last Christians and induce them
to leave for Syria, then under French mandate.
The Kaza of Severek

Severek, the medieval Sevaverag (“Black Ruins”), was the principal town in the kaza. The
town had an Armenian population of 5,450 on the eve of the First World War; this repre-
sented more than half of the total population. Seven other localities in this basically rural

district known for its red wine were home to 3,825 Armenians: Karabahçe, Çatak, Mezre,
Simag, Harbi, Gori, and Oşin.89
We have very little documentation on the events that occurred in the kaza of Severek. We
do know, however, that the kaymakam, İhsan Bey, in office from 1 May 1914 to 3 November
1916, played a crucial role in the destruction of the Armenian population, with the help
of the troops of the Special Organization commanded by Yuzbaşi Şevket, a captain who
was seconded by a number of leaders of squadrons of çetes: Ahmet Çavuş, Bıçakci Mehmed
Çavuş, Bıçakci Kör Ömer Ağa, and Haci Tellal Hakimoğlu, nicknamed Haci Onbaşi. Several
tribal chieftains, such as Ramazan Ağa, Kadir Ağa, and Kalpoğlu, as well as notables from
the city, such as the mufti of Severek, Acemoğlu Haci Vesil, Terzi Osman, Osmanoğlu Abo,
Kasanoğlu Zılo, and İbrahim Haliloğlu Mahmut, were directly implicated in the massacres
and pillaging of Armenian property.90
According to the meager sources available to us,91 the house searches and elimination
of the men took place in May 1915, followed by the deportation of the women and chil-
dren. A few survivors reached Urfa or Aleppo. The only credible eyewitness account, by
Faiz el-Güseyin, an Arab Bedouin who had been a parliamentary deputy and a kaymakam,92
describes Severek and the vicinity shortly after the elimination of its Armenian population
(probably in July).93 El-Güseyin observes that initially a multitude of corpses littered the road
between Urfa and Severek, above all those of women and children. The Armenian bodies
that he saw the next day on the road to Dyarbekir were probably not those of natives of
Severek, but of people deported from regions to the north.
The Kaza of Derik

The kaza of Derik, which lay some 58 miles south of Dyarbekir, had in 1914 an Armenian
population of 1,782, 1,250 of whom lived in the administrative seat of the kaza. The others
lived half an hour’s distance from the town in Bayraklı, known as Bairuk in Armenian.94
As we have seen,95 the kaymakam Reşid Bey (in office from 12 October 1914 to 2 May 1915)
was dismissed from his post because he had refused to proceed with the deportation of the
Armenians under his administration without a written order from the national authorities.
He was later executed by Dr. Reşid’s Çerkez on the road to Dyarbekir. His assassination was
ascribed to the Armenians of Derik, providing the vali with an opportunity to send Tevfik
Bey, the present of the court-martial in Dyarbekir, to the town.96 Tevfik, who had just
finished dealing with the Armenians of Viranşehir,97 applied the usual procedures. From
20 to 30 June, he first eliminated the men in small groups, then turned to the women and
children, who were deported and massacred a short distance from the town. The public
hanging of clergymen of various denominations on 27 June crowned, as it were, the judge’s
activity.98
It is not without interest that the new kaymakam, Hamdi Bey, was appointed to his post
on 30 June 1915 – that is, the day operations were terminated in Derik.
The Kazas of Silvan and Beşiri/Chernig

The 110 Kurdish-speaking Armenian villages of the rural kazas of Beşiri and Silvan, with
respective Armenian populations of 5,038 and 13,824, lay on the eastern border of the vilayet
of Dyarbekir, just south of Sasun.99 The location of these villages may explain why they were
attacked very early. As we noted when discussing the operations carried out in the sancak
of Mush, the authorities appealed in May to the Kurdish Belek, Bekran, Şegro, and other
tribes to attack not only Sasun but also the civilian populations of the kazas of Silvan and
Beşiri.100 While many fell victim to the massacres that the Kurds staged in these villages,

several thousand Armenians from the area managed to flee to Sasun, where in August they
met the same fate as its own population.101
Among Dr. Reşid’s many victims was the kaymakam of Beşiri, Naci Bey, a native of
Baghdad; as we have said, he was assassinated on the vali’s orders102 and was not replaced
by Rasım Bey until 20 June 1915, after the district had been cleansed of its Armenian popu-
lation (Rasım remained in office until 1 July 1917). The kaymakam of Silvan, Hakkı Bey,
appointed on 4 October 1914, was not transferred elsewhere until 31 August 1915. He par-
ticipated in the crimes committed here.
The Kaza of Lice

In 1914, nearly half of the 5,980 Armenians in the kaza of Lice lived in the administrative
seat of the kaza, which bore the same name, along with 1,980 Orthodox Syriacs. The other
half lived scattered in 32 small mountain villages or in deep gorges.103
The orders concerning the Armenians were apparently contested in this area as well by
Hüseyin Nesimî Bey, the kaymakam of Lice, who was executed on instructions from the vali
of Dyarbekir.104 Subsequent events seem to have followed the usual pattern. According to a
secret report by the head of the Administration of the Public Debt in Lice and a Catholic
Syriac, Nâman Adamo, house searches were first conducted with a view to finding arms.
They were followed by the arrests of the notables, who were assassinated in caverns located
further south in Daştapise. Next came the elimination of all males over ten and, finally, the
deportation of the women and children. The men still present in the Taurus mountain vil-
lages seem to have been massacred where they were found. We do not know what became of
the women and children.105
Massacres and Deportations in the Sancak of Arğana

The sancak of Arğana Maden had an Armenian population of 38,430, living in some 50
towns and villages. Lying on the southern slopes of the Taurus mountains and traversed by
the eastern branch of the Euphrates (Murad Su) in the north and containing the source
of the Tigris in the east, the region was well-suited to agriculture and animal husbandry.
Copper mines were also in operation there. The prefecture was located in Arğana Maden,
a little town lying on the right bank of the upper Tigris that had an Armenian population
of 3,300.
Argana/Arğin
The first wartime mutesarif, an Armenian named Dikran Bey, held office very briefly, from 20
August to 28 October 1914. On 30 December 1914, he was replaced by Nazmi Bey, who super-
vised the liquidation of the Armenian population in the region until he left it on 24 August
1915. The 10,559 Armenians of the administrative seat and ten other localities of the kaza106
were eliminated in July 1915, at the same time as the inhabitants of Chnkush, in the place
known as Yudan Dere; this was a chasm lying on the border between this kaza and the kaza
of Çermik, where an underground river fed the sources of the Tigris.107 However, no survivor
seems to have left an account of these crimes, apart from one witness to the events that took
place in Göljük, a little town lying on the shore of the mountain lake that is the source of
the Tigris.108 Göljük/Dzovk (“sea” in Armenian), famous since antiquity for the horses bred
near the lake, lies halfway between Harput and Dyarbekir; it formed the sole practicable
passage between the two regions and marked the administrative border between them. After
the general mobilization order, things remained calm in the little town of Göljük, situated

on the southern lakeshore. Only in April did the authorities collect all the Armenians’ arms
and proceed to arrest the notables. On the evening of Friday 4 June, Göljük was surrounded
by some 50 horsemen and 70 “soldiers of the militia,” come from Harput and commanded by
the müdir, Begzâde Ali. They proceeded to arrest all males over 16, whom they imprisoned in
a stable and systematically tortured. The official objective was to bring them to reveal where
their arms caches were located.109 Toros Toroyan, one of the principal notables in Göljük,
committed suicide when his captors threatened to transfer him to Arğana Maden.110 Krikor
Mardikian, M. Buludian, Shahbaz Vartabedian,111 and all the men who had been taken into
custody were put on the road to an unknown destination, guarded by “militiamen” and a
police officer.112 The parish priest, Father Boghos Zhamgochian, was taken to Harput and
subsequently slain at Deveboynu, near the village of Kharasagh.113
On Wednesday 7 July, the officials responsible for carrying out the deportations from
Göljük arrived there, accompanied by Turkish and Kurdish çetes. They proceeded to count
the deportees house by house, confiscated all their property and food reserves, and then
announced that they were to be deported to Aleppo. The leaders of this operation were
Halil Ağa and his two sons, Mahmed and Abdüllah, who were accompanied by their men.
On Friday, 9 July, the first convoy, made up of 70 families, began moving eastward, hugging
the lakeshore; the second, comprising the remaining 30 households, set out the following
morning.114 An order is then supposed to have come down from the capital of the vilayet
authorizing the local population to “adopt” male children under 12 and females irrespective
of their age on the condition that the Christians agreed to convert on the spot and had no
relatives abroad, “especially in America.” The “adoption” ritual then took place, legalized by
an official who proceeded to register the new believers.115 Remaining behind in the town,
the six “chosen ones” saw two young girls and an 11 year-old boy, Aram Mardikian, who had
left the previous evening with the first convoy, suddenly emerge from the lake. The children
related how their companions had been massacred with axes a few hours from Göljük, in
Gapan.116
The island on which the monastery of Saint Nshan was located, close to the southern
lakeshore, eventually became a refuge for dozens of Armenians native to villages of the plain
of Harput or areas further south.117 Until Tuesday, 2 November 1915, they were not seriously
molested. On that day, however, a brigade of army troops arrived. An emissary promised
them that the sultan had proclaimed an armistice with all the “Syrian Armenians” (Suriyani
Ermeni). Only a few young men managed to escape the ensuing attack and survive in the
mountains.118 The very detailed account we are following here contains an interesting piece
of information: the Armenians of the southern lakeshore, which, as we shall see in the next
chapter, served as a gigantic slaughterhouse for the Armenians from the plain of Harput,
were “dealt with” by the authorities of the vilayet of Mamuret ul-Aziz, although they were
officially under the jurisdiction of Dr. Reşid. The only exceptions were a few notables who
had been sent in the direction of Arğana Maden or Dyarbekir.
Çermik
The kaza of Çermik, located just southwest of the district of Argana, was sparsely inhab-
ited. Armenians lived in only three localities in Çermik in 1914: in the administrative seat,
Chermug (“Hot Springs”), with an Armenian population of around two thousand and, above
all, in Chnkush (today Çüngüş), where more than ten thousand Armenians were settled on
an impressive rocky plateau that dominated the Euphrates valley.119 In this remote region,
the authorities’ strategy seemed to consist in liquidating the Armenians where they were
found: there was no trace of deportees from this kaza in the concentration camps of Syria
and Mesopotamia.

Chnkush is the best-documented case, thanks to five survivors whose accounts were
recorded by Karnig Kévorkian.120 Conscription emptied the town of men between 18 and 45,
including those who had paid the bedel to avoid the draft. The requisitions were the financial
ruin of the tanners and fur traders (two of the town’s specialties) and left the muleteers without
their animals, but no exceptional event came along to disturb the calm reigning in Chnkush
until June 1915. The anti-Armenian exactions began there as soon as the müdir, Karalambos,
a Greek from Maden who had been in office since September 1909, was dismissed from his
post by Reşid for refusing to organize police searches of the Armenians’ homes. Twelve cav-
alrymen were waiting for him one morning in front of his home, and he was forced to follow
them. He was replaced by the more flexible Ferik Bey on 1 July (Ferik remained in office
until 25 June 1917). Systematic searches of the Armenians’ homes began soon thereafter.
The Armenian prelate Yeghia Kazanjian, the Protestant minister Bedros Khachadurian, and
Father Pascal Nakashian, a Catholic priest, were all arrested. The Protestant was the first to
die, under torture in the “prison” of Chnkush; the Apostolic clergyman was massacred along
with his flock, and the Catholic priest was deported to Dyarbekir, where he was put to death
somewhat later.121 The Armenian notables were also arrested. Among them were Abraham
Kaloyan, Hagop Gulian, and Hovsep Der Garabedian, who were sent to the administrative
seat of the sancak, Arğana Maden.122 Forty others were dispatched to Dyarbekir to stand trial
before the court-martial. They were accused of being “revolutionaries.”123
In July, the remaining men were methodically arrested. Then came the women and chil-
dren’s turn. All were deported in several convoys to the chasm of Yudan Dere (which the
Armenians called “Dudan”), two hours northeast of the town. They were joined on the
way by deportees from neighboring areas, notably Arğana Maden. The rare survivors report
that the convoys were escorted by Circassian gendarmes, which should doubtless be taken
to mean Çerkez çetes of the Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa wearing gendarmes’ uniforms. These çetes
were probably sent from Dyarbekir. It was these gendarmes who were also stationed on the
promontory that towers over the chasm of Yudan Dere. The males were dealt with first, in
accordance with a classic procedure: tied together in small groups of fewer than ten, they
were handed over to butchers who bayoneted them or killed them with axes and then threw
the bodies into the chasm. The method used on the women was quite similar, except that
they were first systematically stripped and searched and then had their throats cut, after
which their corpses were also thrown into the chasm. Some of them preferred to leap into
the abyss themselves, dragging their children with them; thus they cheated their murderers
of part of their booty.124
According to Karnig Kévorkian, 13 people survived – a few men who had taken refuge in
the mountains and a handful of young women who had been abducted in Yudan Dere.125
Palu
Boasting 37 Armenian villages and towns with a total population of 15,753 in 1914,126 the
kaza of Palu, located at the northern extremity of the vilayet of Dyarbekir and traversed
by the eastern branch of the Euphrates (Arsanias), was not a strategic stake of any special
importance. The administrative seat, Palu, boasted 10,000 inhabitants, 5,250 of whom were
Armenian. As elsewhere, the general mobilization drained the region of its vital forces: some
of the recruits were sent to the Caucasian front and others to the front in Palestine, with the
exception of the handful of men who were able to pay the bedel.127 Until spring 1915, the
only problem we know of was the violence of the military requisitions and, toward the end of
February, the enrollment of new Armenian draftees in the amele taburis.128 In the same period,
the only two Armenian gendarmes in Palu were dismissed, for no apparent reason. This was,
however, unspectacular in a country that was little accustomed to seeing non-Muslims bear

arms. The first alarm came in April 1915, when the town’s leading personality, the phar-
macist Karekin Kiurejian, was arrested and sent to Dyarbekir. He was soon followed by two
Hnchak activists, the brothers Hampartsum and Mgrdich Kozigian.129 The order to search
people’s homes for arms was issued by the kaymakam, Kadri Bey, very shortly thereafter.130
Two Kurdish chieftains, Haşim and Teffür Beg, were charged with accomplishing this task
in the 36 Armenian villages in the kaza.131 The biggest Armenian village, Havav, which
had 1,648 inhabitants, was the first to be searched. It was surrounded by 150 armed men led
by the mayor of Palu; 70 notables were arrested – among them Thomas Jelalian, Vahan Der
Asdurian, Manug Navoyian, and Sisag Mkhitar Baghdzengian – and jailed in Palu. They were
subsequently taken to Palu Bridge in a convoy of 200 men and slain in the nearby gorge of
Kornak Dere, after which çetes commanded by Teyfeş Beg threw their bodies into the river.132
The other Armenian villages of the kaza were cut off from each other and then, in the first
half of June, were attacked by çetes under the command of İbrahim, Tuşdi, and Teyfeş Beg. All
the men were stripped and shot on the banks of the Euphrates; their corpses were thrown into
the river. In the village of Til, about which we have a detailed account, only one miller was
spared, so that he could continue to provide the town with flour.133
On 1 June, 800 men of the amele taburi stationed in Khoshmat, north of Palu, all of them
from Eğin or Arapkir, as well as 400 worker-soldiers based in Nirkhi, where they had been
working for seven months, were tied together and killed with knives by the “butchers of
men.”134
Palu’s prison rapidly filled with schoolteachers and merchants who had been arrested in
the administrative seat of the kaza. The pivotal point the genocidal system set up in the
kaza, however, was the famous medieval bridge with eight arches that spanned the eastern
Euphrates near the exit from the town. Squadrons of çetes operated there in three killing
fields under the immediate command of the kaymakam Kadri Bey, who sometimes took a
hand in beheading his victims. He encouraged his men with a formula: “The body for the
nation and the head for the state.”135 All the men of Palu were slain here.136 In the first half
of June 1915, Palu Bridge was also a point of passage or massacre for some 10,000 deportees
from the vilyet of Erzerum, especially the kaza of Kıği.137 The leaders of the butchers who
performed their work on the bridge were Zeynalzâde Mustafa and his sons Hasan and Husni,
Mahmud Çavus from Norpert, Şeyhzâde Hafız, Süleyman Bey, Saïd Bey, Kâzım Ali Mustafa
Ağa, and Musrumli Karaman.138 They worked under the authority of Kadri Bey, who was
also a leader of Palu’s Young Turk club.139
The women and children from the rural zones were first transferred to Palu and confined
in the courtyard of the Church of St. Gregory the Illuminator for two weeks. The male popu-
lation came to pick out young women, who were raped and then returned after a day or two.
The turn of families from Palu came next: their houses were systematically plundered, with
the exception of a few that had been earmarked for Turkish notables. Very young children
were then separated from their mothers, packed into barrels, and thrown into the Euphrates.
A few young men and a few families succeeded in fleeing to the mountains, where they sur-
vived by living in caves before reaching Dersim at the beginning of winter 1915.140 In early
July, several hundred women, old men, and children from the area were finally sent away in a
convoy that passed by way of Maden, Severek, Urfa, and Bilecik.141 Bishop Yeznig Kalpakjian
and Father Mushegh Gadarigian were not arrested until late June. They were killed near
Palu, in the vicinity of Sınam, by a certain Reşid.142
Massacres and Deportations in the Sancak of Mardin

Mardin, lying in the heart of Syriac territory, had a population of 12,609 Orthodox Syriacs
and 7,692 Armenians, the vast majority of them Catholic. All were Arabic-speaking.143

Conscription proved quite difficult in this region that was far from the front. The search
for the recalcitrant took violent forms that, all in all, took classic forms. The first genuinely
alarming sign for the Christian population did not appear until late February 1915, when all
non-Muslim civilian officials were dismissed from their posts. On the other hand, doubtless
in order to reassure the Christians and create the impression that everything was in order,
the sultan bestowed a high Ottoman decoration on Ignace Maloyan, the Armenian Catholic
bishop. It was awarded to him at a 20 April ceremony.144 On 22 April 1915, the first rumors
began to circulate about the organization of secret meetings among the Muslims both in
Dyarbekir and the villages. The police search of the Armenian bishopric that was conducted
on 30 April only confirmed Maloyan’s fears of anti-Christian violence. His testament, writ-
ten on 1 May, shows that this Catholic was not fooled by the honor that the authorities had
shown him; he was expecting the worst from them.145
However, as we have already seen, Dr. Reşid had to rid himself of the mutesarif of Mardin,
Hilmi Bey (fired on 25 May), and also his successor, Şefik Bey (dismissed one month later),
and then appoint one of his henchmen, İbrahim Bedreddin Bey, as interim mutesarif before
he could put his extermination plan into practice in the sancak of Mardin. With the pro-
motion of two men from Dyarbekir – the appointment of the police captain Gevranlızâde
Memduh as Mardin’s police chief, responsible for expediting the convoys, and that of Çerkez
Şakir, Reşid’s aide-de-camp, as commander of the town’s gendarmerie – the vali put the fin-
ishing touches on his apparatus in Mardin.146
These three individuals – Bedreddin, Memduh, and Şakir – formed the core of the local
“committee of execution,” which also included Halil Edip Bey, a magistrate in Mardin and
member of the local Young Turk Club. This committee was assigned the task of creating
squadrons of çetes.147 It was, however, the parliamentary deputy Feyzi who finally won over
the Muslim notables of Mardin, at a meeting he convened in the town on 15 May at Abdo
Hac Karmo Kasımoğlu’s residence.148
The 500 men whom Halil Edip Bey recruited to the militia “Al Hamsin” were in fact çetes
of the Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa, whose principal officers were Abdurrahman Kasab; Muhamed
Hubaş; Çelebi Şahpiri Abdülrezah; Abdüllah Heder; Şeyh Kasur el Insari; Şeyh Tahir
el Insari, director of Mardin’s prison; and Şeyh Nuri el Insari.149 The “committee of execu-
tion” could also count on the support of several important men in the area: Abdülkadir Bey,
the commander of the gendarmerie, and his aides Faik Bey et Harun Bey; Hıdır Çelebi, the
mayor of Mardin; Necip Çelebi Bey, a tax collector; Abdülkerim Bey, who was responsible
for dispatching the convoys (under the supervision of Memduh Bey); Hüseyin, the mufti
of Mardin; and tribal notables and chieftains such as Abdelrahman el Kavas, Abdelrazzak
Şatana, Davud Şatana, Musa Şatana, Fares Çelebi, Mehmet Ali, Mehmed Raci, Abdallah
Effendi, Hac Asad el Hac Karmo, the chieftain of the Daşiye tribe, Ahmed Ağa, İbn Nuri
Bitlisi, and Osman Bey.150
Throughout the month of May, the authorities’ main activity consisted in conduct-
ing police searches of the Christians’ homes in a search for arms (which, apparently, were
nowhere to be found in this law-abiding Catholic Syriac environment), arresting notables
from all groups of the population and torturing them so that they would reveal their sup-
posed arms caches. An extremely unusual circumstance involving weapons that the “mili-
tiamen” were trying to hide near the Syriac Catholic church on the night of 26/27 May
sheds light on the methods used by the authorities to legitimize the imminent anti-Christian
violence. In this case, the falsification was exposed, for çetes were surprised in the act of dig-
ging the trench that was supposed to contain the weapons. But this failure was soon made
up for by the discovery of an arms stockpile on land owned by a Kurd named Mohammed
Farah, thanks to a confession extorted from an Armenian, Habib Yune. The police lost
no time photographing these arms and sending the prints to the Ministry of the Interior,

along with the information that the arms in question had been discovered in the posses-
sion of the Armenians of Mardin.151 All methods were allowed when it came to proving,
more particularly, that the Armenian Catholic prelate, Ignace Maloyan, was involved in an
ostensible plot against state security: among them was a fraudulent document attesting that
“twenty-five rifles and five bombs” had been transported to “Mardin’s Armenian Catholic
bishopric.”152
These two pieces of “incriminating” evidence seem to have been judged sufficient to seal
the doom of the Armenians and their prelate. On the evening of Thursday 3 June, gendarmes
and “militiamen” took control of all access routes to the city, while town criers announced
that no one could leave Mardin on pain of death. The first round-up of Armenian notables
occurred that very night. It was coordinated by Memduh Bey, who had just arrived. Bishop
Maloyan and six of his priests were also taken under guard to the prefecture and imprisoned
there.153
The next day, 4 June, and on 5 June as well, this first series of arrests was followed by
new round-ups involving 62 people, clergymen and laymen alike. Not all were Armenian,
although the majority were.154
The business of the “Armenians’ arms” aside, the authorities conjured up two other
incidents that repay close attention because they provide an excellent summary of the psy-
chological amalgam that the Young Turk regime fabricated out of thin air. The Young Turks
combined religious prejudice with ignorance, the better to manipulate a population that
was, to say the least, unsophisticated. The local members of the Fraternity of St. Francis,
whose membership lists, in Arabic, were discovered in the Capuchins’ church during a
police search, were transformed into militants of a “French Association” – that is, into
accomplices of France. An association of the “precious blood” – the reference was obvi-
ously to Christ’s sacrifice – was said to have no other goal than to “drink Muslim blood.”155
Ignorance of “the other” seemed to be so basic a feature of the society of the day that we
cannot rule out the possibility that, apart from a few “enlightened” Young Turks, the local
dignitaries were sincerely convinced of the accuracy of the accusations leveled against “the
Christians.”
The Orthodox Syriacs, 85 of whose leading men had also been arrested, persuaded the
authorities, after considerable effort, of their loyalty to the state and their profound aversion
to both Catholicism and France. Thus, they managed to avoid the fate meted out to the
other Christians of Mardin. According to “Catholic” witnesses, some of these Orthodox
Syriacs went so far as to sign a joint declaration together with Muslim notables proclaim-
ing the Armenians’ “guilt.”156 While these accusations are improbable, they reveal, above
all, that the authorities had a good deal of talent for exploiting the long-standing divisions
among the various Christian denominations, while confirming that they resorted to pressure
tactics to leave their victims, in the end, no other choice than to distance themselves from
the other groups.
The Young Turk authorities’ determination to prove by all possible means that they were
simply reacting in a legitimate way to the subversive machinations of “domestic enemies” was
exposed in caricatural fashion during Bishop Maloyan’s “trial.” The bishop was confronted
with the famous document “proving” that he had had 25 rifles and five bombs transported
to his “room.” The signatory, a certain Sarkis, could not appear in court because he had very
conveniently been murdered by persons unknown.157 On the basis of this document, police
chief Memduh leveled a deadly charge at the prelate: he was the head of a “Fedawi” – that
is, a revolutionary association.158 Was Memduh Bey persuaded of the truth of this charge or
was he merely being cynical? In other words, had he been entrusted with his mission because
he was myopic but devoted, or because he was considered shrewd enough to make far-fetched
accusations with a modicum of credibility? Answering this question would provide us in this

case with a better sense of the criteria used to recruit local collaborators with the Young Turk
regime in an area that was reputedly marked by tribalism.
The roughly 400 people who had been imprisoned – some of those arrested, for example
the Orthodox Syriacs, had been released for various reasons – were finally led from the city
under a guard of 100 çetes and gendarmes very early in the morning of 10 June 1915.159 The
departure of Mardin’s elite was staged as a spectacle: tied together or in chains, the men
were paraded through the town’s Muslim and then Christian neighborhoods. It is hard to
understand why. The sight of these important men in chains was perhaps meant to show the
population that the government had the means it needed to neutralize its “domestic foes,”
stringing them out in a heavily guarded column, with Bishop Maloyan bringing up the rear.
The methods used to execute these men – in Ahraşke, on the road to Dyarbekir, in the case
of the first to perish; in Adırşek, near Şeyhan, in the case of the others – did not differ from
those used elsewhere. The departure of the convoy provided police chief Memduh, who
was in command of the escort, with an opportunity to press large sums from the deportees,
especially Naum Jinaji, a member of one of the most powerful families in Mardin, and also to
exhibit his rhetorical talents. As if pronouncing a verdict, he said to the deportees: “Yesterday,
the empire accorded you a thousand privileges; today, it accords you three bullets.”160
Mardin’s leading citizens were killed in three groups: 100 were massacred in caves in
Şeyhan; 100 more had their throats slit and were thrown into the “Roman wells” at Zırzavan,
an hour from Şeyhan; the last 200 were liquidated the following morning on 11 June, in a
gorge further north. Maloyan was the last to be dispatched, near Karaköprü, by police chief
Memduh. It took a year for information about the fate dealt out to the men in this convoy to
trickle through. The authorities even took the trouble to have a forensic pathologist sign a
certificate declaring that Maloyan had died of a heart attack en route.161
After wiping out the elite, the authorities set about liquidating all the other males. On
11 June, 266 men, 180 of them Armenian, were taken into custody. After being tortured,
they too set out on the road to Dyarbekir, on 14 June, escorted by Abdülkadir Bey, a com-
mander in the gendarmerie. When they reached the caves of Şeyhan, they were stripped and
methodically relieved of their valuables. On 15 June, at dawn, 84 of them were slain by Kurds
from the surrounding area. The others were escorted to Dyarbekir: the non-Armenians were
“amnestied,” while the Armenians were brought back to the prison in Mardin. The account
of this episode, described in detail by Syriac survivors, has it that gendarmes from Dyarbekir
arrived in a great rush in Şeyhan with orders that made it possible, for the time being, to
save the last members of the convoy.162 Yves Ternon contends, citing a 12 July telegram
from the minister of the interior,163 that the execution of the Christian Syriacs had prob-
ably not been ordered by the national government but was rather an initiative of the local
authorities, who had a degree of latitude in these matters. The sharp reactions called forth
in certain diplomatic circles in Constantinople by the abundant information proving that
Catholics had been put to death probably impelled the Young Turk government to suspend
the operations carried out against non-Armenians, at least in towns in which there were
foreign witnesses.164
In any case, the sudden suspension of operations on 15 June indicates that the orders from
the national authorities were obeyed. The fact that the eradication program was not resumed
until 2 July also tends to show that Istanbul’s intervention upset the plans of Mardin’s
“committee of execution,” which was perhaps supposed to have awaited instructions before
going into action. On 2 July, things returned to normal: 600 men, among them some of the
Armenian survivors of the second convoy, were this time taken under guard to the city walls,
where they were summarily executed.165
What happened next was, as it were, classic: from 13 July on, Memduh Bey convened the
women and extorted large amounts of money from them in exchange for “saving their lives.”

The sums he received varied between 350 and 750 Turkish pounds in gold; the money was
personally pocketed by Memduh, Bedreddin, and Çerkez Şakir, Mardin’s three strongmen.166
On 15 July, the wives of the notables, including women who belonged to Mardin’s two richest
Armenian families, the Jinajis and Kaspos, were invited to get ready to join their husbands in
Dyarbekir; they were authorized to take money and valuables with them. As had happened
in Dyarbekir, government vehicles were sent to pick up women, children, old men, and a
few other men who had so far eluded the round-ups at their homes. The resulting convoy,
250 people strong, set out on 17 July, escorted by gendarmes under the command of Çerkez
Şakir. But it was halted at the city limits by police chief Memduh. The police chief arranged
for the deportees’ money and jewels to be handed over to him, since they might excite the
greed of “Kurdish or Arab looters.” The convoy then continued on its way southwest.167 It
arrived at İmam Abdül, near Tell Armen, in the evening. Here, the presiding judge of the
court-martial in Dyarbekir, Tevfik Bey – whose role in the massacres of Viranşehir and Derik
we have already seen168 – was waiting for it. Tevfik began by liquidating the few men in the
caravan, including Boghos Kaspo and Dikran Jinaji, and then ordered the massacre of the
others. Tevfik’s çetes and gendarmes proceeded family by family: after being stripped of their
last belongings, the deportees were taken off in vehicles, undressed, were sometimes raped,
and then killed with knives or shot. Mrs. Jinaji was subjected to more refined treatment: first
her hands were chopped off and then she was beheaded. While the slaughter was in progress,
several young women and children were carried off by the Kurdish çetes, who later sold a part
of their booty. By midnight, the convoy had been entirely decimated.169
The fourth convoy of men, comprising roughly 300 people, including the last survivors of
15 June and prisoners from Tell Armen, left Mardin on 27 July. These men were killed and
their bodies were thrown into the underground cisterns at Dara, with their beautiful masonry
arches. The last males still alive in Mardin, the conscripts, were massacred later in small
groups on the road to Nisibin: 50 were slain behind the citadel on 12 August and another
12 were killed at the foot of the nearby monastery of Mar Mikayel on 24 August. Seventeen
Armenian masons, who were busy building the minaret of the Mosque of el-Şahiya, were
granted a reprieve: they were not done away with until October 1915.170
The rest of Mardin’s Armenian population was deported very gradually, from late July to
late October 1915. Some of the deportees in the second convoy of families made it to Ras
ul-Ayn and then Aleppo. The third caravan, some 600 people strong, set out on 10 August;
the fourth, comprising 300 deportees, on 23 August; the fifth, made up of 125 women and
children, left on 15 September. Most of the deportees were slaughtered on the road, particu-
larly in Salah and Harrin. A few reached Mosul or Aleppo, while others managed to take the
least deadly route, the one leading to Homs, Hama, and Damascus.171
Amid this explosion of violence there were a few acts of humanity. Thus, the Chechens of
Ras ul-Ayn saved 400 to 500 Armenians, whom they ushered to the mountain area of Sinjar,
inhabited by Yezidis. To be sure, these Chechens, who took an active part in the operations
organized by Dr. Reşid and would play a crucial role in the fall 1916 eradication of tens of
thousands of deportees in the Ras ul-Ayn and Der Zor concentration camps, received a
“bonus” of 10 to 20 Turkish pounds per person.172 However, in other cases, money promised
and given did not suffice to save people’s lives. In Mardin, in any case, the other Christian
denominations escaped the Armenians’ fate, with individual exceptions.
Let it be observed finally that the çetes and Kurdish tribes posted in Mardin participated
actively in the liquidation of the convoys of deportees that came from the north. Father
Hyacinthe Simon drew up an instructive chronology: from 1 July to 5 July, two caravans of
women containing from 2,000 to 3,000 people arrived in Mardin after a 35-day trek. They
were left for several hours in the courtyard of the Armenian Catholic church before being
sent to their deaths on the road leading south.173 On 20 June, 12,000 women and children

were massacred between Dyarbekir and Mardin. On 7, 8, and 9 July, convoys of women from
Dyarbekir and Harput were slaughtered a short distance beyond Mardin, under the direct
supervision of Memduh Bey.174 On 10 September, 8,000 women and children from Harput
and Erzerum were slain between Dyarbekir and Mardin. Two thousand others from the same
convoy were exterminated on 14 September on the outskirts of Nisibin.175
The plunder of the Armenians’ property in Mardin gave rise to grotesquely comic scenes
and left the city looking like a construction site. Many people were hard at work digging
up the grounds around or inside the Armenians’ houses in a quest for hidden treasure. The
myth of the Armenians’ gold, which is still alive and well today, excited people’s lust for
gain. Once the period in which it was possible to make easy money had come to an end with
the first phase of the massacres, the most enterprising turned to trafficking women. On 15
August 1915, for the first time in Mardin, a public sale of young Armenian women was organ-
ized. Buyers had to pay from one to three Turkish pounds per head, depending on the beauty
and age of the female on offer.176
The only Armenian village in the kaza of Mardin, Tell Armen, was inhabited by both
Muslims and more than 1,200 Catholics, most of them Armenian. It was not until 11 June
that a handful of notables and the two Armenian parish priests, Father Anton and Father
Minas, were arrested. They were put to death the same day at Şeyhan, along with the nota-
bles of Mardin. The arrests of men between 10 and 70 began on Friday, 18 June and contin-
ued over the next few days, on orders from Hıdıroğlu Derviş, the müdir of Tell Armen. After
being confined in one of the two Armenian churches, these men were taken under guard to
the Güliye (Ksor) road, where they were killed by Kurds from the area. Some of the women
and children were slain in the other Armenian church or in the fields.177 On 9 July 1915,
the German ambassador informed Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg about the Tell Armen
massacres.178 He was unaware, however, that the town had been thoroughly looted and then
burned down on the orders of an eminent member of Mardin’s “committee of execution,”
Halil Edip Bey, who took the trouble to supervise these operations in person.179
In the whole kaza of Mardin, as we have seen, only the non-Armenian Christians of the
administrative seat of the kaza were, to a certain extent, spared. Elsewhere, in the countryside,
the inhabitants of the Syriac villages were condemned to a fate similar to the Armenians’.
The procedures used were also similar. Yves Ternon has made an inventory of the massacres
carried out, for example, in Güliye (Ksor) on 3 July, of more than 1,000 Orthodox Syriacs
and Catholics; in Mansuriyeh, on 16 June and somewhat later as well, of more than 600
Orthodox and Catholic Syriacs; and in Kalat Mara, Maserte, Bafua, and finally Benebil,
which put up resistance to the çetes’ attack.180
Midyat and the Syriac “Revolt” in Tur Abdin

Midyat, the administrative seat of the kaza of the same name, was a town with a popula-
tion of approximately 7,000. Most of the inhabitants were Orthodox Syriacs; there were
also 1,452 Armenian Catholics and a few Protestants.181 The kaymakam, Şukri Bey, who
was appointed to his post on 28 February 1915 and remained in office until 10 July 1917,
was well disposed toward them until early June. On 21 June, he ordered searches of the
Christian homes and had around 100 men arrested, including Dr. Naaman Karagulian (a
Protestant).182 These men were slain outside the city, in the place known as the “Wells of
Sayta.” When news of their death reached the town, Midyat mounted a resistance that
was sustained until late in the fall; the battalions of Kurdish irregulars, some of whom had
come from a considerable distance away, were unable to take the town.183 The inhabitants
of other localities in the kaza, such as the 2,000 Orthodox Syriacs and Catholic Syriacs of
Kırbüran, 600 of whom managed to flee, as well as the Catholic Syriacs of Kırzhaus, Batı,

Killet, and Hisn Kayfa, were massacred or fled to the mountainous district of Tur Abdin in
June 1915.184
If we are to grasp the reasons for the vigorous resistance mounted by the Orthodox Syriacs
of Tur Abdin from July 1915 on, we have to put the events that took place in both Aynwarda,
an Orthodox Syriac village located in the eastern part of Midyat, and also Azakh, in the
context of the massacres perpetrated by the authorities in the sancak of Mardin. Officially
presented as the “revolt of Midyat,” this resistance shows that the Kurdish irregulars and the
regular army had failed to achieve their objectives – that is, the eradication of these rural
populations, who had rapidly become quite certain that they were slated for elimination in
their turn. In October, contingents of the Third, Fourth, and Sixth Armies were sent to
Midyat to have done with these “rebels.” Even the Turkish-German Expeditionary Corps,
under the joint command of Ömer Naci, a member of the Ittihadist Central Committee and
an officer in the Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa, and Max von Scheubner-Richter, the German vice-
consul in Erzerum, was diverted from its original objective, Tabriz, in order to lend support to
the attack on the Orthodox Syriac enclave, whose members were supposed to have “cruelly
massacred the Muslim population of the region.”185
This accusation, which was also trotted out in the north to legitimize state violence, has
of course not been corroborated by any other source. Moreover, Naci, from whom the charge
emanated, does not name the villages from which these Muslim victims were supposed to
have come. In a subsequent report to the German Chancellor, Scheubner-Richter, obviously
unaware that Naci had transmitted accusations as crude as this to Istanbul, observed that the
“ostensible ‘rebels’ who had been presented to him as ‘Armenians’ had retrenched because
they feared a massacre.”186 Naci, whom the German officer described as one of the moder-
ates in the Ittihadist Central Committee, had nevertheless given Scheubner-Richter reason
to believe that the defenders of Azakh were “Armenian rebels” in order to encourage him to
take part in their liquidation with his German contingent.187 However, Scheubner-Richter
had understood that this maneuver, which he attributed to Halil (Kut), was simply designed
to induce him to play “a compromising role in the Armenian business.”188 This episode from
the history of German-Turkish military collaboration illustrates the methods of disinforma-
tion employed by the Young Turk leaders in their effort to implicate the Germans in the anti-
Armenian violence. It shows how hard it was for German officers to grasp the complexity of
the situation: in the case to hand, Scheubner had understood that he was being manipulated,
yet remained unaware that the “rebels” were not Armenians, but Orthodox Syriacs. He also
confirmed that the Young Turk propaganda about the “domestic enemy” was aimed exclu-
sively at “the Armenian rebels”; the adjective “Armenian” legitimized, in some sense, the
military operation planned against the Syriacs of Tur Abdin. The charge that Muslims had
been massacred, leveled by a “moderate” of Ömer Naci’s stamp, was also calculated without
a doubt to furnish retroactive justification for the crimes already committed throughout the
vilayet of Dyarbekir. That the German-Turkish Expeditionary Corps was diverted from its
original objective is, moreover, indicative of the priorities of the Turkish general staff, which
lavished greater attention on “its” Christians, who were hardly in an offensive posture, than
on its military objectives. Held up by these operations, Naci and Scheubner’s Expeditionary
Corps was forced, with the approach of winter, to abandon the idea of launching an offensive
on Tabriz.
Savur
As in the kaza of Midyat, Armenians lived only in the administrative seat of the kaza of
Savur, where there were hardly more than a thousand of them shortly before the war.189 The
kaymakam, Yaver Bey, who had been in office since 15 January 1914, was dismissed on 2 May

1915, probably at the request of Dr. Reşid and for the same reasons as his colleagues from the
other districts of Dyarbekir. He was replaced the same day by Mehmed Ali Bey, who held his
post rather briefly, until 1 October 1915. This was, however, time enough for him to arrange
to have all the men in the little town arrested and killed, Armenians and Orthodox Syriacs
alike. The murders took place in June 1915, outside Savur. The long march of the convoy of
women and children began thereafter. It culminated in Karabhond, outside Nisibin – more
specifically in a huge well into which the bodies of the last of the deportees were thrown.190
Cezire/Cizre
In Cezire, the easternmost kaza of the vilayet of Dyarbekir, there was a higher concentration
of Armenians than in the rest of the sancak. Besides the 2,716 Armenians living in Cezire
and 11 villages nearby, 1,565 Armenian nomads, Kurdified Christians, roamed through the
kaza.191 The kaymakam of Cezire, Halil Sâmi, who had been in office since 31 March 1913,
was dismissed from his post on 2 May 1915 and immediately replaced by Kemal Bey, who
remained in his functions until 3 November 1915. That Tur Abdin was able to mount a
resistance is doubtless not unrelated to the fact that this district was attacked late in the day.
The massacre of the inhabitants of the rural areas began on 8 August and went on for the
next several days. Few survived it.192 The administrative seat of the kaza, also called Cezire,
was left in peace until 28/29 June. The Orthodox and Catholic Syriac bishops were murdered
on the first of those dates. On the next, all the Armenian men and a number of Orthodox
and Catholic Syriacs were arrested, tortured, and killed.193 In this tribal region, life revolved
around weapons, and the authorities had always to take the power of the local tribes into
account. Here more than elsewhere, what contemporary witnesses describe as “primitive
populations” engaged in limitless violence barely tempered by religious considerations, at the
instigation of the authorities and with “the participation of the regular army.” On the out-
skirts of town, the throats of the Christian men were slit with knives as if in a ritual sacrifice,
and their bodies were thrown into the Tigris. In their turn, the women and children were
deported on keleks toward Mosul on 1 September. The luckiest were abducted by Kurds; the
others were drowned.194 On 22 September, 200 worker-soldiers from Erzerum were liquidated,
at three hours’ distance from Cezire, before the eyes of Halil (Kut). It is easy to imagine the
role he played in these late massacres.195
Nusaybin/Nisibin
In the southern kaza of Nisibin in Mesopotamia, there were only 90 Armenians, all of whom
lived in the administrative seat of the same name.196 Among the other inhabitants were
Orthodox and Catholic Syriacs, Kurds, and some 600 Jews. The kaymakam, Nâzım, who held
office from 2 March to 17 September 1915, organized a round-up of the Christian notables,
including the Orthodox Syriac bishop, on 16 August. They were slain the same day at some
distance from the little town. The women and children were killed over the next few days.
Their bodies were thrown into 65 wells that also served as the final resting place of thou-
sands of deportees who arrived from the north.197
Dara, in the northern part of Nisibin, was the scene of repeated slaughters; this suggests
that the ruins of the ancient city had been chosen as a killing field. In addition to the car-
nage evoked in the preceding pages, let us mention, for example, the 11 July 1915 massacre of
7,000 deportees from Erzerum in Dara, whose bodies were thrown into the town’s immense
Byzantine cisterns.198 According to information gathered by the British intelligence service,
Ali İhsan Pasha, who was serving in Mesopotamia with the Sixth Army at this time, was
primarily responsible for the massacres perpetrated in the district of Nisibin.199

Questions about the Massacres in the Vilayet of Dyarbekir

In the predominantly Kurdish region of Dyarbekir, the repeated replacement of kaymakams
and mutesarifs in May and June 1915 shows that the national authorities and their repre-
sentative in Dyarbekir, Dr. Reşid, were hard put to secure local government officials’ support
for their policy of eradicating the Armenian or Christian population. The Kurdish-Çerkez
family of Ziya Gökalp, notably Pirincizâde Feyzi, had to make a major personal effort200 to
bring the Kurdish tribal chieftains to collaborate on their project. In the end, however, the
action taken by Dr. Reşid in his vilayet was among the most effective. General Vehib, in the
deposition he read to the court-martial in Istanbul in April 1919, observed:
The crimes committed in the province of Dyarbekir, by virtue of their magnitude and
tragic character, number and nature, went beyond all the crimes I have just mentioned.
As we have seen, even the Syriacs and Greeks fell victim to these crimes and families
such as the Shazzazbanis, who had been known for centuries for their loyalty to the
state and the services they rendered it, were killed, along with their children, and their
property was illegally seized.201
As Hans-Lukas Kieser points out, however, Reşid was no exception among the Young Turk
elite of the day. Contrary to what many contemporary Turkish academics affirm, he was
highly representative of it.202 The extreme forms of violence to which he resorted in order to
eliminate the non-Turks of his vilayet were in his view justified by the higher interests of his
party and the “Turkish nation.”
The atrocities perpetrated in the vilayet of Dyarbekir also raise the question of the nature
of the crimes committed against the Catholic and Orthodox Syriacs in a region in which
they abounded, and which contained their principal historical monuments. The available
sources on these events show that, on average, 60 per cent of these groups were eliminated
during the persecutions organized by the local authorities. However, more than the dimen-
sions of the crime, we need to assess the genocidal intention behind it – to determine, in
other words, whether the Young Turk Central Committee made a decision to wipe out these
population groups, as it had in the Armenians’ case. We have already noted that Yves Ternon
is inclined to think that the decision came from the local authorities, who he says enjoyed
autonomy, at least to a certain extent. The substance of the telegram that Mehmed Talât sent
Reşid on 12 July 1915203 does indeed create the impression that the local authorities exceeded
their prerogatives. It should, however, also be pointed out that Talât’s order to halt the mas-
sacre of the Syriac population was probably inspired by the many reactions in diplomatic
circles – especially on the part of the diplomats of Austria-Hungary and the Vatican – to
crimes committed against Catholics and Monophysites.204 For the national authorities, it was
much harder to gain acceptance for the discourse about the “enemy within” in the case of
these Christians, who, unlike the Armenians, had no political representation to speak of in
Istanbul, little economic and demographic weight, and a narrow territorial base.
The fact that the killing came to a halt in Mardin almost one month before the arrival
of the “official” telegram of the minister of the interior, even as it continued to rage in
peripheral and rural areas, is reason enough to wonder whether Talât, in sparing Mardin’s
non-Armenian Christians – let us recall that their elites had perished together with the
Armenians’ – was not attempting to hide his party’s objectives vis-à-vis the Syriacs and dis-
guise the consequences of his own orders as local excesses. The Ittihadists’ Turkist ideology,
their determination to exclude and eliminate non-Turkish groups, inclines us to the view that
the Young Turk Central Committee decided to eradicate the Syriac population along with
the Armenians as a complementary measure. Reşid’s character rules out the possibility that

he simply took an ill-considered step; he was one of the founding fathers of the Young Turk
movement, a disciplined, honest official of high rank who ceaselessly battled the negligence
and venality of the Ottoman administration and was prompt to dismiss those who failed
to obey him. It can even be said that he was one of the rare high-ranking officials to carry
out all of the national authorities’ orders to the fullest extent because he believed in their
usefulness. It must also be borne in mind that Reşid doubled as the leader of the Special
Organization in the vilayet of Dyarbekir and thus answered to two hierarchies, of which at
least one, the Special Organization, had proved its effectiveness and imposed its decisions
with unmistakable determination. Local pressures, inspired in particular by a lust for gain,
might, at the limit, explain the violence, which was chronic in the region, but they can by no
means explain the programmatic methods brought to bear on the Syriac population.
The fact that the Syriac-speaking population was divided up into many different Christian
communities and that each denomination had its prejudices about all the others should
not be allowed to mask the fact that the Syriacs, collectively speaking, were the victims of
genocide. Much more clearly than the Armenian case, the eradication of the Syriacs, which
was not tainted by accusations of irredentism, bears witness to the ideological nature of the
genocide organized by the Young Turk Central Committee.

Chapter 7

the Vilayet of Harput/Mamuret ul-Aziz
T
he available sources on the circumstances surrounding the eradication of the
Armenian population of the vilayet of Harput are exceptionally abundant and
diverse. In addition to many survivors’ accounts,1 we have the official Ottoman docu-
ments unearthed by the Constantinople court-martial during the November 1919–January
1920 “Harput” trial2 and those published in the collection issued by the General Directorate
of the State Archives of Turkey.3 We also have the detailed reports drawn up by the United
States consul, Leslie Davis,4 and American missionaries who witnessed the events.5 In Harput
more than anywhere else, the fact that many citizens of a neutral country were present
in the region represented an additional problem for the authorities, who had to simultan-
eously oversee their extermination program and bring the Americans’ efforts to save as many
Armenians as possible to naught. In other words, in studying the events of 1915 in the vilayet
of Mamuret ul-Aziz, we need to take into account the problem of Turkish-American antag-
onism, which had a direct influence on the Armenians’ fate. That antagonism is the more
important in that the answers given by the local authorities to the questions raised daily by
the American representatives allow us to grasp certain elements of the genocidal machinery
that elude us elsewhere. Even if the American interventions privileged the survival of only
one segment of the Armenian population, the members of the Protestant community, they
compelled the vali to take certain precautions and also to elaborate a discourse justifying
the violent measures he carried out and the mass crimes that the consul and missionaries
witnessed firsthand. To be sure, the vali sometimes succeeded in convincing his Western
interlocutors of the existence of an Armenian “revolutionary plot,” but he lost all credibility
when he leveled such accusations at, for example, the teachers at the principal American
institution in Harput, Euphrates College, since the missionaries were personally acquainted
with them and knew that they were absolutely incapable of getting mixed up in a “plot.” It
is in these rare moments, vividly depicted in the Americans’ accounts of their experiences,
that we can assess the coherence of the arguments that the authorities mobilized to justify
their crimes.
The other regional particularity is the role of the pivot or hub of the deportations that
fell to the vilayet of Mamuret ul-Aziz: in 1915, nearly all the convoys of deportees from the
regions of Trebizond, Erzerum, Sıvas, and the eastern part of the region of Ankara passed
through the “slaughterhouse province”6 and lost some of their members there. The concen-
tration in the sancak of Malatia of a large number of killing fields to which certain squadrons
of the Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa were permanently attached tells us something about the procedures
the authorities adopted to eliminate the deportees, the çetes’ operational methods, and the
routes taken by the convoys. Mezreh also served as the Third Army’s main rear base; this was
where soldiers wounded on the Caucasian front were sent, and it was also a place of refuge

for the Muslim civilian population fleeing the Russian advance. The third salient charac-
teristic of this vilayet has to do with its northern district, the sancak of Dersim, over which
the authorities had practically no real control at the time; it was the only possible sanctuary
for the Armenian deportees who came from the region of Harput or passed through it. This
state of affairs obliged the authorities to devise a mechanism allowing them to control, at
the very least, access to Dersim – since they could not establish military supremacy over the
district itself – in order to make it as hard as possible for the deportees to escape from their
system.
Relatively remote from the war zones, the vilayet of Mamuret ul-Aziz undermines the
claims about security needs put forward elsewhere. Observed from the vantage point it offers,
they manifestly do not suffice to mask the Young Turks’ determination to “homogenize”
the population. Located at the point of confluence of the two branches of the Euphrates,
the region included on the eve of the First World War 270 towns and villages with a total
Armenian population of 124,289. It boasted 242 churches, 65 monasteries, and 204 schools
attended by 15,632 children.7 Behind these statistics lay a variegated society: it comprised
a majority of peasants, who were responsible for the great bulk of the vilayet’s agricultural
production; a broad stratum of craftsmen and merchants, who enjoyed almost total control of
the local market; and finally, a class of serious intellectuals, most of whom had been educated
at Harput’s American Euphrates College or the Armenian Central College. The vilayet’s
Protestant Armenian community was exceptionally big; its importance was due not just to
its size but, first and foremost, to its members’ level of education. The cultural gap between
the Armenian and Muslim – especially Kurdish – populations seems to have been widening
in the years before the war, as were the socio-economic disparities between the two groups.
The permanent ties between the region and its 26,917 emigrants, most of whom had settled
in the United States,8 help explain the accelerated modernization of Armenian society, or
at least its urban segment.
The heart of the vilayet, its economic and political center, was made up of four adjoining
towns: Harput, Hiuseinig, Kesrig, and Mezreh. They had a combined population of 17,198
Armenians, as against 13,206 Turks.9 Mezreh/Mamuret ul-Aziz, located on the plain, was
home to a number of institutions: the vilayet’s governmental bodies; the Eleventh Army
Corps, which was transferred to Mezreh between 26 July and 8 August 1914 and commanded
by a brigadier general; the American hospital, Annie Tracy Riggs Memorial Hospital, headed
by Dr. Henry Atkinson; the American Consulate; and the German mission, under the direc-
tion of Johannes Ehmann, a former officer who had become a Protestant minister.
The general mobilization of 3 August 1914 gave rise to scenes of chaos. A description
by the president of the American mission, Henry R. Riggs, gives us a detailed view of the
reigning confusion. Riggs begins by describing the posters pasted up in the city and the proc-
lamations of the town criers announcing the mobilization of men between 20 and 45 – in
other regions, the corresponding age limits were 18 and 45 – who had five days to enroll.
The populace, Riggs says, responded “promptly and loyally” to the call, but the draft boards
worked slowly and displayed a certain “laxity.”10 After waiting for several days to be mustered,
a good many Kurds from Dersim simply went back home and never returned. The busiest army
officers were apparently the doctors, who handed out exemptions right and left to those who
proved sufficiently generous. Riggs attributes the disorder that characterized the mobilization
to the officers’ inexperience. He observes in particular that counter-orders followed orders,
concerning first those under 40 and then those under 31, who were the first to be mobilized.
Management of the lists of people exempted from military service for health reasons, because
they had paid the bedel, or because they were too young or too old, was, at the very least, dis-
astrous. The underlying reason was the “chaos” reigning in the office, where, one day, “the
list of names prepared the day before had been lost.” Thus, some of the men exempted from

Deportations and Massacres: Harput/Mamuret ul-Aziz 383
service were identified as deserters and arrested.11 The officers’ lack of comprehension of, or
scorn for, the peasants, especially the Kurds who did not know Turkish, the appallingly inad-
equate accommodations for the new recruits, the fact that the soldiers’ food supply depended
on the generosity of the local populace, and a shortage of arms and equipment, explained why
“only 15 percent of the men” actually arrived on the front.12 Riggs also notes that there existed
“a bond of sympathy” between the Armenian and Muslim conscripts, who shared the same
fear of the fighting to come; the proclamation of a holy war did not undermine it.13
The abuses spawned by the military requisitions angered the local population and led the
Armenian primate, Bsag Der Khorenian, to lodge an official protest with the local authori-
ties.14 The requisitions provided the occasion for massive misappropriations of foodstuffs,
farm animals, clothing, wood, and various other products.15 The corruption was orchestrated
by the commission responsible for “military contributions” (teklif-i harbiyye), created in fall
1914 under the auspices of the local Ittihadist club.16 This club was supervised by Boşnak
Resneli Nâzım Bey, the CUP inspector in Mamuret ul-Aziz. He was seconded by Ferid Bey,
the responsible CUP secretary and head of the vilayet’s school system; Şedihizâde Fehmi, a
member of the local Ittihadist council; Haci Baloşzâde Mehmed Nuri Bey, a parliamentary
deputy from Dersim and the head of the regional Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa; Baloş Mustafa Effendi,
a Unionist deputy; Mufti Hoca Bey Zâde; and Haci Feyzi, a member of the general council
of the vilayet.17
The new vali, Sabit Cemal Sağiroğlu, who had been appointed to his post early in
September 1914, had an interesting background.18 Whereas the corresponding posts in Van,
Bitlis, and Dyarbekir were held by Enver’s and Talât’s close friends or relatives – men who
were considered to be educated and could speak French – Governor Sabit was perceived by
the American consul as an “exceedingly ignorant and uncultured man ... gross in his man-
ners,” but “of considerable natural shrewdness.”19 The American diplomat even informs us
that the new vali had spent all his life in a Kurdish environment and that the “only public
position” that he held before he was given the job in Mezreh was that of mutesarif of Dersim.20
Davis was unaware, however, that Sağiroğlu came from a feudal family native to the Kemah
area.21 His familiarity with the Kurds of Dersim and his social position doubtless explain why
the government made a man of his stamp vali of a region in which Turkish ağas and Kurdish
begs had considerable political weight.
On 11 September 1914, the American consul, Leslie Davis, and the head of the American
mission in Harput, Henry Riggs, had a chance to meet the new vali. They were introduced
to him on the very day that the press agency Milli announced that the Capitulations had
been abolished – the decision was to take effect on 1 October; news that put Sabit in a very
good mood. Riggs was not mistaken when he said that the suppression of these privileges left
the American charitable institutions at the mercy of the Turkish authorities.22 In fact, the
abolition of the Capitulations initiated a gradual takeover of the Americans’ property, which
was confiscated bit by bit by the authorities on more or less hollow pretexts; the manifest
intention was to push these “foreigners” aside and reduce their influence in the region. In the
following weeks, the consul and missionaries, threatened with the total loss of their build-
ings and land, could only make appeals to the “gracious generosity of the Governor” through
certain Ottoman friends.23
The attempt to gain control of the Americans’ assets was aimed, first and foremost, at
Harput’s Euphrates College, a symbol of American influence in the region. A request was
made, “very politely,” for use of one of the college’s buildings, “Audience Hall,” which the
army wanted to convert into a barracks. In the weeks thereafter, the girls’ school and the
seminar were confiscated. To justify the confiscations, the vali mentioned the risk of typhus
epidemics, which he said compelled him to take preventive measures and close the American
schools. The government’s effort culminated only on 26 March, when the authorities took

possession of Euphrates College – by no means indispensable to the army, according to

Riggs – and issued the order to shut down the schools once and for all. The American consul
stepped in at this point, making an appeal to the Istanbul embassy, but his intervention did
not stop the colonel and police chief, who came in person to take charge of the premises that
the Americans refused to surrender “voluntarily.”24
The other prestigious American institution, the Annie Tracy Riggs Memorial Hospital,
which was located in Mezreh, partly escaped the fate of the institution in Harput, because
the American Red Cross announced in December 1914 that it would assume responsibil-
ity for 100 beds reserved for wounded soldiers sent back from the Caucasian front.25 Thus,
the hospital served, until the winter of 1915–16, as a sanctuary for its Armenian personnel.
Access to it, however, was closely monitored by a squad of soldiers permanently stationed on
the premises. Also, Armenians able to prove that they were American citizens, and a few
other members of the Protestant community who had been recommended to the consul by
the missionaries, were allowed to stay in the American consulate, or, at any rate, the vast
yard surrounding it. The gradual confiscation of the buildings that housed the American
institutions can be explained by the Young Turks’ desire to eliminate foreign influences from
the country and, secondarily, by the army’s needs for barracks and office space. However, the
takeover of the American schools, decreed on 26 March 1915, was no doubt also designed to
eliminate any and all zones beyond the authorities’ control – that is, to leave the Armenians
no way out. It is, moreover, telling that the first step the vali took was to arrest most of the
Armenian faculty of these schools.26
The rising death rate, in late winter 1915, among conscripts charged with transporting
supplies to Erzerum, Bitlis, and Mush seemed to the Armenians to be cause for alarm,27 as
did the public execution of three peasants from the village of Korpe who were executed by
firing squad in front of the military hospital for “aiding and abetting deserters.”28 Riggs, one
of a generation of American missionaries who had been born in Turkey and spoke Turkish
and Armenian, notes that over the preceding years, “certain conditions had presaged the
coming storm,” although this was not at all the case in 1915, when “the relationship of the
Armenian to his Moslem neighbor was more friendly and sympathetic than ever before.”29
Riggs also remarks that the mood changed in April, when rumors began to circulate about
“seditious activity,” followed by reports of the atrocities to which the Muslim population
in the border zones had been subjected by the Russians and Armenians. He adds that he,
too, had heard “fantastic tales” of this kind from the vali himself. These stories, of course,
spawned some resentment among the Turks; they were, however, never spread by official
publications.30
Armenians seem to have sensed the threat much earlier, for, on 5 February 1915, a meet-
ing of the main Armenian political leaders was called at Jean Shirvanian’s house in Mezreh
in order to assess the situation and discuss the possibility of organizing a self-defense effort if
it should deteriorate further. They came to the unanimous conclusion that the Armenians
lacked the preparation needed to do so.31 They were probably unaware that Vali Sabit was
already busy organizing squadrons of çetes for the Special Organization, as is indicated by
a 15 February 1915 telegram addressed to the mutesarif of Malatia;32 it gave him three days
to send the çetes to Mezreh. Of course, the Armenians could not have known that the
vali would announce, in a 16 March conversation with a German diplomat passing through
Mamuret ul-Aziz, that “[t]he Armenians in Turkey must be, and were going to be, extermi-
nated.” “They had grown in wealth and numbers,” he said, “until they had become a menace
to the ruling Turkish race; extermination was the only remedy.”33
In any event, the vali, Sabit Sağiroğlu, maintained relations with the leading Armenian
men in the vilayet until early April. Matters took a less friendly turn when he summoned
these political and religious leaders to his offices in order to inform them that he had to

begin collecting the weapons held in people’s homes. Although he treated his interlocu-
tors with respect, he had soon unleashed a campaign against Armenian political activists.
“Shortly after Easter” (4 April) 1915, Armenian clubs were searched and their leaders were
arrested. In Mezreh, the first to be arrested were the Dashanks Garabed Demirjian, Dikran
Asdigian, Dr. Nshan Nahigian, Aram Srabian, and Garabed Geogushian, the Hnchaks
Harutiun Semerjian and Garabed Tashjian, and the liberals Khosrov Tembekijian and Smpad
Arslanian.34 A rumor had been circulating to the effect that “bombs and guns had been
found in the possession of certain persons who were thought to be members of Armenian
revolutionary societies conspiring against the Turkish Government.” “Looking at the matter
in the light of subsequent events and comparing it with what happened in all others parts
of Turkey at the same time,” the consul adds, “I think it is probable that in many cases the
bombs, which were found in the backyards of the persons accused, were actually buried
there by the police so as to manufacture evidence against the Armenians.”35 The political
activists arrested were held in Mezreh’s central prison, where they were tortured, the official
purpose being to get them to reveal where they had hidden their weapons. The house-to-
house searches already underway in both the towns and villages were now transformed into
occasions for destruction and plunder. The authorities looked not only for arms, but seized on
the least little letter or printed document in their quest for compromising documents, which
were turned over to a committee charged with examining them.36 In a 5 May letter, the head
of the German mission in Mezreh, Johannes Ehmann, informed the German ambassador in
Constantinople that house searches had been conducted in Harput-Huysenig-Mezreh and
that people “who seemed suspicious” had been arrested, despite the fact that the populace
“obeyed the government” and had accepted conscription without complaint. Ehmann also
noted that Vali Sabit, with whom he had met, “[was] himself convinced of the peaceful dis-
position of the Christian population of the region.”37
Nazaret Piranian, a teacher at Euphrates College, reports in this connection a conversa-
tion that he had in mid-April with Feymi Bey, a local liberal, in the shop of a Mezreh phar-
macist, Karekin Gurjian. Feymi Bey informed Piranian and Gurjian that he had recently
attended a meeting in the city between the authorities and Turkish notables about disarming
the Armenians. Aware of the alarm caused by the prospect, Ehmann, who had been invited
to the meeting, offered to intercede, taking advantage of his status as a man of the cloth.38
The Dane Hansina Marcher, who worked alongside the German pastor, gives a different
interpretation of his role in this matter. As she tells it, the vali asked Ehmann to inter-
cede with the Armenians (this is probable), and the minister then summoned the leading
Armenians in the city to ask them to bow to the authorities’ demands.39 The Armenian
sources, for their part, indicate that the former German officer played a much more active
role; he is said to have gone to preach in the Apostolic and Protestant churches of Harput,
Mezreh, Hiuseinig, Pazmashen, Korpe, Khulagiugh, and so on. In the village of Pazmashen,
where he went in the company of Pulutlı Halil, the leader of a squadron of çetes in the
Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa, and a few local government officials, he assembled the population in the
church and “very skillfully” delivered a “sermon” in which he asked the Armenians to hand
in their weapons, swearing on the Bible that he would personally guarantee their safety.40
In Hiuseinig, he also promised that he would obtain the release of the men who had been
arrested.41 Piranian even affirms that the minister used Biblical quotations and his status as
a Christian clergyman to wage a propaganda campaign for the benefit of the authorities, and
that he was in fact an officer of the military propaganda department (like Scheubner Richter
in Erzerum, as we have seen).42
The searches conducted in April thus seem to have had several different functions. They
sought to completely disarm the population and gradually neutralize the Armenian elite, fol-
lowed by all male Armenians, while at the same time lending substance to the charge that

an “Armenian revolt” was in the making. An examination of the way events unfolded shows
that the local authorities methodically enacted a plan that had probably been hammered out
in Istanbul; it was distinguished by the fact each step paved the way for the next. Thus, the
hunt for arms justified the arrests, tortures, and house searches. These made the thesis of an
Armenian “plot” credible; the existence of the “plot” justified extending the measures taken
to all males over the age of ten, followed by the deportation of the whole population. It was
an almost perfect mechanism.
Observers of the situation, who concede that they had not yet understood what was in
fact taking place, began to ask themselves questions after the arrests of 1 May 1915. Members
of the Protestant Armenian elite, notably teachers at Harput’s Euphrates College, were
among those taken into custody; the arrests thus directly affected the American institu-
tions and “men whose attitude on all political matters was well known to be scrupulously
correct.”43 Undeniably, the sudden arrest of these intellectuals “admired by Moslems as well
as Christians,” against whom there existed no “suspicion of any clandestine activity against
the government,44 was an important feature of the genocidal system. While it deprived the
Armenians of enlightened leaders, it showed above all that official talk of a “plot” was mani-
festly just a ploy: the vali, indeed, was no longer even pretending to legitimize his actions. Of
Khachadur Nahigian,45 Nigoghos Tenekejian,46 Garabed Soghigian,47 Mgrdich Vorperian,48
Hovhannes Bujikanian,49 and Donabed Lulejian,50 only Lulejian managed to escape with
his life.
The arrests and repression affected not just the Protestant elite of Harput, but all the
Armenian leaders, such as the head of Mezreh’s Central College (Getronagan Varzharan),
Yerukhan (the pseudonym of the writer Yervant Srmakeshkhanlian); Hagop Janjigian, an
important businessman whose premises were subjected to a police search; Dr. Artin Bey
Helvajian, who was dismissed from his post; Dr. Mikayel Hagopian of Mezreh, who had
directed a field hospital during the first Caucasian campaign; the well-known writer Tlgadintsi
(whose real name was Hovhannes Harutiunian); Father Vartan Arslanian of Harput;
Hagop Fermanian; Garabed Ekmekjian; Garabed Hovsepian; Armenag Terzian; Erzuman
Erzumanian; Khachadur Nahigian; Serop Vartabedian; the lawyer Aleksan Nalbandian, who
had made a name for himself with his defense of the insurgent Kurds of Dersim; Mardiros
Muradian, who was tortured to death the night after he was arrested, and so on.51
Riggs, who happened to speak with a member of the “committee” responsible for exam-
ining the “papers” found in the possession of the arrested suspects, learned “that in all the
papers examined there was absolutely nothing objectionable, but that the other members
of the committee were showing a determination, by misinterpretation and by segregating
isolated words, to make out an artificial case against the men on trial.”52 As an example of
such misinterpretation, he cites the condemnation of the teacher Nigoghos Tenekejian, the
leader of the Armenian Protestant community. According to information “revealed” to him
by the parliamentary deputy for Harput, Haci (Baloşzâde) Mehmed (Nuri), Tenekejian was
convicted on the basis of documents proving that he was the president of the “Cooperative
Committee.” But, as Riggs notes, Tenekejian’s position at the head of this “ecclesiastical
body composed of missionaries and representatives of the Protestant church organization,
whose duties were purely ecclesiastical,” had long been known to one and all, as had the
nature of his activities in the organization. This did not prevent the judge from declar-
ing that Tenekejian had confessed to “his complicity in seditious organizations.”53 The files
assembled by the authorities to justify the arrests of well-known people above all suspicion
were doubtless intended to influence local public opinion and convince the public that the
government’s anti-Armenian measures were legitimate. The arrests of 40 to 50 Armenian
notables of the first rank, apprehended from May to early June,54 helped bolster the story of a
plot woven by seditious organizations that represented a threat to state security, such as the

Protestant “Cooperative Committee.” According to Riggs, the campaign mounted by the

authorities was successful: the Muslim population’s friendly attitude toward the Armenians
gave way to profound suspicion.55
As for the other question preoccupying the authorities, the confiscation of the Armenians’
weapons, Ehmann’s intervention, the torture inflicted on the Armenian prisoners and the
house searches conducted in Mezreh, Hiuseinig, Harput and the surrounding villages from
April on seem not to have produced the desired results. It is true that the Armenian notables
had undertaken to consult their “Turkish fellow citizens” at a “mixed assembly” held in the
first half of May to discuss the problem of arms, and had agreed to turn over their weapons if
and when the Turks guaranteed their security.56 The vali, however, claimed that they had not
handed over all their weapons, but had kept their modern arms and “bombs.” Sabit’s threats
and the Turkish notables’ promises convinced the Armenian notables who had not yet been
deprived of their liberty to visit the prisoners, accompanied by parish priests and the inevitable
Reverend Ehmann, in order to beg them to reveal where they had hidden their arms. If they
did not, the prisoners were told they would “be responsible for the destruction of the whole
community.”57 The vali also promised “immunity” to everyone who voluntarily gave up his
arms.58 In the end, a miscellaneous “arsenal” was assembled and put on display at the police
station in Mezreh; it allowed the parliamentary deputy Haci Baloşzâde Mehmed Nuri to spread
the idea that “a dangerous plot had been unearthed and was being vigorously prosecuted by the
government.”59 Vali Sabit lost no time in photographing these war trophies, sending the pic-
tures to Constantinople along with a report on the conspiracy that he had brought to light.60
Consul Davis noted, for his part, that there was no telling “how many of the bombs may have
been planted by the police themselves and how many weapons were obtained by innocent
people for the purpose of having something to surrender to the police.”61
The preliminary stage that we have just examined ran from late April to late May. It was
followed by a second stage, the beginning of which may be dated to 6 June 1915. The second
stage was characterized by a sharp increase in the number of arrests throughout the cities of
Mezreh and Harput and a systematic search of all houses “without exception” – including the
few buildings still in the hands of the American missionaries.62 Riggs notes that he learned
only much later that local officials had conducted the arrests on the basis of preestablished
lists.63 Kesrig and Hiuseinig were surrounded on 7 June and a good many of the men were
arrested. The turn of the villages on the plain came on 8 June. On 10 June, Mezreh was
surrounded by troops. All of its Armenian shops were closed and its leading citizens were
arrested.64 By 20 June, several hundred men were being held in the prisons of Mezreh; 200
were transferred to Harput on that date.65
These prisoners were put in several different prisons. The political prisoners, who
in theory had to be brought before a court-martial, were held in solitary confinement in
Mezreh’s central prison. But most of the prisoners were locked up in the Kirmizi Konak (“Red
Konak”) near the western exit from Mezreh. Piranian, who was detained in this military
barracks from 14 to 28 June 1915, says it was a hell through which both the worker-soldiers
of the labor battalions as well as the men of Mezreh, Harput, and Hiuseinig passed. The
day he was jailed, 3,000 men of the amele taburis were in custody there.66 They were left for
30 hours without food or water, and crowded together under unspeakable hygienic condi-
tions. On 15 June, they were joined by 500 newcomers, most of them craftsmen from Harput
employed by the government and army. Every night, some 50 men were taken to the prison’s
torture chamber and brought back in the early hours of the morning, just before the passage
of Mezreh’s garbage collectors, whose task it was to collect the bodies of prisoners who had
died overnight.67
News of the internment of these 3,500 men soon spread, resulting in thousands of wives
and mothers descending on the konak with provisions in the hope that they would be

allowed to give their relatives food and drink. On their third day of detention, the prison-
ers were actually authorized to receive water and a little food.68 On the morning of 18 June,
Piranian noticed the arrival of Çerkez Kâzım, one of the commanding officers of the Special
Organization’s “militia,” accompanied by cavalrymen and 200 infantrymen, who were in turn
followed by a cart piled high with ropes. The authorities had apparently decided to empty
the konak, which was full to the point of bursting, of the more than 2,000 prisoners who
were still alive. These men were told that they were leaving for Urfa to help construct the
railroad being built there. They were set marching southward in the afternoon, tied together
in groups of four, under the command of Çerkez Kâzım.69 Our witness, who managed to stay
behind in the konak, did not learn what happened to these men. At first, Riggs had heard
only rumors; then he obtained information about how they were massacred. He was told in
the course of a conversation with the vali that “those prisoners had encountered some Kurds,
and there had been some ‘unpleasantness’.”70 In other words, the vali did not deny that these
men had been put to death, but attributed the crime committed by the soldiers and Çerkez
Kâzım’s çetes to Kurds.
The next morning, on 19 June, the konak was again filled up with men from the surround-
ing villages of the plain who had been arrested during the night. The next day they were
joined by men arrested in Mezreh and Harput. By 22 June, some 1,000 Armenians, both
urban notables and peasants, were being held in the Red Konak.71 In the two weeks he spent
there, Piranian observed the various ruses that the commander of the garrison, Mehmed Ali
Bey, used to squeeze money from the prisoners. He announced that those who could pay the
bedel of 42 gold Turkish pounds would immediately be set free, while the others would be sent
to Urfa the next morning. Although all contact with the outside world had been forbidden
until then, the men were now authorized to receive visits from their wives, obviously so that
they could try to obtain the required sum. The 100 prisoners who succeeded in finding the
money were put in a separate room. The other roughly 900 men were set marching south
under heavy guard on 23 June.72 According to the verdict handed down in the trial of the
criminals of Mamuret ul-Aziz, these men were shot at the foot of Mt. Heroğli on 24 June.73
Riggs, an outside observer of these events, remarks that the police went systematically to
all Armenian homes, beginning on 24–25 June, and arrested all the men, who were then
“herded into prison, and it would appear that when the prison [was] full it [would] be cleared
out in the same fashion again.”74 News that the first groups of men had been murdered on
the outskirts of Harput reached Mezreh in short order. Thereafter, it seems, the authorities
decided to stage the massacres in more isolated sites, notably in Güğen Boğazi, a gorge near
Maden.75
By 25 June, the konak was full again. The prison administration had announced that
this time the military authorities wished to recruit craftsmen. Nursing the secret hope that
they would escape the fate reserved for their fellow prisoners, 80 candidates, including our
witness, were registered. The next day, however, the army declared that it needed only 40
men, and proceeded to dispatch them to their new posts. This episode would hardly be worth
mentioning if it were not symptomatic of the cruel game that the military had decided to
play with its prey. After the lucky 40 had happily left the prison, the officers in the konak
revealed that it was the 40 artisans left behind who had in fact been chosen; the “happy few”
were sent to the slaughterhouse.76
On 27 June, another 500 prisoners, who had been arrested over the preceding few days,
left for “Urfa” at dawn.77 This is the last convoy of men about whom we have information,
but there is every reason to suppose that the same procedure was used to dispatch the others
as well, and that the heart of the vilayet of Mamuret ul-Aziz had been virtually emptied of its
male population by late June. It is probable that the authorities waited until this stage of their
extermination plan had been brought to an end before initiating the next one.

On 26 June, the munedik (town crier), Mamo Çavuş, announced in every Armenian
neighborhood of Mezreh that all Christians were to be deported to the south and that the
first convoy would leave in five days. Çavuş began his announcement this way:
Listen! My message is for the gâvurs, all the gâvurs ... By order of our sublime state and
the king of kings, it has been decided to send all the gâvurs in Harput to Urfa. From
babies in the cradle to the last of the old men, all must go ... The first group, to be
formed of people from the Devriş, Nayil Beg and Market neighborhoods, is to set out
on the first of July at dawn.78
Thus, it appears that not only the Armenians but also the Syriacs were deported from
Harput. Riggs, however, informs us that the same day, 26 June, the decision to deport the
Syriacs was confirmed and then rescinded,79 probably after an exchange with the minister
of the interior. In fact, as soon as the beyanname (deportation order) was made public, all
the foreign residents of Mezreh-Harput joined together and demanded to be received by
the vali. Riggs again best captures the mood prevailing in the city. Although the men
were being liquidated, the city was basically unaware of the fate that had been reserved for
them – it only knew about the tragic destiny of the first convoy, the blame for which had
been put on the Kurds. Until the munedik announced the deportation order, the city knew
even less what was in store for it. Davis and Ehmann sent telegrams to their respective
ambassadors to ask that they intercede, but the authorities censored them; the American
consul’s telegram did not reach its intended destination. Moreover, the missionaries’ tel-
ephone line was cut. Thus, it appears that, when the extermination program entered the
crucial phase, the local authorities took all the measures necessary to isolate foreign resi-
dents and prevent them from communicating with the outside world.80 “There was no pos-
sibility,” Riggs writes, “of changing the order in any way, as it had been sent in just that form
from Constantinople.”81
The “memorable visit” that all the foreign residents paid Vali Sabit on the afternoon of
29 June began in a very chilly atmosphere. The only diplomat present, Davis, took pains
to point out that his visit did not have an official character and that he had come solely
to request that the vali show “mercy for the unfortunate Armenians.” According to Riggs,
the attitude that Sabit took and the words he uttered plainly gave them to understand that
their “interference was not welcome.”82 On the evening of 27 June, Davis had already met
with Sabit Bey to request that the American missionaries be allowed to accompany the
convoys. He received a “categoric refusal.”83 During the “memorable visit,” of which Riggs
and Davis give converging accounts, the foreign residents began by broaching the problem
from another angle. They suggested that the Armenians be granted extra time in which to
prepare for this “difficult journey.” Their aim was to gain time in the hope that possible “delay
might give time for appeal in Constantinople and reversal of the edict.” Very diplomatically,
Sabit Bey said that he was aware of the difficulties, but added that he could not disobey his
orders; at most, he would allow the women and children who had no male accompaniment
to leave with the last convoys. There was, he said, no cause for concern because “they would
be taken good care of.”84 Riggs notes the vali’s statement to the effect that the Armenians
were to blame for what was happening to them because of their acts of “disloyalty,” especially
in Van, and also that he had discovered “weapons and bombs” in their possession in Harput.
The head of the American mission then asked if that was sufficient reason to condemn so
many innocent women and children to death. “Indignantly,” the vali answered “that they
were not condemned to death, but to be sent into exile.” Sabit Bey also assured his visitors
that he had seen to it that the deportees would be provided with means of transportation and
protected by a sizeable escort.85

The failure of these local efforts should not blind us to the fact that diplomats in Istanbul
also interceded with the Young Turk government. For example, Riggs points out that
Ambassador Morgenthau arrived at an agreement with the Sublime Porte exempting natu-
ralized Americans from deportation. Similarly, the joint efforts of the Vatican’s nuncio, His
Eminence Angelo Maria Dolci, and Johann von Pallavicini, the Austro-Hungarian ambas-
sador, were rewarded with an “imperial pardon” for the Armenian Catholics. Protestants,
too, were officially granted exemptions.86 Likewise exempted were Harput’s Syriacs, particu-
larly the Catholics among them. Thus, people in at least four categories were exempted, as
were, finally, children “without families,” whom the minister of the interior, Talât, personally
authorized to remain in the city in a 26 June telegram to Sabit Bey.87 However, as Riggs
notes, the order exempting Catholics and Protestants was not made public until after the
groups concerned had been deported; the local authorities paid no attention to the rights
accorded to naturalized Americans.88 As we shall see, for the children “without families”
initially admitted to a Turkish orphanage, they were put to death in the fall. At this stage of
our study, we can only conclude, given all that we have already established about the Young
Turks’ methods, that the sole purpose of the exemptions granted in Constantinople was to
throw sand in the eyes of the diplomats in the capital and conceal the CUP’s true objectives.
There is even every reason to believe that the local authorities were ordered to ignore these
exemptions and deport all the Armenians. It would appear, moreover, that the handful of
people who did benefit from these measures because they were able to hide when the depor-
tations began were finally rounded up and deported in fall 1915. It should also be pointed out
that, as early as 27 June, even before the departure of the convoys of women and children, the
minister of the interior ordered Sabit Bey to take the steps required to settle Muslim muhacirs
in the “evacuated” Armenian villages89 – that is, to “make a clean sweep of things.”
The documents available on the events that occurred in Harput in 1915 provide insight
into another interesting moment, hard to study in other areas, in the process of eradicating
the population – the few days that preceded the departure of the convoys. As we hardly
need point out, this phase was characterized by an initial transfer of Armenian assets to
Muslims and Syriacs. It gives us a glimpse of the state of mind of the future deportees and the
measures taken by the authorities to prevent Armenians from eluding the party-state and its
representatives; it illustrates the American consuls’ and missionaries’ willingness to play the
role of bankers; and finally, it shows us the varying responses of the Turkish population to
the Armenians’ distress. Thus, Riggs observes that it was the women who prepared their own
and their families’ departure in their imprisoned or “deported” husbands’ stead. Although
few of them had experience in commercial or economic affairs, they had to liquidate their
husbands’ moveable assets or business stock at, on average, a tenth of their real value.90 Many
Turks naturally saw this as an opportunity to enrich themselves on the cheap. Some did not
merely attend the auctions held in the streets, but went to see these helpless women to extort
what they could from them on various pretexts – and sometimes by straightforward threats.
Others, however, particularly those Turks from the “better” social classes, were apparently
horrified by the treatment being meted out to their Armenian neighbors and refused to profit
from the situation by acquiring haram (“unlawful”) goods. Some even neglected their own
affairs for several days in order to help a neighbor’s widow sell her property, without asking for
the least compensation in exchange. Such people were, however, exceptions.91
While the fate of the men was sealed in advance, it seems that Istanbul left some lee-
way where young women and girls were concerned. In the short period before the departure
of the convoys, the authorities encouraged conversions and “marriages” that would make
these Armenian women the second, third, or fourth wife of a Turk. The immense majority,
to be sure, refused this solution, preferring deportation. But others understood that it was
the only way to save their lives. Alongside such cases, based on coercion, there were more

unusual situations, such a young woman who survived by contracting a fictive marriage with
a Turkish neighbor, a policeman, probably in exchange for money; or the official union of a
young Armenian woman with a Muslim neighbor’s minor son.92 Although such agreements
were sometimes respected, there were also more tragic cases: for example, that of the young
women who, having brought their inheritance to their new husband’s family as a “dowry,”
were ejected from the household that had taken them in and deported.
Unlike many other features of the deportation, the local authorities’ attitude toward
impromptu sales of Armenian assets evolved rather rapidly. On the first day, they were con-
tent to levy the legal tax of 5 per cent on all commercial transactions. However, the day
preceding the departure of the first convoy, the town crier announced that “anyone who
sells or buys anything, if caught, will be sent to the court-martial.”93 It is likely that the vali
and his administration, or even the national government, had initially established rules that
were somewhat too vague without anticipating their economic effects, and had understood
only afterwards that it would not be easy for them to lay hands on the Armenians’ moveable
assets if they let matters stand as they were. The way the Armenian “taxpayers’ ” debts and
accounts receivable were dealt with also spawned a certain number of abuses. A multitude
of claims, from both real and imaginary creditors, came raining down on the Armenians.
These were debts of the sort ordinarily incurred by business firms, representing only an insig-
nificant fraction of their sales volume or value. Yet they served here as a pretext for numer-
ous financial misdealings particularly wholesale confiscations of commercial property. The
Banque Impériale Ottomane played a crucial role in these matters by “promptly” taking
possession of businesses and stores and selling them after the departure of their proprietors.
As Riggs points out, the BIO, after paying off the debts on these businesses – a tiny fraction
of the value of the properties that it sold off – deposited the balance “in the coffers of the
government.”94
The large sums of cash, sometimes amounting to several thousand pounds in gold and
held by people who were able to liquidate their assets, also presented a problem because
the banks were not authorized to accept deposits. They were, however, allowed to accept
“transfers” that certain Armenians made to themselves through a bank or post office for
withdrawal in the locality to which they were ostensibly being deported.95 Some survivors
later managed to master the subtleties of the banking regulations set up by the authorities,
and a handful of them – those who escaped the massacres or arrived in the place to which
they were supposed to be deported – indeed profited from them. However, the bulk of these
“transfers” benefited the state. The problem of traveling with cash was, moreover, one faced
by almost all Armenian deportees, who knew their country and were aware that it was, to
say the least, imprudent to circulate with large amounts of money in one’s possession. These
considerations and an objective analysis of the situation convinced a good number of future
deportees to entrust sizeable sums to the American consul and American missionaries in
Harput-Mezreh. According to Davis, at that “memorable visit” on 29 June, the vali did not
object to the Armenians “leav[ing] their money,” jewels, precious objects and documents to
the Americans. Some even gave the consul or the missionaries the addresses of relatives in
the United States, with the request that these deposits be sent there should nothing be heard
from them for longer than six months. “All feel that they are going to certain death,” Davis
wrote in a report, “and they certainly have good reason to feel that way.”96
Order of a kind was re-established after the rapid creation of a commission responsible for
abandoned property, which set about trying to recover the funds that the Armenians had depos-
ited in the post office or kept in their bank accounts, as well as the stocks of merchandise from
their businesses.97 The commission was officially charged with “safeguarding” the Armenians’
property during their absence. According to Piranian, who had remained in Mezreh after the
departure of the convoys, the authorities had the doors of Armenian homes sealed to prevent

looting. A kind of race then began between the authorities and the Turkish population to
see who could plunder faster – doors, windows, and everything else were carried off. Only
those houses in the immediate vicinity of the prefecture remained in the authorities’ hands.98
The commission was not unaware that large amounts of money had been deposited with the
American consul and missionaries and accordingly demanded, on behalf of the government,
that these assets be turned over to it. In September 1915, the vali himself made the same
demand in a letter addressed to the consul, who ignored it.99 The missionaries had received
much bigger deposits than Davis (Riggs writes that he was “simply deluged with money”), hav-
ing resorted to tricks that facilitated access to the mission buildings in Mezreh and Harput by
Armenian depositors or fugitives. Although the mission in the provincial capital had been left
totally isolated and unprotected throughout June, it was surrounded by soldiers who had kept a
close eye on the main entrance from the moment the deportation order was announced.100 The
vali’s absolute, if tardy, interdiction notwithstanding, Henry and Ernest Riggs, as well as Henry
Atkinson, continued to accept the Armenians’ deposits. According to a rumor circulating in
Mezreh, the missionaries had “fabulous sums” on their hands, and yet the orders of magnitude
cited by the rumormongers “never surpassed” the sum that Riggs had actually forwarded to his
treasurer in Constantinople by way of a local bank. The treasurer, in turn, took responsibility
for transferring the money to America. The police never succeeded in ascertaining how much
money was involved.101 When the vali sent a request to Riggs, through the police chief, to turn
the funds over to him, the head of the American mission declared that he had already trans-
ferred the money to the United States. All the police officer had in hand by way of “official”
documentation was a claim filed by a young woman whose family had entrusted money to the
Americans and who was now being held in a harem in Mezreh. Riggs notes that he was con-
stantly assailed by demands of this kind from Turks holding Armenian women. He says that he
invariably met them with the same response.102
To appreciate the state of mind of the Armenians who were about to be deported, we must
take an important factor into consideration: they were absolutely ignorant of the crimes being
committed in the other provinces. The first caravans from the vilayets to the north arrived
in Mezreh immediately following the departure of the two first convoys. This was probably no
accident. Piranian, who had made the acquaintance of two fugitives from Jabaghchur while a
prisoner in the Red Konak in the latter half of June, remarks that it was only when he heard
their story that he took the full measure of the Young Turk plan – in particular the fate reserved
for those deportees on the road to “exile.”103 An event that occurred the day before the depar-
ture of the first convoy gives us a glimpse of the Armenians’ mood. That day, since the authori-
ties had requisitioned both the Armenian Apostolic and Armenian Protestant churches, the
last prayer vigil was to be held in the German mission building. The theme of the vigil, con-
ducted by Reverend Hovhan Sinanian from Mezreh, was: “Let us pray that evil vanish from the
Armenian horizon.”104 During the service, Sinanian had turned to Ehmann and sarcastically
asked him if he was inclined to serve as their guide in the desert. “The time has come,” he said,
“to prove the sincerity of your apostle’s soul.”105 Ehman did not take up the challenge.
In his own fashion, Consul Davis also anticipated the announced departure of the
Armenian population. He observes that, according to official statistics, 90 per cent “of
the trade and of the business carried on through the banks is that of Armenians,” whose
businesses were now doomed to destruction “beyond the possibility of its being restored.”
Pessimistically, he prophesied a return to the Dark Ages.106
The Kaza of Harput

We have so far considered the events that took place in and around Mezreh and Harput, the
administrative and economic heart of the vilayet of Mamuret ul-Aziz. It must, however, be

recalled that the fate of these towns went hand-in-hand with that of 50 villages on the plain
of Harput, which had a total population of 20,590 peasants.107
The first convoy, made up of people from three Mezreh neighborhoods – Devriş, Nayil
Beg, and the markets – contained a total of some 2,500 deportees. They were escorted by
infantrymen and mounted gendarmes under the command of Captain Adam Pasha. The
convoy set out on the road to Dyarbekir on 1 July. Although the immense majority of people
in this caravan were women and children, there were also a few older family heads. Notably
among the deportees were the Mazmanian, Istambulian, Doertyolian, Khanigian, Darakjian,
and Kalpakjian families. The convoy was followed by a cart full of rope, which served its
purpose shortly after the deportees left Mezreh, when the males were separated from the oth-
ers and put under separate guard.108 The following day, the deportees passed by Lake Göljük,
arriving that evening in Arğana Maden, in the vilayet of Dyarbekir. They reached the city
of Dyarbekir in a week. There they were left in a cemetery outside the city walls; the guard
was changed and the carts rented in Mezreh resumed their journey. In the week it took this
convoy to travel from Dyarbekir to Mardin, the deportees were repeatedly plundered by
çetes. Young women and children were abducted or sold to local populations. The youngest
members of the caravan as well as old people were left on the side of the road. The survivors
reached Ras ul-Ayn a fortnight later, and a handful of those arrived in Der Zor in another
two weeks.109
On 2 July 1915, the second convoy set out from Mezreh, this time heading toward Malatia.
The roughly 3,000 deportees in this convoy came from the Karaçöl, Icadiye, and Ambar
neighborhoods. They were from the most affluent families: the Fabrikatorians, Harputlians,
Kazanjians, Zarifians, Sarafians, Dingilians, Gurjians, Arpiarians, Totvians, Karaboghosians,
and Demirjians. Reverend Hovhan Sinapian was also in this convoy.110 The affluence of
these Armenians doubtless explains why the caravan had a great many vehicles at its dis-
posal and included many male family heads. It was not until it reached Malatia that the
men were separated from the others. We know nothing about how they died. The rest of
the caravan continued on its way towards Urfa. Some of those in it reached Der Zor several
weeks later.111
On 4 July, the Armenian population of Hiuseinig was deported in turn, in a single convoy
that set out on the road to Malatia.112 The deportation of the Armenians of Harput was put
off until late July. According to Riggs, Asim Bey, the kaymakam of Harput, maneuvered so as
to delay departure of the population of the former provincial capital in hopes of relieving it
of all its cash and precious objects before sending it on its way. It is more likely, however, that
the authorities chose to deal with Mezreh and Huiseinig first, perhaps because of a shortage
of personnel, and concentrate on Harput thereafter. The arrests of all males over 13 did not
begin until the first days of July, apart from those of members of the elite, who had been
apprehended very early. On Saturday, 6 July, Maria Jacobsen and Tracy Atkinson learned
that 200 of those arrested, along with the men who had been in Mezreh, had been massacred
the night before in a gorge near Hanköy by the squadron of çetes that accompanied them –
in all, 800 people.113 The same day, the town crier summoned the inhabitants of Harput to
open their shops. All the men present were then arrested by soldiers of the regular forces and
sent away the following night. In the evening, the Danish missionary finally learned that
all males over the age of nine had been herded together in a mosque and dispatched from
the city on Saturday 4 July. Their guards, “Kurds and gendarmes,” came back from Içme on
Sunday in clothes smeared with their victims’ blood.114
After the first convoys had set out from Mezreh, it would appear that the authorities
soon decided to attend to the people who had been officially exempted from deportation.
Beginning on 8 July, the elderly, who had been allowed to “remain behind,” received sum-
mons in their turn and were put on the road.115 Jacobsen mentions the case of an old man

of 80, Hagop Benneyan, who was killed in front of his house by the soldiers who had come
for him. The handful of women and girls who had been authorized to remain were, for their
part, invited to convert to Islam immediately.116 Boys between the ages of four and eight were
apparently not abandoned. They were rounded up, circumcised, and then admitted to two
“Turkish” orphanages that had opened around 10 July.117 The authorities even asked Consul
Davis to contribute to their upkeep.118
It was not until 10 July that the deportation order was announced in Harput and the popula-
tion was invited to convert to Islam.119 A first convoy comprising 150 families from the “Lower
Quarter” (Vari Tagh) was put on the road the same day, escorted by “Kurds and gendarmes.”120
The former kaymakam of Harput, Dr. Artin Bey Helvajian, a general practitioner who had been
relieved of his post in May and replaced by Asim Bey, was also deported on 14 July, along with 40
other leading personalities. They were transported in horse-drawn coaches, all officially granted
“safe conduct” and provided with guarantees of absolute security. Officially, Dr. Helvajian was
deported to Aleppo, supposedly suffering from a lack of physicians. Traveling with him was
his family and, notably, the Catholic primate of the diocese of Harput, Archbishop Stepan
Israyelian, as well as Father Sarkis Khachadurian, Father Ghevont Minasian, and four nuns
from the Congregation of the Immaculate Conception. The following day, 15 July, the convoy
was brought to a halt near Kâzım Han, eight hours to the south of Harput, and massacred by
the gendarmes who escorted it, according to testimonies given by one of the three women who
survived the massacre and the gendarmes in the escort who had returned to Mezreh.121
The second convoy from Harput, made up of some 3,000 people, was expedited down the
road to Malatia toward Urfa on 18 July, escorted by 100 gendarmes and three officers.122 At
dawn, the army surrounded the city’s upper quarter and proceeded to expel its inhabitants
one house at a time. Only five Armenian craftsmen and their families were allowed to remain
in their homes, as were the Syriacs and Greeks. Jacobsen notes that, by 21 July, officers and
government officials had already moved into the Armenian houses located in the neighbor-
hood of Euphrates College.123 According to a survivor from the second caravan, Mushegh
Vorperian, it had reached Malatia in a week, having lost only 25 victims after the escorting
officers had extorted money from it. At three hours’ march from Malatia, in the place known
as Çiftlik, all the males over 12 were separated from the rest of the caravan and locked up in
a nearby barracks, where they were put to death. The 14 year-old sister of our eyewitness was
“taken to wife” by one of the officers in the caravan’s escort; the other women and children
were turned over to the men, who were authorized to help themselves.124
In a 24 July report, Consul Davis indicates that 12,000–15,000 Armenians had already
been deported from Mezreh and Harput by that date. Between 1,000 and 1,500 remained in
the city “with permission or through bribery or in hiding.”125 He adds that thousands of other
people from the neighboring villages had already been put on the road.126
Hardly had the deportations been completed then Davis expressed his surprise over the
“total lack of resistance” on the part of the Armenian deportees, which in his opinion was
due “very largely also to the clever way in which the scheme has been carried out.” The
overview of events that he drew up while they were occurring is doubtless one of the most
edifying documents we have on the eradication of the empire’s Armenian population. Davis
was in the thick of what was happening and had a perfect grasp of a key aspect of the
extermination plan: each stage of it paved the way for the next with almost clockwork preci-
sion. This led him to conclude that “everything was apparently planned months ago.” He
had also understood the authorities’ first move. The arrest of “a few who were said to have
been involved in a revolutionary plot”127 had established the principle of the “Armenians’
culpability” from the outset, legitimating the authorities’ suspicions. In fact, the authori-
ties were so little convinced of the justifications which they themselves advanced that they
attempted to wring incriminating testimony from foreigners. For example, Davis reports that

on 23 July, at a meeting with the vali, whom he had gone to see in order to ask him to leave
the Armenians not yet deported in peace, he was asked to make a written request, which
he was told the vali would be inclined to treat favorably if the diplomat spelled out that the
authorities had deported only “all those who were guilty of anything.”128 The vali even sug-
gested that he could send the police chief to see Davis “to explain the matter more fully.” The
vali’s intentions then became much more explicit: he went so far as to have the police chief
ask Davis to stress the fact that the Armenians “who were guilty of having been engaged in
a revolutionary plot had been punished, together with their families,” unlike those who had
been allowed to remain behind.129 This episode, written down almost as soon as it happened,
suggests that the minister of the interior had asked high-ranking officials in the provinces to
build up the story of an Armenian “conspiracy,” utilizing, if at all possible, “testimony” from
foreign residents. This perhaps explains why Mezreh’s police chief responded to the consul’s
stalling tactics by stepping up the pressure and threatening to take severe measures against
naturalized Americans and others.130
One last striking event occurred after the departure of the big convoys of deportees:
Mezreh’s central prison went up in flames. In this institution, located close to the seat of
Governor Sabit, the leading Armenian citizens of Mezreh, Harput, and Hiuseinig – those
deemed the most “dangerous” – were interned from April to July. Here they were systemati-
cally tortured in an attempt to elicit the “confessions” needed to bring them before a court-
martial. By early August, however, the authorities doubtless considered these legal artifices
superfluous. The time had come to liquidate these men, the same way the less important
men imprisoned in the Red Konak had been liquidated. However, when soldiers came to
announce to these prisoners, in the middle of the night of 3/4 August 1915, that they were to
leave immediately for Urfa, Dr. Nshan Nahigian refused to obey. He demanded that all the
prisoners be allowed to leave by day, “when they could be seen by one and all,” or, if they were
to be killed, that they be hanged in public. The prisoners had gleaned at least some informa-
tion about the fate of the Armenian population by this time and were aware that transfer
to Urfa meant death. Rather than let their executioners do with them as they pleased, the
political elite of Harput-Mezreh chose to set the prison on fire and die in the flames.131
The few Armenians still present in the region were hiding in various places, such as on the
plain or in abandoned homes, or else lived in the hospital or the American consulate. In the
case of the hospital, these were doctors or nurses looking after soldiers sent back from the front
and, in the case of the consulate, relatives of murdered American citizens,132 or diplomats such
as the British vice-consul of Dyarbekir, Thomas Mgrdichian, and his family.133
The 500 boys between four and eight, who had been rounded up in the countryside or the
city’s deserted neighborhoods in July after the deportations134 and placed in what the author-
ities called “orphanages,” had in fact been crammed into abandoned houses in Mezreh and
left without food and water. In three days, 200 of them perished. The missionaries, Atkinson
notes, were not allowed to visit these “institutions.” The odor of the children’s rotting corpses
led to protests from the Turkish population, which demanded that the authorities bring this
experiment to an end. The surviving children were ultimately deported to the southwest
on 22 October. Those who did not die on the road were thrown into the Euphrates at Izoli,
a short distance from Malatia.135
The Villages of the Kaza of Kharpert

We do not have information on what happened in every village on the plain of Kharpert in
1915. However, the existing documentation suggests that the same procedure was followed
in all of them. Men between 30 and 80 years old were mobilized and sent to the front in fall
1914. Some of those between 35 and 40 had avoided the draft by paying the bedel, while the

rest were used to transport military supplies. In early April, adolescents between 15 and 17
were also mobilized and assigned to transport units or labor battalions. Early in May, system-
atic searches were carried out in the villages; the leading men were arrested and tortured by
the army or squadrons of çetes. In June, the remaining men were rounded up and interned in
the Red Konak in Mezreh or murdered in isolated areas close to their villages. This was what
happened at Içme and Habusi. On 26 June, several women from these localities arrived in
Mezreh and reported that their husbands and brothers had been massacred in the mountains
at an hour’s distance from the two villages.136
As we have said, Johannes Ehmann, the head of the German mission in Mezreh, repeat-
edly helped confiscate arms in the villages of the plain of Kharpert, such as Pazmashen,
Korpe, Khulakiugh, and so on. The German pastor, accompanied by the çete leader Pulutlı
Halil and a few government officials, had there sworn on the Bible that the villagers would
be spared if they surrendered their weapons. They complied, only to be arrested and killed.137
The sole act of resistance we know of took place at Morenig, where a dozen adolescents bar-
ricaded themselves in the church and fought back until they were all killed – but not before
inflicting a few casualties on the “gendarmes” who had come to arrest the village men.138
We owe the fullest account we have to a naturalized American citizen, Krikor Yeghoyan,
from the village of Khuylu, which had 240 Armenian households in 1915 (1,201 people) and
10 Turkish households. Located two hours south of Mezreh, the village was well known for its
tanners and its apostolic school, whose operating costs were paid out of income from a fund
established by emigrants who had settled in the United States.139
During the general mobilization, 23 men in Khuylu paid the bedel and 36 others were mobi-
lized. Of these, some were sent to the front while others were sent to the city. In April 1915, 34
adolescents and older men were also conscripted and assigned to carry out military transports
to Mush, along with 260 other villagers from the plain, including one Turk. They were gradu-
ally eliminated as they returned to Mush by way of Bitlis and Dyarbekir. The 65 men who
were not killed en route were subsequently shot on the road to Harput, with the exception of
a 65-year-old-old man and two 15-year-old boys. These three survivors were apprehended and
deported several weeks later, together with all the other men of Khuylu.140
Early in May, 85 soldiers and a dozen gendarmes under the command of Zunguldağli
Haydar surrounded the village of Khuylu. The gendarmes conducted house searches, looking
for arms. The village notables were tortured, with the worst treatment being reserved for the
village priest. Next came the remaining men, who were taken to the Red Konak. Our eyewit-
ness was able to hide for a time in the German orphanage, until Ehmann found out he was
there and ordered him to quit the premises. However, the brief interlude that followed the
mid-April proclamation of the imperial “pardon” for Catholics and Protestants provided him
with an opportunity to leave the city and, with help from Kurds, make his way to Dersim.
On 16 July, the women and children of Khuylu were supposedly deported to Urfa. In fact,
the çetes escorting them slaughtered them with axes in a gorge near the village of Kürdemlik
shortly after they were deported.141
Piranian, who fled to a village northwest of Lake Göljük, passed through the deserted vil-
lage of Yegheki on 16 July and later through a devastated Ertmneg, which had been emptied
of its population. There he encountered an old woman who lay dying. At her side were three
children between the ages of four and eight, naked and with swollen bellies.142
The Fate of the Worker-Soldiers of the Amele Taburis of

the Vilayet of Mamuret ul-Aziz
According to an Armenian source, some 15,000 Armenian conscripts from the vilayet of
Mamuret ul-Aziz were either sent to the Caucasian front in fall 1914 or assigned to logistical

tasks in their native region.143 In early April, 7,000 of them were gradually disarmed and
brought back to the vilayet under guard to be put in amele taburis.144
The fate of these men depended on the military authorities; it was independent of the
civil population. One man who played a major role in determining it was Brigadier General
Süleyman Faik Pasha, the commander of the Eleventh Army Corps, which had been based
in Mezreh since 8 August 1914. Appointed to his post in May 1915, this Bosnian, a Harbiye
graduate, had also served as interim vali in Sabit Bey’s absence, both while Sabit was on a
mission to Dersim early in August 1915 and that November when Sabit took part in a meet-
ing of the valis of the eastern provinces in Erzerum.
From the documents gathered during the pretrial investigation of those responsible for
the massacres in Mamuret ul-Aziz, it appears that all military matters were under the direct
supervision of Süleyman Faik and that he “could not deny that he had ordered the execu-
tion of seven thousand Armenian conscripts.”145 In May 1915, shortly after Faik assumed his
functions in Mezreh, he ordered his subordinates to draw up a list of all Armenian soldiers,
irrespective of their rank, who were serving in the various regiments and military forma-
tions in the vilayet. He also mobilized all the Armenians who had not yet been mustered
because they were not of draftable age – that is, males between 16 and 18 and between 55
and 60 – and assigned them to amele taburis.146 According to survivors from these labor bat-
talions, the main units of worker-soldiers were based in Habusi, Hoghe, and Alishami, on the
road to Palu.147 Piranian, a former teacher at Euphrates College, together with three Turkish
officers, was charged with drawing up the plans for the construction work to be carried out
at Hoghe.148 He joined his labor battalion, comprising about 2,000 men, on 26 May, accom-
panied by three young men from Mezreh. There were no barracks in this district, despite
an office responsible for keeping track of the lists of conscripts having been established in
Hoghe under the command of a Turkish officer, Huseyniklı Hüseyin. The worker-soldiers
of the three battalions therefore lodged wherever they could. Piranian notes that they were
totally isolated at the time and had no idea about what was happening in the city; they did
not even know that the Armenian notables had been arrested there. He adds that one of the
amele taburi officers, Garabed Kasoyan, was Armenian.149
On 11 June at dawn – we continue to follow Piranian’s account – the battalion in Hoghe
was surrounded by a group of cavalrymen commanded by Çerkez Kâzım. It was, however,
only on Monday, 14 June that the worker-soldiers were taken under guard to a field, where
they were joined by the battalions from Habusi and Alishami.150 Çerkez Kâzım, who had a
list of these worker-soldiers, escorted them, guarded by 200 infantrymen and 40 cavalrymen,
to the Red Konak, into which all 3,000 of them were crammed.151
Information gathered during the pretrial investigation of the criminals of Mamuret ul-Aziz
indicates that Süleyman Faik Pasha personally passed these 3,000 men in review in front of
the Red Konak, his official residence. He told them that, as a “friend of the Armenians,” he
was going to send them “to a good place.”152 While waiting to be sent to this “good place,” the
men were left without food or drink for 30 hours. Every day, around a hundred corpses were
piled into garbage trucks, taken to the outskirts of the city, and burned. Piranian observes that
some 50 men were tortured nightly, often with big tongs that were used to pull off toes, fingers,
and strips of flesh. Red-hot irons were used to smash skulls or run through abdomens, and saws
were used to open skulls or amputate limbs. Axes were put to many different uses.153
As we have already seen,154 these 3,000 men were put on the road to Dyarbekir on 18 June,
and then slain. The indictment for the Mamuret ul-Aziz trial spells out that all the battalions
of worker-soldiers sent to Urfa “to help build the railroad” were in fact dispatched in separate
groups and put to death in the defile of Deve Boynu or a place known as Güğen Boğazi, a
few minutes’ distance from Maden. They were killed either by their guards or by the çetes
stationed there for the purpose.155

An encrypted telegram that was sent by Süleyman Faik to the commander of the Third
Army at Tortum and later unearthed by the court-martial provides a rather remarkable sum-
mary of the practices of the Ottoman military elite. It is worth citing in extenso:
I have the honor to provide you with the following information, taken from a report by
the agent responsible for the convoy of the battalion of workers put at the vilayet’s dis-
posal. This battalion, which was en route to Dyarbekir, reached Maden without incident.
After it left Maden, near the place known as Güğen Boğazi, Armenian bands suddenly
loomed up and opened fire from both sides, interfering with the orderly advance of the
convoy. The workers of the battalion all deserted in order to join the bands. Since they
refused to obey the order to “halt,” arms were used against them and the bands. It proved
impossible to stop a large number of the members of the battalion and the bands, despite
the efforts of the contingent responsible for guarding the convoy as well as the reinforce-
ments dispatched by the local authorities, for the fugitives were aided by the rugged
terrain. However, detachments continued to pursue them. In the mêlée, one soldier dis-
appeared, three weapons were destroyed and the sheath of a sword was broken. The agent
escorting the convoy saw no point in remaining in the area and returned home.156
Taking this (rare) document as his starting point, the presiding judge at the court-martial,
Nemrud Kürd Mustafa Pasha, cross-examined Süleyman Faik. He asked him in particular
how, if the brigands were armed, the escort managed to kill all these men while sustaining
no losses itself.157 This odd way of informing one’s commander-in-chief that a battalion had
been exterminated could not, of course, fool a general in the Ottoman army.
The pretrial investigation file also reveals the role played by Haşim Beyzâde Mehmed, the
leader of a squadron of çetes based at an hour’s distance from Malatia, in the 11 June 1915
murder of 1,200 Armenian worker-soldiers in Izoli. Initially locked up in the mosque of the
village of Pirot, the Armenians were led from it in small groups and brought down to the
Euphrates, where they were killed and thrown into the river. These killings apparently took
place on orders from Sabit Bey and the mutesarif of Malatia, Nabi Bey.158 This accusation
must, however, be taken with a grain of salt. It is quite possible that the person who made
it, a soldier, wished to impute these crimes to the civilian authorities without knowing how
much real power they had over the military units. The possibility that Sabit assumed the role
of intermediary can by no means be ruled out, but the mutesarif of Malatia certainly did not.
He was dismissed early in May 1915 and replaced by Reşid Bey on 20 June, when the veritable
bloodbath began in the region of Malatia.159
The Convoys of Deportees in the Areas North of Harput

So far, we have rarely had occasion to consider descriptions in non-Armenian sources of the
passage of convoys of deportees that had been on the road for weeks. Thanks to eyewitness
accounts left by the American missionaries and consul in Harput, we have such descriptions
for the vilayet of Mamuret ul-Aziz.
The composition of the caravans coming from the north, which had set out in mid-May,
had obviously changed by the time they arrived in the plain of Mezreh. These caravans had,
as a general rule, been formed anew out of what was left of various groups decimated en
route. The first convoy from the north to arrive in Harput, on 2 July, was made up of 8,000
deportees from Erzerum and Erzincan. They had been on the road for about six weeks, hav-
ing set out in different convoys and regrouped on the way. There were no males among them
except for very young boys.160 The groups that followed at ever-closer intervals, such as the
convoy of 3,000 people that arrived on 9 July, also came from Ordu, Kirason, Trebizond, Kıği,

Erzincan, and Erzerum. The deportees remained in the Harput area for an average of two
days, in a place on the outskirts of Mezreh known as the “Four Fountains.”161 The missionar-
ies came to see them here, offering what comfort they could. But these stops also provided
certain Turks from Mezreh with an opportunity to acquire women for their harems.162 Leslie
Davis, who paid several visits to the camp at Four Fountains, gives a graphic description of
the deportees’ condition: in rags, unable to wash or change their clothes, and malnourished,
“to watch them one could hardly believe,” he says, “that these people were human beings.”163
Hundreds of people on their last legs died in this improvised camp. The corpses were buried
in a mass grave when they were not simply abandoned. The able-bodied were set marching
again. Davis notes that the method was fool-proof, making it possible “to dispose of all of
them in a comparatively short time.”164 A few people nonetheless escaped the common lot
thanks to the missionaries who admitted them to the American hospital or to the German
orphanage in Mezreh. Some of the women even succeeded in taking up residence in one of
the city’s abandoned houses by “marrying” an officer, such as Siranush Hoghgroghian, who
was 13 years old and already pregnant.165
As these convoys from the north left Mezreh, they were directed toward one of two kill-
ing fields. One, as we have seen, lay eight hours southwest of Malatia, in the gorges out-
side Fırıncilar, near Kahta. Here squadrons of çetes, led by two Kurdish chieftains of the
Reşvan tribe, Zeynel Bey and Haci Bedri Ağa, attended to business under the supervision
of Haci Baloşzâde Mehmed Nuri Bey, a parliamentary deputy from Dersim, and his brother
Ali Pasha.166 The other killing field was made up of the many rocky little valleys that sloped
down to Lake Göljük (present-day Hazar Gölü), which lay some 30 miles southeast of Harput,
a short distance from the road to Dyarbekir.
The Slaughterhouse at Göljük

After Nazaret Piranian found sanctuary in Havtasar, a Kurdish village located on the heights
overlooking the northwest shore of Lake Göljük, he learned from the Kurd who had given
him refuge, Ğanli Cemo, that on that very morning – shortly after Ramadan, which in 1915
came to an end on 12 August – four Turkish officers had arrived in the valley and asked
to meet the ağas of the Kurdish villages in the area. Accompanied by 200 çetes, they had
conducted a caravan of about 3,000 deportees from Trebizond, Erzerum, and Erzincan to the
lakeshore, and were now inviting the villagers to help them “finish” their work. The Kurdish
villagers responded to the invitation in family groups, attacking the convoy with axes and
knives. After the slaughter was over, Piranian notes, a very few children were brought back
to the village. Suffering from deep physical and psychological wounds, all of them died in
less than a week. A few days later, when Piranian left his refuge and went down to the shores
of Lake Göljük, he discovered a huge mass grave: the bodies of these 3,000 deportees filled
one of the little valleys that descended toward the lake to half its height.167 This firsthand
testimony does not, however, do justice to the extent of the crimes committed near the lake.
Here, the narrative of Consul Davis provides us with information not available elsewhere.
On 24 September 1915, Davis decided to inspect the area around the mountain lake on
horseback after a Turk informed him that it was strewn with corpses.168 Setting out at four
o’clock in the morning so as not to be seen, the consul and his Turkish guide rode for four
hours toward Kurdemlik, discovering hundreds of half-buried bodies as they went. Arms or
legs stuck out of the ground, sometimes devoured by animals; some bodies had been burnt
“in order to find any gold which the people may have swallowed.”169 Upon reaching the lake,
the consul decided to hug the cliffs on its northwestern shore, which was broken up by “deep
valleys.” It seems that the method most often used by the çetes consisted in throwing the
deportees from the towering cliffs down into the steep valleys, veritable traps from which

there was no exit apart from the lake itself. On this first leg of his tour, Davis observed two
valleys filled with about 1,000 bodies, in the first case, and 1,500 in the other. He saw a good
many more that were not as full, but could not approach them for a long time because of the
unbearable odor.170
The information that the consul gleaned from local Kurds confirmed that the çete “gen-
darmes” had delegated the task of liquidating the deportees to the Kurdish villagers living in
the area. In exchange for a lump sum that varied with the size of the convoy, the “gendarmes”
turned the convoy over to the Kurds, who in turn made their money from their victims.
Davis also notes that the bodies he saw were naked, indicating that the victims were probably
stripped before being killed. He even suggests that this method was applied in all the eastern
provinces. He also remarks that practically none of the victims had been shot to death.171
Returning to Mezreh by way of Keghvank, southwest of Göljük, Davis discovered the
bodies of several thousand half-buried victims in another mass grave; they were already
skeletons. His assumption was that these were the remains of the men of Harput and the
surrounding area who had been sent to their deaths before the big convoys of women and
children set out.172
During his second trip to the area, undertaken with Dr. Atkinson on 24 October, the
American consul decided to explore the eastern lakeshore. In the vicinity of the village
of Göljük he saw the rotting bodies of hundreds of people who had been massacred more
recently. Riding across the highlands, he discovered a little valley filled with the bodies
of hundreds of killed women and children, their corpses bearing the mark of fresh bayo-
net wounds. Leaving the southern lakeshore behind, Davis and Atkinson reached a valley
located at the lake’s northwestern tip, in which they discovered “more dead bodies than
[Davis] had seen in any other place on either trip.” The two men estimated that 2,000 bod-
ies littered these several acres of land. The papers found on them indicated that the victims
were from Erzerum and other regions. Davis concludes the account of his second trip with
the estimate that the remains of 10,000 massacred Armenians lay in the mass graves around
Lake Göljük: “Few localities could be better suited to the fiendish purposes of the Turks in
their plan to exterminate the Armenian population than this peaceful lake in the interior of
Asiatic Turkey ... far removed from the sight of civilized man.”173
It is worth pausing over one more eyewitness account, that of a protégés francs from
Smyrna, S. Padova, who had been expelled from Bitlis by Vali Rahmi Bey along with A.
Amado and D. Arditti. On 17 September 1915, these three men witnessed the massacre
of a caravan of 3,000 Armenians on the shores of Lake Göljük. They had left Harput for
Bitlis on 15 September, arriving at the lake’s southern shore after a journey on which they
stumbled upon corpses “almost every step of the way.” They encountered the caravan on the
lakeshore. Stationed on the mountains dominating the lake, bands of Kurds opened fire on
the deportees and then encircled the convoy. “It was simply an attack by ferocious animals,”
Padova writes, “on a defenseless flock.” The deportees were dispatched with axes while the
“gendarmes” escorting the convoy stood by and watched. In half an hour, these 3,000 people
had been “drowned in a pool of blood.” The Kurdish women then ran down the mountain-
sides and proceeded to strip the bodies.174
Final Measures to Eradicate the Armenians

In an 18 September 1915 cable addressed to the interior minister, Sabit Bey drew up the first
balance sheet of the operations conducted in his region. He estimated the number of deported
Armenians at 51,000; 4,000, he thought, were still hiding in the villages.175 From mid-August
to mid-November, the authorities focused their efforts on the Armenians who had in one way
or another escaped the deportations. To find these fugitives and flush them out of their hiding

places, however, Vali Sabit needed to restore a climate of relative confidence. Thus, less than
a month after the departure of the last convoys of deportees, on 18 August, the town crier
announced that the Protestants – virtually all of whom had already been deported – were now
free to remain in their homes.176 Davis notes that on two occasions, notably on 26 September,
the authorities had announcements made to the effect that there would be no further depor-
tations.177 And indeed, no noteworthy initiatives were taken for two weeks, although the
police did stage a raid on the American hospital in order to verify that no “non-authorized
Armenians” were to be found there.178 A number of villages on the plain, such as Habusi, were
now inhabited by Çerkez, Turks, and Kurds from the eastern provinces, but other villages,
such as Hoghe, near Harput, were still occupied by Armenians.179
On 4, 5, and 6 November, however, the deportees from Trebizond, Erzerum, and Ordu
who had found refuge in Harput’s Upper Quarter – Armenians and Syriacs from the city and
people who had returned to the villages of the plain – were rounded up in a raid and assem-
bled in the police station.180 On 4 November, the American hospital was also surrounded by
troops and the United States consulate was put under surveillance. With the exception of a
few doctors, the Armenians working there were women taking care of Turkish soldiers, such
as the schoolteacher Anna, a widowed mother of three who had also adopted the six children
of her deceased sisters. At half past one in the morning, the police burst into the hospital
and demanded that all the men and boys present be turned over to them. A mother gave her
eldest daughter to a gendarme so that he would help her and her other children remain in the
city.181 On 8 November, the 435 people who had been rounded up over the past few days were
finally deported.182 Davis, for his part, estimates that 1,000 to 2,000 Armenians were led off
and killed in “isolated valleys” by “gendarmes” early in November.183
These events occurred on the orders of General Süleyman Faik, the commander of the
Eleventh Army Corps and acting vali184 in the absence of Sabit, who had left for Erzerum on
19 October.185 Together with the vali of Erzerum, Tahsin, the vali of Sıvas, Muammer, and
the vali of Trebizond, Cemal Azmi, Sabit was taking part in a meeting organized by Kâmil
Pasha. According to an Armenian survivor, Mihran Zakarian, the discussions at this meet-
ing turned, notably, on the measures to be taken to ensure that confiscated assets become
state property.186 The inadequacy of our sources about this meeting does not allow us to
substantiate Zakarian’s claim, but given the fact that it was held after the first phase of the
eradication of the Armenians had come to an end, it is likely that its purpose was to ascer-
tain the results of the operations and perhaps decide what needed to be done to finish the
job. Thus, the October meeting would have been a kind of follow-up to the one organized in
Erzincan in late July.187 At any rate, such is the impression created by two telegrams brought
to light by the Istanbul commission of inquiry in 1919. The first, dated 3 November, appar-
ently refers to the conscripts, considered “deserters,” who had managed to elude the fate
reserved for worker-soldiers:
We understand that, where you are, scattered here and there, Armenian males are liv-
ing with Armenian females without guardians who have arrived from various places.
This situation is likely to lead to disorder: in one or two days, individuals of this kind
must be rounded up and sent off, under escort, by way of the road to Dyarbekir.188
This first telegram can, however, also be interpreted as an order to deport Harput/Mezreh’s
remaining Armenians. That, in any event, is how General Faik interpreted it, who answered
Sabit the same day with:
A search group has been created and assigned the task of flushing out Armenians
in hiding, whether they are from the city or elsewhere; one convoy was recently

dispatched. In future, in accordance with Your Excellency’s orders, we shall accelerate

operations and bring this situation to an end.189
Other documents that bear on the sancak of Malatia are much more explicit. These clearly
indicate that, “in conformity with the most recent orders received, not a single local
[Armenian] has been left behind. Similarly, not a single person who has come from elsewhere
has been allowed to remain.”190
In light of the above, we are inclined to think that the participants in the Erzerum meeting
decided, among other things, to liquidate the last Armenians in the eastern provinces. After the
early November deportations of the 1,000 Armenians who had been left in Mezreh and Harput,
there remained only 150 girls in the custody of American missionaries,191 300 to 500 children
in Mezreh’s German orphanage,192 and a few orphans, who roamed the streets and occasionally
came to the mission in search of a bit of bread – the sole survivors of the group that had been
taken from Mezreh’s Turkish orphanage on 22 October and thrown into the river at Izoli.193
With the departure of a number of American missionaries on 15 November, the authori-
ties stepped up their harassment, demanding that the Americans hand over the girls in their
institution.194 As for the wards of the German orphanage, its Danish director, Genny Jansen,
informs us that, in January 1916, the authorities officially requested that Reverend Ehmann
hand the children over to them, so that they could “be sent to the places where their parents
are.” After obtaining “solemn assurances that these children would be delivered to their des-
tination safe and sound,” the orphanage’s German staff entrusted the 300 boys to the “special
agents” come to take them away.195 Two days later, two of the orphans arrived at the German
orphanage “covered with sweat from running so long” and informed their former protectors
that “their comrades [were] being burned alive” at two hours’ distance from Mezreh. Jansen
confesses that she did not believe a word of this “very incredible story” at first, but that, when
she went the next day with the German nuns to the place that the orphans had described, she
saw a “still smoldering black heap” and the “poor children’s charred skeletons.”196 Inexorably,
the authorities were eliminating the last traces of an Armenian presence in the region.
The Kazas of Keban Maden and Pötürge

We have only scant information about the fate of the 789 Armenians who lived in Keban
Maden, the administrative seat of the kaza of the same name, or in the villages of Argovan
and Ashvan;197 there is no record of survivors. An official report, probably dating from
September 1915, tersely indicates that 308 Armenians were deported from the kaza of Keban
Maden.198 It would seem to follow that more than 400 people were allowed to remain in the
kaza or, more likely, were put to death in their native villages under the supervision of the
kaymakam, Tevfik Bey, who occupied his post from 2 May to 1 July 1915.
In the kaza of Tepürke/Pötürge, a mountain district, all 679 Armenians were concentrated in
the village of Vartenig.199 According to official statistics, 622 were deported in summer 1915.200
These villagers were put on the road in a single convoy at the request of the kaymakam, Rüşdi
Bey, who was probably appointed to his post in order to carry out this mission, having held it
only from 8 July to 31 October 1915. Given the proximity of these districts to the much more
heavily populated kazas of Arapkir and Eğin, it seems reasonable to suppose that their Armenian
inhabitants received a similar treatment to that reserved for those in more populous districts.
The Kaza of Arapkir

In this agricultural kaza on the banks of the Euphrates, the Armenians were concentrated
in the administrative seat, Arapkir, which had a population of 9,000 Armenians and 7,000

Turks. There were also four Armenian villages in the kaza: Ambrga (pop. 250), near Arapkir;
Shepig (pop. 468); Vank (pop. 129); and Antshnti (pop. 510).201 As everywhere else in these
eastern provinces, trade and the crafts, especially silk-weaving, were in Armenian hands,
the countryside was populated mainly by sedentary Kurdish peasants, and the government
and administration were a Turkish monopoly. Around 4,000 Armenians from Arapkir had
emigrated to America and Egypt after the 1895 massacres, but maintained close ties to their
native land.202
During the general mobilization, 2,300 of the 3,000 men of draftable age in Arapkir left
the kaza to serve in the Ottoman army.203 Complaints lodged by the Armenians indicate
that all the war requisitions were made to their detriment, whereas the handful of affluent
Turks in the kaza were not affected.204 Over the winter, gendarmes and policemen regularly
visited Armenian homes looking for deserters, and profited from the occasion by helping
themselves to whatever they found. According to Khachig Kardashian, Armenian business-
men who had avoided the draft by paying the bedel were arrested on 26 April 1915. The next
day, the town crier announced that people had five days to turn over the weapons stashed in
their homes. Kardashian also informs us that in the same period, rumors began to circulate
to the effect that Armenians and Kurds had massacred Turks.205 Kalust Kaloyan notes, for
his part, that the authorities did not have the manpower they needed to carry out house
searches, so groups of çetes were formed, recruited from the most affluent Turkish families,
to deal with “the Armenian business.” They were reinforced by gendarmes, policemen, old
soldiers, and the notables from nearby villages.206 These çetes began to scour the different
neighborhoods and conduct searches of people’s homes, which were literally sacked in the
process. Every night, some of them also tortured the men, who had been imprisoned in
accordance with the usual procedures. The search for arms provided a pretext for blackmail-
ing the inhabitants, who sometimes preferred to pay a bribe so that their homes would not be
demolished.207 Yet it was not until 19 June that 30 of the men who had been detained were
taken from the prison in chains and escorted beyond the city limits. Officially, they were to
be transferred to Mamuret ul-Aziz, in compliance with a request from the vali.208 Only later
did the inhabitants of Arapkir learn that this convoy was led to the banks of the Euphrates,
piled onto a raft, and drowned in the middle of the river.209
Two days later, on 21 June, a second group of 300 men, also in chains, was supposedly
dispatched to Malatia, but in fact disappeared in the waters of the Euphrates. The last two
convoys, each containing 250 men, set out on 23 and 24 June and met the same fate as the
previous two.210 In other words, by this time there was hardly a man between 18 and 45 in
Arapkir. The last men to be arrested, the Catholic priest Reverend Krashian, the auxiliary
primate Father Goriun, and the municipal physician Dr. Hagop Aprahamian, a native of
Kütahya and the only civilian doctor in the city, were deported in the second convoy.211 The
population was unaware of the fate these men suffered, but it witnessed the arrival, around
25 June, of a column of deportees from Erzincan, whose condition left little room for doubt
about what was to come.212
On Sunday, 27 June, a town crier announced that the Armenians of Arapkir were to be
transferred to Urfa, and that they had one week to sell their property and make prepara-
tions for the journey. The sales took place on the square in front of the sub-prefecture, under
surveillance by government officials, while the militia patrolled the town’s neighborhoods
to prevent looting.213 A handful of older men made one last effort to save the Armenians
of Arapkir from being deported: they wrote a telegram in which they offered to turn over
all their assets and deeds to the government, entreating it to allow them to remain in their
homes in exchange. But the kaymakam refused to send the telegram.214
The sole convoy from Arapkir, comprising more than 7,000 people, 250 of them
adult males, set out on 5 July 1915 under the surveillance of approximately 150 çetes and

gendarmes.215 The authorities brought it to a halt some five hours from the city and informed
the deportees that they could return to their homes if they agreed to convert to Islam. The
police were already drawing up a list of families and their decisions when a counter-order
arrived: the leaders of Arapkir’s Ittihadist club found this solution unacceptable. A CUP
inspector even arrived from Mezreh – probably Resneli Nâzım – to resolve the problem.
It seems that the mufti had hard words for the Ittihadists and their project, but it made
no difference: the deportation order was confirmed.216 The very day the deportees set out,
their houses and stores were put under seal. Members of the most affluent families, notably
S. Chaghatsbanian, were carefully searched and then tortured by the police and certain
members of the local Ittihad club in order to bring them to confess where they had hidden
their cash reserves and valuables.217
After the deportees had been on the road for four days, the captain of the gendarmerie
who was in command of their escort demanded 8,000 Turkish pounds in gold from them,
threatening to abandon the men to the Kurds if they did not produce the money without
delay. Jewelry as well as gold and silver coins were collected and handed over. On the sixth
day, when the convoy reached the Euphrates, halfway to Malatia, the deportees discovered
the bodies of Armenians from previous caravans on the riverbanks.218 On the seventh day,
the 250 men in the caravan, as well as the boys over 11, were separated from the rest of the
caravan and led down to the Euphrates by the entire escort. The rest of the caravan con-
tinued on its way, guarded by Kurds, until it reached Kırk Göz (“Forty Arches”) Bridge,219
which spanned the Tohma Çay, a northern tributary of the Euphrates. This was one of the
centers of destruction under the control of the sevkiyat memuri (director of the deportation).
Here the çetes, sometimes wearing the uniform of the gendarmerie, transported groups of
deportees to the other bank of the river. Most of the caravans that set out from the Black
Sea coast or the vilayets of Angora and Sıvas passed through this point. Hundreds of half-
buried bodies could be seen on the banks of the Tohma Çay. On the heights, in front of the
guard post, several thousand deportees were resting, almost all of them women and children.
This was a convoy of city-dwellers from Sıvas that had been on the road for 30 days.220 The
escort arrived somewhat late and took up its posts around the encampment as it did every
evening, “so that the Kurds would not throw themselves” on the deportees. At dawn, it was
announced that the “men” were to rejoin the group. This in fact refered to a group of about
30 boys aged 12 to 16 who had been led away the day before with adults, supposedly for
transfer to Harput by boat. A gendarme revealed a little later that they had been shot and
thrown into the river.221
On the eighth day, when the convoy from Arapkir was fewer than four hours away from
Malatia, the guards directed the deportees southward on a route circumventing the city. A
simulated Kurdish attack was staged that night, enabling the officers of the escort to demand
additional “recompense” from the deportees for the protection they were providing. On the
tenth and eleventh days the caravan was once again set marching east, toward the Euphrates.
It had already lost a quarter of its members by the time it reached the village of Fırıncilar,
around three hours southeast of Malatia, where convoys of Armenians from Tokat, Amasia,
Agn, Samsun, Trebizond, and Sıvas had recently arrived, making an immense throng.222
The site was strewn with rotting corpses that gave off a terrible stench. An elderly Turkish
man explained to our witness that the worst would come the next day, when he and the rest of
his caravan set out on the “death route” that lay on the other side of the peaks of the Malatia
Dağlari.223 Doubtless attracted by the presence of so many caravans, a large number of mer-
chants had set up shop in the village of Fırıncilar, where anything and everything could be
found, but at exorbitant prices. Kaloyan also noted that a battalion of the “gendarmerie” was
on hand here, along with a müdir who regularly received orders by telephone.224 This was a
Special Organization command center, which coordinated the departures of those convoys

on the “death route.” Our witness observes, moreover, that the “gendarmes” ordered the
deportees rather courteously to leave their belongings on the spot, entrusting them to the
commission responsible for “military contributions” (teklif-i habriyye). He puts the number of
deportees camping at the foot of the mountains at between 80,000 and 100,000.225
On the twelfth day, 16 July, the authorities ordered the families to turn their daughters
under 15 and boys under 10 over to them. The children were to be admitted to an orphanage in
Malatia created especially for them. Between 3,000 and 5,000 children were loaded onto carts
and taken away. In Kaloyan’s opinion, some of them had been rounded up earlier in raids.226
One by one, the convoys headed for the gorge located outside Fırıncilar, one of the
Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa’s main killing fields. The site was under the supervision of Haci Baloşzâde
Mehmed Nuri Bey, the parliamentary deputy from Dersim, and his brother Ali Pasha. They
had two Kurdish chieftains of the Reşvan tribe, Zeynel Bey and Haci Bedri Ağa, under their
command, with the Kurds’ squadrons of çetes.227
Kardashian, one of the 17 worker-soldiers in the Arapkir barracks who had been allowed to
remain there after the deportation of the Armenians thanks to the well-disposed command-
ing officer, Hüseyin, saw successive convoys of deportees from the provinces of Erzerum and
Trabizond trekking through Arapkir. He also informs us that this old officer refused to shake
down these convoys the way “the other Turks” did.228 As they passed through Arapkir, the
convoys left victims behind, and a certain number of children who were abandoned to their
fate as well. Kardashian points out that the local authorities had therefore decided to create
an “orphanage” that was rather more like a “slaughterhouse for children.” Every day during
the few weeks of its existence, some 50 corpses were removed from it. After it was closed, the
surviving children were ostensibly sent to the orphanage in Malatia, but in fact were taken
to Kırk Göz Bridge and thrown into the Tohma.229 But what surprised cadet Kardashian the
most was the convoy from Erzerum, which arrived in carts, was equipped with tents, and had
an escort of well-armed gendarmes. These deportees, he thought to himself, had obviously
been well protected en route; they constituted an odd exception in the midst of the flood of
desolation that poured through Arapkir.230
Kardashian further observes that each time a convoy passed through Arapkir, the author-
ities took the trouble to register all those who had permission to settle there in order to make
good for the absence of craftsmen, which was making itself felt after the deportation of the
town’s Armenian inhabitants. The residence permits issued to them, however, were valid
for only a few weeks – such craftsmen were regularly sent off to “Urfa.”231 Our witness also
reports rumors, making the rounds in Arapkir toward the end of the summer, to the effect
that “the government deported the Armenians, but the Kurds massacred them on the way.”
The rumor is supposed to have irritated the Kurds and made them more hostile toward the
Armenians seeking refuge with them.232
The campaign to eliminate the Armenians from the kaza of Arapkir was, without a
doubt, organized by the kaymakam, Hilmi Bey, who was appointed on 2 March 1915 (and
transferred elsewhere on 19 December of the same year). He was seconded by a number of
government officials, notably Kadri Bey, the commander of the gendarmerie; Khorşid Bey,
the police chief; Mehmed Effendi, nufus memuri (administrator of the registry office); Reşid
Bey, the head of the telegraph office; and Bekir Effendi, the director of the post office.233 But
we have also seen that the Ittihadist leaders in the provincial town, who had been recruited
from the ranks of the local notables – Riza Effendi, a lawyer; Nagib Hamdi Effendi, a land-
owner; Şakir Bey, the former head of the telegraph office; and Molla Ahmedzâde Tevfik
Effendi, a clergyman – exercised considerable if not decisive influence.234 These men were,
at the very least, associated with the decision-making process, no doubt in order to enlist
the Turkish population’s support for the policies of the Young Turk government. Among the
chief perpetrators of the crimes against the Armenians, the best known are Derebeyoğlu

Ali Effendi, Çuşi Ağasi Mustafa, Şeirli Mehmed Bey, Paşekizâde Lutfi Bey, Kuçubeyzâde
Mehmed Bey, Kuçubeyzâde Tevfik Bey, Kuçubeyzâde Haci Bey, Paracuklı Haci Mehmed
Effendi, Hiranlı Bekir, Şotiguli Mustafa Effendi, and several “policemen” – Selamlizâde Şerif
Ağa, Denizli Fazlı, Bekir, a native of Malatia, Osman, Mehmed, Şaban, Ethem, and Mehmed,
from Şeyhler.235 According to the above-mentioned undated fall 1915 report to the minister
of the interior, 8,545 Armenians were deported from Arapkir.236
The Kaza of Eğin/Agn

Traversed from one end to the other by the Euphrates, the kaza of Eğin/Agn boasted 25
Armenian towns and villages in 1914, with a total Armenian population of 16,741. The
administrative seat of the kaza, known as Agn in Armenian and rebaptized Eğin, had a mixed
population of 7,720 Armenians and approximately 6,000 Turks.237 With an economy based
on wine-growing and tanning, this mountain district, in which the villages were for the most
part located in the highlands dominating the Euphrates, suffered from a shortage of arable
land and had for centuries been sending emigrants elsewhere. Thus, many of the Armenians
from Agn could be found among the prominent bankers and jewelers of the Ottoman capi-
tal, but also among high-ranking government officials; the last famous example was Gabriel
Noradounghian, foreign minister from 1912 to 1913 in the last liberal Ottoman government.
The first arrests in the kaza were made on 22 April 1915, for no apparent reason. The
same day, the town crier announced that arms had to be surrendered to the authorities. This
order was followed by systematic house searches and new arrests.238 According to our main
witness, 248 people were arrested in the course of 24 hours in Agn alone. Similar events
occurred in the kaza’s villages around the same time.239 After this first phase of violence,
the authorities unmistakably inaugurated the second stage of their plan on 1 June, when
they arrested the auxiliary prelate, Father Bedros Karian, and another 30 of the town’s lead-
ing citizens, including the kaza’s tax collector, Srabion Papazian, a member of the district
council; Margos Narlian, the head of the Armenian orphanage; Mardiros Semerjian; and
also B. and H. Diradurian, Gh. Vartabedian, B. Khanarian, K. Ardzruni, Avedis Palushian,
Avedis Gananian, and Dr. Sahag Cholakian. Those arrested were promptly sent off to Keban
Maden with 90 other men, loaded onto a raft, and drowned in the Euphrates.240 Agn, how-
ever, knew nothing about what had become of them.
The town crier’s 7 June announcement, that the draft was being extended to include
males between 16 and 18 and between 46 and 60, suggests that the authorities had devised
a new stratagem to eliminate the men in the kaza. Thus, 400 men were “mobilized” only to
be taken under guard to three places on the banks of the Euphrates, tied together in groups
of five, and thrown into the river. Since there had already been a conscription campaign the
year before, this left virtually no adult males in Agn aside from a few old men.241
The deportation order was issued late in June. The authorities announced, however, that
they were willing to allow those families who agreed to convert to Islam to remain in their
homes. About 5 per cent of the population succeeded in avoiding deportation in this way.242
Three convoys were deported. The first included the population of the villages, the sec-
ond was made up of people from the outskirts of Agn and one of the town’s neighborhoods,
and the third and last, dispatched on 5 July under the command of Halil Çavuş and with
an escort of 30 “gendarmes,”243 comprised the rest of Agn’s Armenian population – that is,
around 7,700 people.244 All the houses and shops in the bazaar were put under seal as soon
as the convoys had set out.
Our principal witness, a 17-year-old youth by the name of Levon Boghosian, left Agn
with the last convoy, the fate of which he would share until the deportees reached Fırıncilar,
where the 400 survivors from his group arrived after 27 days – that is, around 1 August

1915.245 Boghosian’s account allows us to observe the way the caravan was decimated day
after day and the way the deportees were methodically stripped of their possessions. Thus, he
notes that from the very first time the convoy pitched camp, the prettiest young women were
abducted, while the families were charged 2,070 Turkish pounds gold by their guards for “pro-
tection from the Kurds.” One week later, the convoy numbered fewer than one thousand;246
dehydration, malnutrition, and exhaustion had carried off the youngest and oldest deportees.
Suicides were also quite frequent. If the main reason for this was simply despair, many of
those who took their own lives were young women, who chose to throw themselves into the
Euphrates rather than submit to rape. Mothers also frequently refused to submit to the will
of their torturers, killing themselves and their children instead.
Boghosian also observes that a caravan leaving Agn could by the direct route reach the
Kırk Göz Bridge across the Tohma Çay in four to five days, whereas his caravan reached
it only after a 24-day trek. Thus, it is probable that the escort had been ordered at regular
intervals to prolong the deportees’ trajectory in order to produce more casualites. Boghosian’s
description of the transit camp at Kırk Göz also suggests that the area was so crowded with
deportees that the authorities were forced to “reroute” the convoys. “A human flood was to be
found there,” he writes, “consisting of people from all the cities of Turkey: tens of thousands
of people, four hundred to five hundred of whom died every day.247
Boghosian’s description of the camp of Fırıncilar is just as harrowing. He notes in particu-
lar that 12-year-old Turkish and Kurdish boys came to the camp to help themselves to girls.248
It would appear that the extreme violence unleashed by the Young Turk government had
swept taboos aside and unleashed behavior that was normally repressed, to the point that
these children felt that they could have their way with these girls as the fancy struck them
because the girls belonged to a group officially declared to be outside the law.
The government officials implicated in the crimes committed in Agn were, first and fore-
most, the kaymakam Asım Bey (who held his post from 23 July 1913 to 15 October 1915)
and the commander of the gendarmerie Abdülkadir Bey, who supervised the departure of
all the convoys and the local massacres of the men. Asım and Abdülkadir were backed up by
Arnavud Mustafa and Mustafa Bey, two lieutenants in the gendarmerie, and the police chief
Hurşid Bey, who organized arrests, torture, and house searches. The local Ittihad club, made
up of Nurzâdeoğlu Bekir Çavuş, Musa Receboğlu Musa, Abçuğalı Mustafa, and Dr. Şerif, a
member of the vilayet’s regional council, distinguished itself by orchestrating the anti-Arme-
nian propaganda campaign, seeing to it that the program of destruction decided upon by the
CUP was carried out and setting up the commission responsible for abandoned property, with
Tevfik Bey as its president, with Tavtili Yaşar’s and Tevfik’s father, Ahmed Bey, at his side.249
Among those who played especially prominent roles in slaughtering the people of Agn
and the surrounding villages were Haci Mehmed Keleşağazâde, Haci Hasanzâde, İbrahim
Ağa, Cemal Hasanzâde Osman Ağa, Akraklı Sadik Çavuş, Parakoç Ömer Ağa, Hezinin Kel
Ahmed Ağa, Dardağanzâde Halid Ağa, Kürd Ali Ağa, Kel Hacizâde Mehmed Ağa, Kör Haci
Ağa, Osman Ağa, Hakkı Ağa, Babaoğlu Ali Ağa, Arslanoğlu Mehmed Ağa, Kürd Osmanoğlu
Receb Ağa, Çisenoğlu Mevlud Ağa, Boğoyi Hasanoğlu Mehmed Ağa, Ibooğlu Yaşar Ağa,
İsmail Ağaoğlu Memo, and Selo and his three sons.250 There were only a few Kurdish notables
among these criminals. According to the Constantinople Armenian Patriarchate’s sources,
some 400 Armenian children were being held in Turkish homes in Agn in late 1918. There
were an additional 900 Armenian survivors, half of them from the villages of the kaza.251
Deportations and Massacres in the Sancak of Malatia

The preceding pages have provided some information about the pivotal place that the san-
cak of Malatia occupied in the annihilation of the convoys of Armenian deportees from

the four corners of Asia Minor. One can therefore readily imagine that the city of Malatia
was itself a major coordination center in the system created by the Young Turk government.
Only one foreigner resided in the city, a German pastor by the name of Hans Bauernfeind,
the head of an institution for the blind run by the Deutscher Hilfsbund für christliches
Liebeswerk im Orient. Bauernfeind would witness the events and record them in his diary.252
A patriot and partisan of the German-Turkish alliance, he initially took a skeptical view of
the evidence, describing the mayor of Malatia as “mad” when the Turkish official explained
to him what was really going on beneath the soothing discourse of the authorities. He came
to confess, however, that he had “been most horribly duped from first to last.” His remarkably
precise account allows us to chart the preliminary phase of the genocide, from the second
mobilization to the requisitions, and from the arrests of the men to their liquidation, with a
wealth of detail only rarely available for other regions.
What did Malatia represent on the eve of the war? It was, to begin with, the biggest city in
the vilayet of Mamuret ul-Aziz, with a total population of 35,000 to 40,000 and an Armenian
population of 15,000.253 Although Armenians were a minority, the region, famous for its tex-
tiles, dyes, rugs, and gold jewelry, depended mainly on them for its economic development,
which was reinforced by the remittances sent back to Malatia by Armenian emigrants to
the Unites States. These ceased when the war broke out.254 Near Malatia, 1,400 Armenians
still lived Melitene – or at least what remained of the ancient city – and also in the villages
of Kogh Lur (pop. 150), Orduz (pop. 400), and Chermekh (pop. 67). The city of Malatia had
been largely spared the massacres of 1895. The Armenians in the rural zones, however, had
been all but wiped out.255
During the general mobilization, a significant number of Armenians from Malatia were
exempted from military service because they paid the bedel. A commission responsible for
“military contributions” (teklif-i habriyye) was immediately created and proceeded to make
requisitions that one Armenian source describes as “pillage” of almost exclusively Armenian
property.256 These operations, combined with the rise in the price of food, were partially
responsible for the rapid impoverishment of the Armenian population. The harsh condi-
tions imposed on the soldiers and, above all, the typhus epidemic that ravaged the Third
Army in February 1915, spawned desertions as well, initially among the Kurdish recruits
and then among the Armenians and Turks. An Armenian source claims that there were
proportionally more deserters among the Turks but that the Armenians were the first targets
of the disciplinary measures: thus, the family homes of two Armenian deserters were burned
down and the soldiers went back to their barracks.257 Shortly thereafter, the Postal Ministry
outlawed correspondence in Armenian. Armenian conscripts in the region were disarmed
around 19 April.258 In May, the authorities nevertheless decided to draft men in age groups
that had been spared hitherto, notably 18- and 19-year-olds and those between the ages of 46
and 50,259 and assigned them to amele taburis to do roadwork between Malatia and Harput,
three hours to the north.260 The Ottoman Information Bureau also announced that the
“Armenian insurgents [had] sabotaged the mountain passes and so hindered the soldiers’
advance.” The Muslim population clearly seems to have taken these claims for good coin, so
that tensions in the city were raised a notch or two.261
On 4 May, Bauernfeind wrote, “It would appear that the government has lost all trust
in the Armenians.”262 Hovhannes Khanghlarian, an eyewitness to events in Malatia, notes
that police searches of Armenian homes were now undertaken with a view to confiscating
letters, newspapers, and all printed documents using the Armenian alphabet; owners of such
material were suspect, and were arrested and imprisoned.263 Bauernfeind reports the arrest of
a young Protestant woman, Veronika Bonapartian, who was accused of having “Armenian
songs that were composed by her pastor and written out in his hand” in her possession.264
The collective incrimination of the Armenians, observed elsewhere as well, constituted a

first phase that was followed, on 20 May, by the town crier’s announcement that weapons
held in people’s homes had to be turned over to the authorities “for the state’s self-defense
effort.”265 This decree unleashed a second wave of house searches that in turn provided
the basis for the arrests of many more men. On 22 May, all Armenian government officials
were imprisoned, together with important figures including the Armenian auxiliary primate,
members of the district council, leaders of the political parties, and local men of means.266
This second phase of the persecutions seems to have gained momentum with the arrival
in Malatia of the CUP inspector, Boşnak Resneli Nâzım Bey, who lodged with Haşim
Bey, a parliamentary deputy and a rich landowner who lived near the German mission.267
According to a judge on Malatia’s court-martial, Captain Fazıl, the inspector organized a
meeting of all the Young Turk leaders in the city at Haşim Bey’s house:268 Talât Bey, a mem-
ber of the regional council; Haci Çakirdegin Effendi (who would later bury several hundred
children alive); Mehmed Bey and Faik Bey, Haşim’s sons; Eşaf Bey, another parliamentary
deputy from Malatia; and Mehmed Effendi, a businessman.269 Resneli Nâzım was appar-
ently also interested in the attitude of Malatia’s German resident, whom he took the trouble
to meet. Bauernfeind’s description of him as “the most pleasant, well-educated and manly
Turkish official we have ever seen” indicates that the Bosnian succeeded in charming the
German minister.270 The sudden recall of the mutesarif, Nabi Bey, on 3 June, and his provi-
sional replacement by Vasifi Bey, the kaymakam of Akçadag/Arga,271 was doubtless related
to Nâzım’s visit. Perhaps the CUP inspector found that Nabi did not display sufficient initia-
tive. It is also possible, however, that the mutesarif fell victim to the machinations of local
Young Turk circles. In any case, the new prefect, Reşid Bey,272 who arrived on 20 June from
Istanbul, had the advantage of being Kurdish, a factor of no little importance in a predomi-
nantly Kurdish region. It should also be noted that the authorities released common-law
criminals from prison around 6 June in order to incorporate them into squadrons of çetes.
The German pastor writes of these irregulars that he was “initially surprised that all these
people were immediately given arms, although they were robbers and murderers.”273 There
can be little doubt that the creation of this squadron of the Special Organization resulted
directly from initiatives taken by Resneli Nâzım. It is hard to imagine that a mutesarif, and an
interim mutesarif at that, could open the doors of a prison except on orders from his superi-
ors. However, in the party-state system of the day, a CUP inspector not only had the powers
required to enroll convicts in the Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa; it was his duty to do so. The fact that
this squadron (which, as we shall see, played an important role in the improvised slaughter-
houses) had been put under the command of Mehmed Bey,274 a son of the parliamentary
deputy Haşim Bey and a local Young Turk leader, confirms that these irregulars answered to
no other authority than that of the Special Organization. As Resneli Nâzım was preparing
to return to Harput on 9 June, a ceremony was held in a schoolyard before all of Malatia’s
leading citizens. It illustrates the influence of the Young Turk network on – or even the fear
it inspired in – the provincial notables. By way of a parting recommendation, Bauernfeind
writes, Nâzım held up before his audience a “copy of a cheap cops-and-robbers magazine
containing illustrations of a large number of rifles, bombs and similar objects that are said
to have been discovered in the homes of Armenians from Kuharea [presumably Kütahiya],
Dyarbekir and so on.” The interim mutesarif put the crowning touches on Nâzım’s demon-
stration when he told the German minister that the day before, “they had found nearly five
thousand bombs in Mezreh.”275 The outrageous nature of the accusations was on a par with
the violence that the authorities were perpetrating.
For Malatia’s Armenians, the demand that they turn in their arms posed a major problem.
Since the outbreak of the war, they had scrupulously performed their duties as Ottoman
subjects in hopes of laying the authorities’ lurking suspicions to rest. When it came to sur-
rendering their weapons, however, the question of the government’s intentions toward them

arose: if they gave up their arms, they would be giving up all possibility of defending them-
selves. This brought back memories of the 1895 massacres, which, of course, were one of
the Armenian population’s obsessions. This concern was most palpably felt by the jailed
Armenian leaders. In prison, where they were daily subjected to extremely violent forms of
torture, these men, after taking counsel, decided to make the authorities a proposal: if they
were set free, they would proceed to collect and deliver up the Armenians’ arms. Four men
were released on 27 or 28 May. Among them was the leader of Malatia’s Dashnaks, Khosrov
Keshishian, a Protestant pharmacist. The others remained behind bars. The Armenians
apparently handed over all their weapons to the authorities276 (“weapon” here means every-
thing from hunting rifles to rifles of a more or less modern kind). Those who did not have any
arms “secretly bought rifles, simply so that they would have one to turn in if they should be
forced to do so by being put in jail or beaten with clubs.”277 The government was plainly seek-
ing to neutralize the Armenian population, which, for its part, had doubts about the authori-
ties’ true intentions. The accusations of an Armenian conspiracy that were more or less
officially put into circulation had fit the Young Turk strategy too well to be taken seriously.
On the other hand, it goes without saying that the Armenian leaders, here as elsewhere,
grappled with the question of self-defense. Yet the strategy of methodically undermining the
Armenians’ capacities seems to have made this option quite simply unfeasible.
According to Bauernfeind’s diary, the arrests began to affect all strata of society from 27
May onward.278 Khanghlarian mentions in particular the arrests of adolescents, old men,
and the craftsmen and merchants of the bazaar. The result was that 1,300 men had already
been taken into custody by late May.279 An official at the government accounting office
(muhasebeci) and a close friend of Bauernfeind’s, who lived opposite the prison in which the
Armenians were detained, asked the German minister to take him in for a few days because
he could no longer bear the racket caused by the bastinadoes, which had already claimed
their first victim – an “elderly” Catholic priest280 named Stephan Baghdasarian.281 The tor-
turers demanded that the prisoners tell them where the “dynamite, bombs, arms stockpiles
and cannons” had been hidden.282 Six weeks later, Bauernfeind doubted “that all these sto-
ries about bombs and pogroms had a basis in the truth.” “The Armenians here,” he went on,
“haven’t done anything that need alarm the government.”283 According to Khanghlarian,
the authorities ultimately secured 114 “outlawed” rifles and pistols; they laid them out next
to “weapons from the barracks,” photographed the whole, and sent the pictures to Istanbul.
To be sure, “they did not find the bombs”284 that seemed to obsess them. By the time the
campaign to confiscate weapons was over, 60 Armenians had died under torture – including
Manug Khantsian, Khosrov Keshishian, and Napoleon Bonapartian [sic], who threw himself
from an upper story of the prison to avoid torture.285
An examination of the sources suggests that once the arms had been collected, the author-
ities moved on to the third stage of their plan: the systematic liquidation of the men – that
is, both the conscripts in the new age groups, 18–19 and 46–50 – who had been mobilized
in May and set to repairing the road to Harput in amele taburis (they were not immediately
affected)286 and the men arrested late in May or early in June who were locked up in Malatia’s
central prison. It was now no longer a question of torture, but of summary execution. On
16 June, Bauernfeind wrote in his diary: “We now take it to be an established fact that pris-
oners are dying and being buried in secret. On the other hand, we do not believe that the
government is helping them die ... We have now discovered where they bury the men.” The
first victims were ineptly buried in the southwest corner of the German mission grounds, in
a mass grave dug overnight.287 The repetition of these inhuman nighttime scenes and the
nuisance caused by the stench of the rotting corpses finally pricked the conscience of the
German pastor, who requested a “secret meeting” with mutesarif Reşid Bey. Bauernfeind’s
account of this “two-hour meeting on the Armenian question” betrays his first doubts about

the authorities’ intentions toward the Armenians. Following his indications, the mutesarif
sent a saptieh to inspect the mass graves adjoining the mission. The explanation of the affair
that he was given (“someone buried a horse there”) was hardly credible. Reşid Bey therefore
adopted a new strategy: he told the pastor that it did not lie “in his power to change things”
that had taken place “before he assumed his post and that he [was] not claiming that nothing
illegal had happened.” The murders had been committed, Reşid said, “at the instigation of a
few rich people.” Moreover, his predecessor had “done a little something to help [the prison-
ers] die.” After making these confessions, Reşid solemnly declared that, “for as long as he
remain[ed] in his post, illegal acts of this sort [would] never again occur.”288
After this well-educated mutesarif recently dispatched from Istanbul, Malatia’s belediye
reisi (mayor), Mustafa Ağa Azizoğlu, was the pastor’s second-most-important interlocutor.
Azizoğlu made no secret of his opposition to the measures aimed at the Armenians and fre-
quently passed on information about the authorities’ crimes. Thus, the day after Baurenfeind
visited Reşid Bey, he was told by the mayor that “the bodies in the six graves had been
decently buried; there were more than one hundred corpses.” He also learned “with certainty”
that 1,200 Armenian worker-soldiers who had been doing roadwork in Çiftlik, located on the
Euphrates between Malatia and Çoğlu, had been massacred on 11 June 1915 near the village
of Pirot. The crime had been committed by a squadron of çetes based in Taşpinar that had
been recently created on orders from Haşim Beyzâde Mehmed, son of parliamentary deputy
Haşim Bey.289 The same squadron liquidated, in Haşim’s presence, a second contingent of
worker-soldiers from Malatia on the night of 13 June: 214 of them were killed with axes and
knives at the quarry of Taş Tepe, after which their corpses were thrown into pits; 74 more
were killed an hour and a half from Taş Tepe in Kızıl Göl, where their bodies were dumped
in a pool used for breeding fish.290
Rumors of these first massacres spread through the city. According to Khanghlarian, the
authorities had to go to considerable lengths to lay them to rest in order to keep people in
doubt. On 26 June, they finally announced the order to deport the Armenian population
of Malatia within three days. The next day, however, they announced that the families of
young men who volunteered for labor battalions would not be deported. Four hundred young
men under the age of 18 enlisted. They were divided into three groups. The first group from
Indere, one hour’s distance from Malatia, was responsible for keeping the barracks in Malatia
supplied with water. The second was put to work building the city’s CUP club. The third
made uniforms in the workshop of a certain Osman.291 There is every reason to believe that
these men were recruited in order to remove as many adolescents as possible from town. An
event that occurred on 1 July shows, moreover, that the authorities wanted to make certain
that the Armenians’ self-defense capabilities had been crushed before initiating the deporta-
tions. That day, mounted troops surrounded the Armenian neighborhoods and simulated
an attack, obviously in order to see whether this would bring on an armed reaction. It did
not.292
The liquidation of the men still imprisoned in Malatia seems to have followed on the
heels of that of the worker-soldiers. In his diary entry for 2 July, Bauernfeind wrote: “The
most horrible, appalling thing has happened: a massacre.” Once again, he solicited an inter-
view with the mutesarif, where he says he was able to “speak more frankly” since they were
alone. Reşid Bey nevertheless began by dishing him up a lie about the fate meted out to the
mission’s steward, an Armenian. In the end, however, he revealed to him, in a confiden-
tial tone: “Don’t tell anybody: they killed Garabed, and not only Garabed, but 300 other
people last night and 180 the night before. All of them had been taken to Indära [Indere]
and there ... I didn’t have the courage to ask whether they had been strangled or shot to
death.”293 The mutesarif’s confidences were meant to create the impression that he was
not implicated in the murder of “all the prisoners, that is to say, almost all the men” who

were still in prison.294 Bauernfeind, however, knew that, “in accordance with the reigning
linguistic conventions,” to be “ ‘sent somewhere else’ meant ‘killed,’ ” and that “things did
not happen any differently here than in Mezreh, Sıvas, Erzerum, Erzincan, Cesaerea and
so on. This would appear to be an order received from above and, of course, carefully pre-
pared. That is why we have not had visits from Turks for a long time now ... We have been
abominably deceived and betrayed, with diabolical ill-will and cunning.”295 The German
minister was even more explicit in an entry dated 5 July: “What pains us the most is that
our ‘allies and brothers’ have betrayed us in the most unspeakably vile, loathsome way. This
treachery ... has utterly destroyed our faith in the government.”296
According to information gathered by the mayor Mustafa Ağa Azizoğlu, “in the preced-
ing two weeks, more than 2,000 Armenians were killed; most were massacred and buried in
Indere ... Taş Tepe and near Kündebeg.”297
In the other provinces, the end of the massacre of the males heralded, in principle, the
beginning of the deportations. Why, then, did the deportations in Malatia not begin until
mid-August? A delay of a few days could perhaps have been explained by the fact that this
prefecture had been assigned the role of slaughterhouse: it had to cope with the massive
arrival, in the first half of July, of convoys of deportees from the west and the north. But
this is probably not sufficient explanation for a delay of almost six weeks. Bauernfeind was
now persuaded that the mutesarif was “unremittingly endeavoring to keep the women in the
area.”298 He was, however, unaware that this “humane act” was motivated by the desire to
wring huge sums from the Armenians for the mutesarif’s personal benefit, as we learn from an
investigative report submitted to a court-martial on 25 November 1915, “exposing the illicit
gains of the former mutesarif of Malatia, Reşid Bey.”299
In July and early August, Bauernfeind observed the continuous passage of convoys from
the north and west. On 12 July, he saw the first caravan from Sıvas arrive, 2,000 people
strong, as well as a convoy of 3,000 to 4,000 deportees from Mezreh and the villages near-
by.300 On 17 July, he watched as a caravan of 2,000 peasants from the region of Sıvas trekked
past. A Turkish gardener told him that the caravan had been sent half an hour’s march
north, where “a big grave [had been] dug.” “They are,” said the gardener, “all going to ‘be
lost’ there.”301 On 21 July, “one or two thousand more,” also from the region of Sıvas, pitched
camp along the road.302 On 22 July, 10,000 deportees from Sıvas passed close by Malatia, but
were redirected toward the plain of Fırıncilar.303 On 29 July, 10,000 to 15,000 people who had
come from the north camped close to the mission.304 On 30 July, Bauernfeind saw a convoy
“comprising about 1,000 to 1,500” deportees coming from the northwest. In a single day, 1
August, he saw two caravans from the region of Sıvas, comprising 1,000 and 2,000 people,
respectively.305 Finally, on 3 and 4 August, the German pastor saw a caravan containing
1,000 deportees, and another “that took almost two hours to pass by.”306
Obviously, all these columns, which arrived by the road from Sıvas, represented only a
fraction of the convoys arriving in the region of Malatia. While all the caravans passed by
way of Kırk Gök Bridge, a good many avoided the city of Malatia and headed directly for the
plain of Fırıncilar. Moreover, the isolation in which the German mission found itself and
the minister’s obviously imperfect knowledge of the environment in which he was living
prevented him from acquiring a comprehensive view of the situation. After the initial shock
caused by his discovery that the men had been massacred, it took him some time to realize
the significance of the deportations. In a diary entry dated 22 July, he reports a conversation
he had had the day before with the mayor Mustafa Ağa, observing that “his lack of all power
of judgment again came to the fore; he claims that Malatia is a deathtrap; that people are
brought here from all over in order to be killed; that nobody ever reaches Urfa, and so on.”307
Evidently, Bauernfeind was hard put to admit the harsh reality of the situation, although
he had already noted that the operations conducted by the authorities took “the form of a

high-blown legal murder presented in public as a patriotic necessity and legitimized, with
precious little justification, by references to the German example in Belgium.”308 Shortly
thereafter, he wondered “whether all the confiscations of arms had been carried out with
this in mind.”309
The minister’s observations are corroborated and completed by those of an Armenian
witness. About the simultaneous arrival on 12 July of the first convoy from Sıvas and a
convoy from Mezreh, Hovhannes Khanghlarian observes that the mutesarif, the Turkish
notables of Malatia, and a squadron of çetes at full strength went out to “welcome” the depor-
tees in the second group. After conscientiously stripping them of their belongings, they led
them to the square in front of the barracks, where the last of the men were separated from
the rest of the convoy and locked up in the garrison’s prison, while the boys under ten were
held in the city. The next morning, our witness, who at the time was in one of the three
battalions of adolescents formed in late June, observed that the prison had been evacuated
overnight.310 The group from Sıvas, which had arrived two hours after the one from Mezreh,
now consisted almost exclusively of women and old men, accompanied by a few young men.
It was stationed for several days in the khan of the market, where most of the women were
raped.311 Khanghlarian does not describe all the following convoys in detail, but notes that
they systematically took the road leading to the plain of Fırıncilar without entering Malatia,
after being plundered near Kırk Göz Bridge.312 It is likely that the large numbers of deportees,
presumably together with considerations of hygiene, led the authorities to give up the idea
of having the deportees transit through the city of Malatia around mid-July. On the other
hand, they decided to assemble females under 15 and males under ten there. On 16 July,
they rounded up the first group of these young deportees in Fırıncilar,313 an estimated 3,000
to 5,000 children. These round-ups continued through the latter half of July and into early
August. According to Khanghlarian, the children were put in the five Armenian Apostolic
churches in the city at this time, as well as the Protestant church, the Armenian schools,
and a few big residences, under the gaze of Malatia’s Armenian population, which was still
in the city. More than 4,000 children – the most fortunate ones – found themselves tempo-
rarily lodged with Armenian families. Turks and Kurds were officially authorized to pick out
children for themselves. Those they took with them were promptly replaced by new arrivals
from the subsequent convoys.
All in all, some 40,000 children passed through Malatia’s “orphanages.”314 Bauernfeind, in
whose diary flashes of insight alternate with professions of faith in the authorities, writes that
these children were “voluntarily entrusted to the government by their mothers. This is, then,
an act of social charity.”315 The reality of the matter was rather less heartwarming than his
formula suggests. Witnesses say that the improvised establishments in which the authorities
hoped to educate “true Turks” never possessed the necessary means to provide their wards’
upkeep. Hygiene there was catastrophic, malnutrition chronic, and a terrible epidemic car-
ried off a considerable number of the children. The infected children and the bodies of those
who had died were thrown indiscriminately into mass graves in Göz Tepe; these children
were immediately replaced by a batch of new arrivals.316 A young man whose mother worked
in one of these homes states that there was one “mother” for every 50 children, adding
that he himself was for several weeks responsible for transporting children to Turkish and
Kurdish villages, where they were handed out to the villagers.317 The glut that resulted from
these repeated distributions of children (again according to Levon Boghosian) compelled
the authorities to take more radical measures in order to make space in their orphanages. At
night, carts with a gendarme in each would be loaded with children and driven to the banks
of the Tohma Çay, where “the infidels’ progeny” were drowned in the river.318 To the extent
that one can hazard a judgment on the basis of this information, it would appear that the
ideal of Turkification as envisaged at the highest level of the Ittihadist party-state came up

against the harsh realities of the situation on the ground, particularly in the irresponsibil-
ity of local government officials, who preferred to pocket the limited funds earmarked for
Turkification rather than spend it to lodge and board potential “Turks.”
The authorities did not, however, concern themselves with children alone. For nine
straight days in early August, young men from several amele taburis as well as their older com-
rades had their throats cut in Malatia’s prison; the bodies were carted down to the Tohma
and thrown into the river. The executions took place at an average rate of 300 victims
nightly. The problem of evacuating their blood left the authorities with no choice but to dig
canals capable of conducting the blood from the slaughterhouse to a point outside the city.
Boghosian gives us a Dantean description of these nights: when he arrived in the courtyard
of the prefecture, he saw hundreds of naked young men awash in their blood. The bodies
gave off an unbearable odor; the atmosphere was so thoroughly impregnated with the stench
that visitors were soon covered with it.319
For their part, Malatia’s Armenians did not sit on their hands. Around 16 July 1915, they
formed a delegation that personally submitted a petition to the mutesarif, and he was “said
to have shown great kindness and been touched” by their initiative.320 In fact, there is every
reason to suppose that this petition was accompanied by a cash “gift” intended to persuade
Reşid Bey to spare the petitioners. Several other means seemed to have been mobilized in
an effort to escape deportation: a certain number of women found refuge in the homes of
their Turkish acquaintances321 by promising to give the master of the house all their prop-
erty in exchange. As soon as the deportations began, however, virtually all the Turkish fam-
ily heads turned their female “protégés” over to the authorities.322 Other Armenians sought
to convert to Islam, but the authorities, Bauernfeind writes, “were not interested in proselyt-
izing the Armenians, but in putting them out of the way.”323 The Greeks and “Syrians,” in
contrast, were spared. As for the Germans, they were “in the worst of cases,” Bauernfeind
declares, “in danger only insofar as they were embarrassing witnesses.”324
The minister points to certain rather telling signs of the prevailing mood in the city: for
example, the curious “feeling that the Germans had become Muslims or were about to was
very common among the populace.”325 This was probably the result of rumors spread by the
authorities to convince the population of the legitimacy and power of the Young Turk gov-
ernment, which was supposed to have in some sense succeeded in gaining the upper hand
over its powerful ally. This notion also had the merit of flattering conservative Muslim public
opinion, which did not easily accept an alliance with a Christian state at a time when a good
part of the population was taking part in the physical elimination of its many Christian sub-
jects. The authorities could, however, avail themselves of another stimulant, represented by
the idea that the “property of the slain Armenians legitimately belongs to the Turks.” These
words, uttered around 7 July by a mullah and parliamentary deputy from Malatia, Eşaf Bey,326
speak volumes about the methods used to bring the populace to consent to a crime that was
taking on collective dimensions.327 As for the economic aspects of that crime, one of the
most commonly employed methods in the days preceding the 15 August departure of the
first convoy consisted in demanding the repayment of fictive debts from those about to leave,
at a time when the authorities were willing to validate such claims. Others, more courteous,
approached their Armenian neighbors and suggested that they give them their property
rather than let the authorities confiscate it, since they were going to be killed in any case.328
Bauernfeind notes that the determination of a few local notables “such as Haşim Bey and his
sons, [who] sought to make a fortune by acquiring the property of the slain Armenians – war
booty, as it were – played an important role in this business.”329
The first convoy to leave Malatia was formed in three days. On the morning of 15 August,
the army surrounded three neighborhoods on the outskirts of Malatia, among them the
Niyali neighborhood, and put their population on the road to Sürgü, which lay some 40 miles

southwest of Malatia near Behesni/Besni. On 16 August, the inhabitants of the Çavuşoğlu

and Haraza neighborhoods were deported; those of the Market neighborhood followed the
next day.330 This first group of deportees was plundered and partially massacred at two hours’
distance from Malatia in the Begler Deresi valley. Somewhat further south, the Kurds of
Akçadağ took charge of the caravan, abducting the girls and women and dispatching the
others with knives.331
The second convoy to leave Malatia was also formed in three days, beginning on 23
August. These deportees, however, were not led in the direction of Sürgü, but rather
toward Fırıncilar. From there, a few survivors went to Kahta and then on to Samsat/
Samosat.332
The last sizeable group of deportees, made up of the 400 volunteer workers who had
been recruited in late June, was interned in the prison in Malatia on the evening of 17
August. The few Syriacs present were released thanks to an imperial decree that granted
them “pardon.” On 27 August, these workers learned that there were no Armenians left
in the city – that is, their families, who had until then been exempt from deportation, had
also been “sent away.” On 29 and 30 August, these workers’ throats were cut in the prison
slaughterhouse.333
On 30 August, Muslim homes were searched by the authorities, who were looking for
Armenians over the age of ten. Muslims who did not turn them over were threatened with
severe punishment. The families holding young children registered them; those who had
older girls in their possession formalized their unions (nikah) with them. The handful of arti-
sans who had been allowed to remain in the city were invited to convert to Islam around
30 September.334 These measures constituted the final stage of the program to liquidate the
Armenians. One month later, on 31 October, Reşid Bey’s replacement, Hüseyin Serri Bey,
drew up a balance sheet of the deportation measures and an account of the families still in
the city:
In Malatia, 3,341 males and 3,594 females were registered in 1,582 houses. Of these peo-
ple, the occupants of 1,550 households, 3,246 males and 3,492 females, were deported.
The occupants of the 32 remaining households, 95 males and 102 females, were allowed
to remain behind because they were artisans. Also present in the city are individuals
[who should] have been deported and fugitives who have come here, a total of 30 males
and 60 females; they have been arrested and are subject to deportation. [There] are
also male and female children without guardians, approximately 600 males and 400
females, who have come from elsewhere and are now in orphanages or living with the
populace. Finally, as a result of delays in the deportation and in accordance with orders
received, 130 Catholic males and 185 Catholic females, 50 Protestant males and 80
Protestant females as well as 30 Levantine males and 27 Levantine females have been
left in place by the commander of the gendarmerie.335
On the other hand, an order dated 12 November offers a glimpse of a more restrictive
policy: “There is no objection to the presence of female artisans, if they are chosen, prefer-
ably, from among the Catholics and Protestants, and on the express condition that their
number does not exceed ten or fifteen.”336
The Kaza of Hüsni Mansur/Adiyaman

The kaza of Hüsni Manusr/Adiyaman boasted 21 Armenians localities in 1914, with a
total population of 5,202. The administrative seat of the kaza, Adiyaman, had a popula-
tion of 3,390. The kaza, which served as a transit zone for Armenian deportees, was also

distinguished by the fact that the rural zones in the north were inhabited by Armenians who
had been Islamicized at an undetermined date.337
The first striking event in the kaza occurred on 14 May 1915, when 400 Armenians in the
kazas of Behesni and Adiyaman were massacred by çetes338 commanded by Haci Mehmed Ali
Bey.339 The sub-prefect, Nuri Bey, was named to his post on 27 June 1915 and remained in
office only until 17 December. With the leader of the çetes, Haci Mehmed Ali Bey, he was one
of the four main criminals in the region; the others were Mehmed Effendi, the commander
of the gendarmerie; Vasfi Bey, the police chief; Mehmed Alioğlu Haci Mustafa Effendi; and
Nureddinoğlu Sıddık, a çetebaşi (çete chief) who supervised the massacre of thousands of
deportees in transit in this district.340 Sıddık could reckon on support from the Zırafkan
and Zeynel tribes of Kolık, in particular. After the men were arrested and eliminated, the
population was deported on 28 July 1915 toward Samsat and then Urfa. Two hundred people,
adolescents and a few old men, were massacred in the Karakayık gorge.341
In a 3 November telegram, the kaymakam informed the mutesarif of Malatia that “there
are no more local Armenians to deport: there are only four to five households belonging to
Armenian craftsmen who have come here with their families and whose conversion took
place after the required religious obligations were fulfilled.”342 Nuri Bey also notes that there
were a few boys and girls who had been “placed with well-intentioned people.” “As far as the
young virgins who wish to marry are concerned,” he added, “the process is nearing comple-
tion.” He pointed out, however, that he would not take the older women who had offered to
convert into consideration, since he preferred to marry off “younger females.”343
Thus, most of the Armenians allowed to remain in Adiyaman were from other regions,
particularly “women from elsewhere who had married after converting to Islam.” Another tel-
egram, however, is less forthcoming about “how to deal with people taken into custody.”344
The Kaza of Kahta

In 1914, 2,250 Armenians out of a total population of 4,300 lived in the administrative
seat, Kahta, of the kaza of the same name. There were 56 localities in this kaza in the
nahies of Şiro, Gerger, Merdesi, and Zeravikan, where more than 10,000 Armenians lived
alongside Catholic Syriacs, Kurds, and a handful of Turks.345 The divergence between the
Patriarchate’s population figures and the official census is astonishing here: there were more
children enrolled in the Armenian schools alone than there were, according to the official
count, Armenians in the kaza. Yet the summary of the deportations submitted to the mute-
sarif of Malatia in September 1915 contains figures matching those in the official census:
this summary speaks of 791 Armenians, of whom 715 had been expelled, as well as 74
boys under ten and girls under 15 “without father or mother” who were in the custody of
“pious people.”346 More than 9,000 people seem to have simply evaporated without plausible
explanation.
The kaymakam, Hakkı Bey, who was appointed to his post on 9 April 1915 and served
until 12 June 1916, bore the main responsibility for the crimes committed in the region.
These involved not only the liquidation of the local Armenians, however many of them
there may have been, but also supervision of the killing fields in the gorge immediately
adjoining the plain of Fırıncilar in the northernmost part of the kaza. In a 9 December 1915
report to the Sublime Porte, Hasan Mazhar mentions specifically the “crimes committed by
the kaymakam of Kahta.” The reference, however, is not to his role in eradicating the depor-
tees. Rather, he is accused of having seized control of a convoy of Armenians from Erzerum
that had been entrusted to the kaymakam of Hüsni Mansur, and thus of “exceeding his
prerogatives.” Mazhar notes that the two men clashed because they could not agree on how
to “divide up” these deportees’ property. Things became more complicated when Haci Bedri

Ağa,347 who belonged to the Reşvan tribe involved in “sending off” the deportees, “stuck
his nose” into the affair, so that Hakkı Bey was compelled to give him “part of the booty in
order to calm him down.” Mazhar’s report charges the kaymakam of Kahta with “responsibil-
ity for substantial material losses” and also with seizing, “by legal or personal means, large
sums of money and considerable amounts of property. According to information and proof of
the most reliable kind, he transferred only 10,000 piasters to the treasury.” Mazhar observed
that, “in the kaza, the plunder of Armenian property, by both officials and the population,
assumed incredible proportions.”348
Thus, as we have just seen, the inquiry carried out by Istanbul centered on a sordid affair
of illicit personal gain at the expense of the state treasury, to say nothing of the deportees.
The fact that Haci Bedri Ağa and his men murdered these people in the Kahta gorge near
Fırıncilar does not seem to have upset the central authorities much. It is clear that their main
concern was recovering the property taken from deportees, wherever they might be. Jafar
Abdallah, an officer in the gendarmerie accused of having organized the massacre of 1,500
Armenians in Karlık, was also unduly troubled by the military courts.349
This remote kaza, which saw hundreds of thousands of deportees plundered or slain in the
Karlık gorge, is almost a caricature of Young Turk government and Ottoman society in the
eastern vilayets. Two sub-prefects quarreled over the property of the deportees from Erzerum,
who were killed soon after; an inquiry was undertaken, but only because this property was
diverted from the state coffers; a Kurdish chieftain, who had been entrusted with the task
of “expediting” the deportees – that is, with the dirty work of killing them – insisted that
he be given his share of the “pie.” Financial abuse and personal enrichment seem to have
been the only crimes for which anyone could be brought before a court-martial, as if the
authorities had legalized massacres in advance. A 12 December 1915 telegram would seem
to indicate that while these matters were under investigation the minister of the interior
was issuing new instructions to “deport” the handful of Armenians who had so far been left
in their homes: “In accordance with the last orders received, not a single local [Armenian]
has been kept here. Similarly, not a single person come from elsewhere has been allowed to
remain.”350
The Kaza of Besni/Behesni

In the kaza bordering on Kahta, Behesni, 3,750 Armenians, one-third of the total popu-
lation, lived in its administrative seat in 1914, while another roughly 800 Armenians
inhabited seven other localities: Kesun, Surfaz, Şamboyad, Tut, Pelvere, Raban Ovase,
and Hoçgaşi.351 The kaymakam, Edhem Kadri Bey, who was named to his post on 11
April 1915 and remained in it until 6 March 1916, ordered the arrest of Father Clement
Singirian and 20 notables from Behesni in early May. They were sent to Kündebeg and
massacred by çetes on 13 May.352 Like his colleague from the kaza of Kahta, Edhem
Kadri Bey faced court prosecution after the inquiry conducted by Mazhar in fall 1915.353
Kadri, the president of the local commission responsible for abandoned property (mahalli
emvalı metruke), was blamed “for significant losses of property abandoned by deported
Armenians and abuses in connection with this property”; sealing only about ten houses,
with as many stores “abandoned by the Armenians of his kaza, out of a total of 400 houses
and 128 stores”; and leaving the remaining real estate “without surveillance.” Mazhar also
charged him with recruiting collaborators who were “widely known to be disreputable,”
with the result that the bulk of the “abandoned property” had disappeared; failing “to
keep records that would have made it possible to make an inventory of the abandoned
property”; and selling the property stored in the church “that was serving as a ware-
house,” thus facilitating “illicit gain on the part of certain individuals.” The accusation

also bore on government officials’ participation in the auctions. These officials had “sold
goods worth 13,232 piasters on credit” and had never tried to recover the debt from the
buyers. Finally, the accusation noted that the kaymakam had “failed to take the interests
of the Treasury into account”; it charged him with rigging auctions, “requisitioning the
furniture and possessions of one of the richest Armenian houses in Behesni, without
compensation” for his personal use and, more generally, “making illicit profits thanks to
his involvement in Armenian affairs.”354
Mashar’s fall 1915 report thus exposes the ferocious struggle between the Treasury on the
one hand and local notables and government officials on the other over the legalized plunder
of the Armenians’ “abandoned property.” The real situation was a far cry from the formal
statements of the authorities, who pledged to protect this property yet themselves behaved
like predators. In a 5 November 1915 report, the mutesarif of Malatia laconically announced:
“There are no Armenians left in Behesni.”355
The Slaughterhouses of the Kaza of Akçadağ

There was, at best, only a symbolic Armenian presence in the kaza of Akçadag, which had
a total Armenian population of 1,691. The Armenians lived in Arga (137 Armenians),
the predominantly Kurdish village of Ansar, the administrative seat of the kaza (167
Armenians), Muşovga (380 Armenians), Hekimhan (770 Armenians), and Hasançelebi
(237 Armenians).356 However, as we have seen, the kaza straddled one of the main routes
used to deport the Armenian population. The choice of a kaymakam for Akçadağ was
therefore important. Vasfi Bey, who had been appointed on 27 March 1914, was dismissed
on 23 July 1915 and immediately replaced by Asım Bey (who remained in office until 12
June 1916). Coming at a time when dozens of convoys were converging on Akçadağ from
the north and west, this was a surprising change. One possible explanation is that Vasfi
Bey had not carried out orders with sufficient rigor. It is, however, much more likely that
the kaymakam was a victim of the financial issue – the question of how the deportees’
expropriated assets were to be divided up. Ali Amruş, the commander of the gendarm-
erie in Akçadağ/Arga, also served as a financial inspector in Hekimhan, a place where
many massacres were perpetrated. Complicit in the murder of several thousand deportees
along with Haci Karib Ağa, the head of the squadron of çetes responsible for the site, he
was brought before a court martial in Malatia and condemned for “abuses” (that is, mis-
dealings), but was ultimately acquitted by the military authorities.357 Haci Halil Kör, who
openly boasted that he had executed 49 male Armenians in Hekimhan, was never pros-
ecuted, probably because he had distributed part of the booty he took from the deportees
to his superiors.358 Tayar Bey, the secretary of the gendarmerie in Malatia who was charged
with leading the çetes “disguised as gendarmes” stationed at Kırk Göz on the Tohma Çay,
kept the 5,000 Turkish pounds he had taken from deportees whom he had ordered killed.
Yet he was not indicted either.359 According to the report of Captain Fazıl, who sat on the
bench of the court-martial in Malatia, the sole grounds for indictment were personal gain,
never murder or rape.
As we have seen, Kirk Göz Bridge, which the Armenians deported from Nigde, Tokat,
Samsun, Amasia, Gürün, Arapkir, Sıvas, and Eğin crossed on their way to one of the killing
fields near Malatia, was under the control of a sevkiyat memuri (director of the deportation).360
With the aid of çetes, who may or may not have been wearing gendarmes’ uniforms, the sevki-
yat memuri transported groups of deportees to the other bank of the river after removing the
males between 12 and 65 from the convoys. These males were massacred on the riverbank
and thrown into the river, whereas the women and younger children were set walking again,
bound for the plain of Fırıncilar, a six-hours march away.

The Main Authors of the Slaughters in Malatia

The report drawn up by Captain Fazıl, a former judge of the court-martial in Malatia, is
without contest the richest document we have on the crimes committed in this sancak. Fazıl
lists the names of 567 war criminals complicit by various degrees in the atrocities and crimes
perpetrated in the vilayet of Harput. In addition to providing information that Fazıl acquired
during the trials that some of these men faced for financial abuse, his 82-page report, com-
pleted on 30 November 1918, also describes the crimes that he himself had witnessed and the
abuses about which their perpetrators had boasted in his presence.
Fazıl’s report on the events that occurred in 1915 in the vilayet of Mamuret ul-Aziz
and especially the sancak of Malatia begins with a general assessment that is not without
interest:
The 1915 abuses perpetrated against the Christians of the eastern provinces constitute one
of the blackest pages in history ... These abominations, acts contrary to justice and civiliza-
tion, wounded Islam in its very heart. These thousands of Christians never showed the
least resistance to the government’s orders ... They were deported from all over, one convoy
after the next. All their personal belongings and property were plundered and more than
1 million people were exterminated to satisfy the bloodlust of a few brigands ... Large num-
bers of children were smashed against walls and boulders. Barely pubescent girls drowned
themselves after being raped; hundreds of thousands of men and women were massacred
with swords or axes and cast into ditches or wells. Other corpses were strewn over moun-
tains and plains and abandoned, food for birds of prey.361
The captain’s report refers to a number of cases submitted to the court-martial in Malatia
at the request of the ministers of justice, war, and the interior. Yet the court, he observes,
never judged the people implicated in the massacres; it considered only the property-related
abuses of which the Armenians were the victims, the seizures of real estate and movable
assets. According to Fazıl, the cases submitted to the court-martial particularly involved
people suspected of having cheated the CUP or government. Even when the proceed-
ings attested the perpetration of massacres, they were never judged. In Fazıl’s view, there
existed a tacit agreement between the government, the CUP, and the leaders of the Special
Organization, by which the courts martial would not deal with crimes but only “abuses.”
Moreover, when all was said and done, very few real condemnations were pronounced; the
punishments inflicted were often limited to confiscation of the assets that had been illegally
acquired by the accused.
The examples that Fazıl adduces give us an idea of the ordinary crimes that were often
committed for no reason other than a lust for gain. Fevzizâde Muftizâde Effendi, a man
accused of stealing the rugs and other belongings of an Armenian doctor to whom he had
supposedly given shelter in order to save him, but whom he had in fact murdered, was con-
demned for theft but not for murder.362 Hoca Mehmed Effendi Dellalzâde, who murdered
an Armenian woman to come into the possession of her three houses, had all his property
confiscated by the state but was not condemned for homicide.363 Haci Ahmed, the son of
Haci Kolağasi, confessed before the court-martial that he had shot several Armenians to
death with a revolver in order to seize their property; the court ordered the property confis-
cated and sentenced him to 12 years in prison for theft (his sentence was later reduced by
the military authorities).364 Ziya Hararci, chief court clerk in Malatia’s court of justice and an
inspector of the convoys of deportees, had escorted a caravan of 1,500 Armenians to Indere,
an hour’s march from the city, and ordered the çetes there to kill them, dig a pit, and burn
the bodies in it. Yet the court-martial saw no reason to indict him.365

This general mechanism of conditional impunity, established at the highest levels of the
Ittihadist party-state, throws up the question of the personal legal accountability of gov-
ernment officials, if not that of the members of paramilitary groups such as the Teşkilât-ı
Mahsusa, who were by law immune from punishment of any kind. It is hard to imagine that
Constantinople was capable of appointing to the highest level of the local governmental
hierarchy – that is, to the post of mutesarif – anyone it suspected of opposing its policy
of eliminating the Armenians. In Malatia, Reşid Bey, Reverend Bauernfeind’s spontaneous
liking for him notwithstanding, was deeply implicated in the anti-Armenian persecutions,
although not necessarily as their main instigator. The Ittihad inspector Resneli Nâzım’s long
stay in Malatia reveals that the key individual there, who was also probably the head of the
Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa in the region, was none other than the city’s parliamentary deputy and
president of its Ittihadist club, Haşim Bey. A rich landowner and a very influential indi-
vidual, Haşim was, according to the mayor Mustafa Ağa, one of the “principal authors” of
the persecutions, the initiator of the arrest and massacre of Malatia’s Armenians. According
to Bauernfeind, he and his sons derived “great personal profit” from the seizure of the mur-
dered Armenians’ property.366 The role played by his son Mehmed, who had been entrusted
with commanding the squadron of çetes operating in Malatia and the vicinity, made Haşim
and his sons the family with the heaviest responsibility for the murder of the Armenians, as
well as the family that profited the most from the seizure of their assets. However, the house
searches, the confiscation of Armenian weapons, the torture, and the deportations – in a
word, all the “administrative” preliminaries – were carried out by civilian and military offi-
cials. The Young Turk state’s responsibility for these mass crimes, as well as its duplicity, are
nicely brought out by this statement of the German minister’s:
The outward appearances are beyond criticism: legal condemnation of those who have
fomented sedition and banishment of the rest of the population to Urfa. [However,] en
route or even right where they are, as many men as possible are secretly murdered. As
a rule, the women are allowed to live, that is, to perish. The same holds for the chil-
dren – or they are transformed into Turks.367
The military and civilian officials implicated in these crimes were Reşid Bey, mutesarif
(no. 42); Serry Bey, mutesarif and Reşid’s successor (no. 77); Hamdi Bey, a commander in the
gendarmerie (no. 69); Abdülkadir, a commander in the gendarmerie and Hamdi’s successor
(no. 38); Tayar Bey, a secretary in the gendarmerie; Nâzım, a lieutenant in the gendarmerie
(no. 69); Tevfik, an inspecteur in the gendarmerie (no. 60); Vasfi Bey, the kaymakam of
Akçadağ; Salih Bey, vice mutesarif; Tahir, the ex-mutesarif of Kerbala (no. 72); Hrink Köylü
Abdüllah, a police chief (no. 52); Ali Çavus, the head of the gendarmerie of Erğana (no. 106);
Eginli Sadik Bey, an assistant police chief (no. 65); Ayvasin Hasan Effendi, Halil Effendi,
and Haci Ibrahim, police captains; Şiroli Mahmud, a prison director (no. 53); Muhezin Yusuf
(no. 54); Süleyman Effendi, an assistant prison director (no. 59); Ahmed Effendi, a director of
the Agricultural Service; Arapkirli Cemal, an official in the land registration office (no. 74);
the parliamentary deputy Eşref Hoca; the mufti who wrote the fatwa about the extermination
of the Armenians in Malatia; Erzrumli Masud Effendi, a judge (no. 41); Gusikoğlu Ahmed,
an interpreter; and Hoca Ali Effendi, a teacher (no. 17).368 Of the multitude of underlings
who carried out orders, a good many came from the tribes. Among them were Saricanli
Kasab Hüseyin, the murderer of the Catholic bishop; Yazicezâde Tahir (no. 35); Demirci
Ali Ahmed Ağa; Hasim Effendi, a policeman; Ağcadağli Velioğlu Hüseyin Ağa; Hakkı
Effendi, a policeman; Velioğlu Kör Ali Ağa; Bekir Ağa, son of Kurbağli Köse; Süleyman,
son of Kurbağli Köse; Ali Amruş, the commander of the gendarmerie of Akçedağ (no. 62);
Dedeşarkhinli Yusuf Ağa; Becet, a policeman (no. 57); Delibaşli Süleyman Ağa; Boyrazin

Hasan Ağa; Mağmurlioğlu Yusuf Ağa; Muftizâde Fazıleddin Feyzi Effendi; Haci Hasan,
son of Tommo; Hasan Onbaşi (no. 71); Çoloğlu Mahmud Ağa; Boranlı Kurd Hamo Ağa;
Lutfi Bey, a retired kaymakam; Hüseyin Ağa, son of Çeşo; Küçügün Vahab Ağa; Tortunlı
Haci Hafiz Ağa; Tellalzâde Hoca Mehmed Effendi; Kesecioğlu Kasab Süleyman; Bedri Ağa
Kahtalı; Haci Abdüllahzâde Hasan Bey (no. 81); Selukizâde Ahmed Ağa; Reşuvaloğlu Haci
Effendi; Haci Pasha; Haci Rol Ağasineoğlu; Haci Ahmed; Kandaroğlu Haci Abdüllah; Müdir
Süleymanzâde Kadir; Alibeyzâde Haci Reşid; Mehmed Effendi; Erdegununioğlu Abdüllah;
Mafuzeffendioğlu Yusuf; and Erzrumli Faik.369
The Sancak of Dersim, a Haven for Armenian Deportees

The sancak of Dersim represents a very special case in the millennial history of Asia Minor.
This mountainous, forest-covered enclave has almost always been relegated to the margins
of history; its population has remained isolated, displaying specific local characteristics
inherited from time immemorial. Carved up into several different Armenian principalities
in antiquity, the region was never completely Armenized, although an impressive number
of churches (107) and monasteries in ruins (50) show that it was extensively Christianized.
Cut off from the world and refractory to all outside influence, Dersim was never subjugated
by the Ottoman state, which collected no taxes in the district and was unable to impose its
authority on it. Although the district was reputed to be dangerous for anyone not native to
it, a few Armenian merchants and hardy churchmen ventured into it under the protection
of local begs.
Thanks to a handful of firsthand reports by such people, we can give an approximate
description of the social and political situation prevailing in Dersim on the eve of the First
World War. In this period, 16,657 Armenians lived there alongside two groups that together
formed the majority – to the south and southeast, the Seyd Hasan tribe, supposed to have
come from Persian Khorasan, and in the rest of the sancak, in the most inaccessible regions,
the “Dersimli.” Albeit partially Turkified, both groups, especially the Dersimli, had elabo-
rated a very particular religious syncretism under various influences; it was the religion of the
overwhelming majority of both the Dersimli and the Seyd Hasan. Several strata coexisted
in it – pagan, Zoroastrian, Christian, and Muslim. Because of their secret religious practices,
the Kızılbaş followers of this faith were deemed gâvurs (“infidels”) like the Christians. Indeed,
the mere trappings or outward manifestations of the faith of the Kızılbaş were enough to give
pause to an orthodox Muslim. Parallel to the worship of Saint Serge, whose feast day was
preceded every year by seven days of fasting, or that of the Twelve Apostles, the Holy Cross,
and the Hake sun (the feast of the “red eggs”) – that is, Easter, which the Kızılbaş celebrated
in common with the Armenians – the followers of this syncretic religion turned toward the
east when they prayed and went on pilgrimages to monasteries, which they protected against
all incursions as if they were part of their own heritage. This did not prevent them from cel-
ebrating Ali, Hüseyin, and Moses, but they completely ignored Ramadan. At the same time,
they had a ritual of their own, which according to the best-informed observers consisted of
songs and dances performed secretly at night in accordance with an elaborate code. The
members of a religious caste, all from the same tribe, saw to it that this code was properly
observed. Among the 40 tribes in Dersim, two – the Mirakian and Der Ovantsik tribes –
were Armenian. The Mirakians, whose territory lay near Dujik, Çukur, Ekez, and Torud,
could mobilize 3,000 fighters. Earning their living almost exclusively from sheep-raising, as
well as rugmaking and kilim-making, these mountaineers were partially liquidated in 1915,
although a minority of them survived in Dersim.370
Thus, it is hardly surprising that, during the 1915 events, the region became a refuge
for 10,000 to 15,000 Armenians from the plain of Harput and the western districts of the

sancak of Erzincan,371 and also for many inhabitants of the neighboring kazas, especially the
Armenians of Pardi/Ovacık (pop. 50) and Nâzımiye/Kyzilkilise (pop. 89).372 Did the welcome
given to these refugees have political significance? Probably not. Both Reverend Riggs’s and
Nazaret Piranian’s accounts state that these population transfers came at a high price: the
first fugitives paid as much as 100 Turkish pounds for passage to the area, although Kurdish
begs later reduced their price to as little as 10 pounds. On the other hand, there were cases
in which people without means were welcomed in Dersim. But life there was harsh for one
and all, and many Armenians survived only by entering the service of the local ağas. That
said, the Kurdish chieftains of Dersim never allowed the authorities to enter their fiefdoms.
It is likely that the objective of Vali Sabit’s ten-day mission to Dersim, which began on 31
July 1915, was to persuade the local Kurdish chieftains to turn over their Armenians.373
In 1914, in the administrative seat of the kaza, Hozat, an ugly village of scarcely a thou-
sand inhabitants, there lived 350 Armenians. There were also 15 mixed – that is, Armenian
and Kızılbaş – villages in Dersim, with a total Armenian population of 1,949.374 According
to an official report, 1,088 Armenians were deported from the kaza of Hozat.375 If the official
count of the Armenian population is to be believed, which put their numbers only a little
higher, it follows that all the Armenians of the kaza were either killed or deported. Given
the geography of the district, this seems unlikely. It is more reasonable to suppose that about
half the Armenians fell victim to the persecutions, while the other half was able to flee to
the mountains of Dersim.
Of the 1,835 Armenians of the kaza of Medzgerd/Mazgirt, 1,200 lived in Hozat, which
had been an important Armenian fortress town in the Middle Ages. The others lived in
eight Armenian-Kızılbaş villages: Lazvan, Dilan-Oghche, Tamudagh, Dana-Buran, Shordan,
Khozenkiugh/Kushdun, Pakh, and Chukur. The ruins of some 15 medieval monasteries were
to be found in the vicinity of these villages.376 Here as well, the official statistics would sug-
gest that the deportation carried off virtually all the Armenians – that is, 1,423.377 Above
all, the figure seems to attest to the zealousness of the people responsible for the deportations
in the area; they were doubtless more eager to show Istanbul how well they were performing
their task than to establish a precise count.
The Kaza of Çarsancak

In 1914, there were 1,763 Armenians in Peri, the administrative seat of the kaza of Çarsancak,
and around 6,200 living in 42 villages in the kaza.378 The kaymakam, Ali Rıza, held office
from 2 March to 15 July 1915. He was therefore present when the first massacres took place,
in Pertag/Pertak, near the landing of the ferry that linked Harput to Dersim over the
Euphrates.379 In this kaza, the official count of the deportees, 6,537,380 seems quite as unlikely
as the census figures cited a moment ago if one bears in mind the number of conscripts in the
amele taburis and the number of people who were able to retreat into Dersim’s mountainous
areas.
The Kaza of Çemişkezek

Chmshgadzak/Çemişkezek, the administrative seat of the kaza of the same name, had an
Armenian population of 1,348, representing about one-third of the kaza’s total population;
another 3,146 Armenians lived in its 21 villages. It was set apart by the fact that it had a pop-
ulation of 4,935 Islamicized Armenians by the late eighteenth century. Most of them inhab-
ited the nahie of Saint-Toros, in the northwestern part of the district, near the little town of
Barasor on the left bank of the Euphrates. There were also Orthodox Armenians – called
“Greeks” in the Ottoman statistics – in the villages of Mamsa, Khntrgig, and Setrga, where

they lived alongside their Apostolic compatriots. The other villages were Dzaghari, Ardga,
Sisna, Strkeh, Garmri, Miadun, Pazapon, Morshka, Kharasar, Mezra, Baghcha/Bardizag,
Ekrek/Yeritsakrag, Murna, Brekhi, and Tsntsor.381
The first rumors to the effect that Armenian soldiers serving in the battalions sta-
tioned in the regions of Erzerum and Erzincan were being disarmed reached Chmshgadzak
during the Easter holidays, around 4 April. Shortly thereafter, stories began to make the
rounds about Armenian soldiers who were going over to the enemy and betraying “mili-
tary secrets”.382 It was at this point that the kaymakam, Selim Ahmed, opened the first
phase of the anti-Armenian persecutions. On 1 May 1915, searches were conducted in the
Armenians’ schools, officials’ homes, and shops in the bazaar. Eighteen leading citizens were
arrested. The authorities were looking in particular for the official seals of the Hnchak and
Dashnak parties and the Armenians’ supposed arms caches. The next day, as many as 100
people were taken into custody.383 The torture to which they were subjected seems to have
been more violent than anything observed elsewhere – several men were nailed to a wall –
and went on until 20 June, when the kaymakam announced that the prisoners were leaving
for Mezreh to be tried.384
On 1 July 1915, the town crier announced the deportation order and outlawed sales of
real estate or moveable assets, which were henceforth “government property.” On Friday,
2 July, around 1,000 people were put on the road to Arapkir after a few children and
young women had been abducted by Turkish families. The convoy took four days to reach
Arapkir, remained there for another three, and then set out for Harput. Ordinarily a jour-
ney of a day and a half, the caravan walked for three weeks before arriving in Harput,
taking wildly improbable detours. In Mezreh, it was stationed at an hour’s distance from
town. It then set out on the road to Dyarbekir, going by way of Hanlı Han, where the males
between ten and 15 and between 40 and 70 were removed from the convoy and shut up in a
khan. The rest of the caravan continued on its way until it reached Argana Maden, where
it was confronted with a horrifying vision of hundreds of bodies rotting on the banks of
the Tigris.385
After a six-weeks trek, the convoy reached Severek, where all the deportees were plun-
dered and some had their throats cut. The next waystation was Urfa. There, what was left of
the caravan was divided into two groups: one set out for Suruc, to the southwest, while the
other headed due south, toward Rakka. Our witness notes that by now there were no longer
any old men in the convoy. After passing through the camps of Mumbuc and Bab 150 women
reached the transit camp in Aleppo.386
We have an account of events in the rural zones of the kaza by three eyewitnesses from
the village of Garmrig, located a mile or two west of Chmshgadzak.387 Here, the searches for
weapons took place on 19 June. On Sunday, 4 July, 200 men from the surrounding villages
joined the men of Garmrig, who had been taken into custody the day before. They were then
“sent to work,” escorted by gendarmes and çetes.388 The same day, all boys under 10 years of
age were taken from their families. On 5 July, the women were summoned to the church in
order to register their belongings there before preparing to leave for Urfa. A convoy of female
deportees from the villages of the Chmshgadzak district was put on the road around 10 July.
The same evening, when they reached the banks of the Euphrates, the guards showed them
the bloodstained clothing of their men.389
Witnesses say that their convoy and another comprising more villagers from the kaza of
Chmshgadzak were combined in Arapkir. Several weeks later, 12 of the 100 women who had
left Garmrig on 5 July reached Aleppo after passing through Urfa, Mumbuc, and Bab.390
A number of villagers from the kaza, especially those from localities in the north, man-
aged to flee to the Kurdish areas, where they survived as best they could until spring 1916.
They moved on to Erzincan when the Russian army took control of the region.391

Destroying the Traces

The file on the pretrial investigation of the criminals responsible for the massacres and
deportations includes correspondence between the vali of Mamuret ul-Aziz and the mutesarif
of Malatia, and also between Sabit Bey and the minister of the interior. The sole subject of
this correspondence is how to wipe away the traces of the crimes, particularly how to bury
the bodies littering the roads. The first telegram on this subject was sent by Sabit to Mutesarif
Reşid of Malatia on 21 August 1915 – that is, shortly after the main convoys of deportees
from the north and west had entered the sancak of Malatia. To begin with, we learn from it
that “there are many corpses strewn along the roads” in this sancak, “with all the problems
that that entails.” Sabit also makes it understood that these corpses have not been buried
with “care” and that “officials guilty of negligence” ought to be punished without delay.392
It would seem, however, that his instructions had no effect. On 10 September, he repeated
his admonitions to Reşid: “It has come to our attention that there are corpses rotting on
the boundary between [the kazas of] Hüsni Mansur and Besni ... It is not appropriate, either
from the government’s standpoint or for health reasons, that putrefying [corpses] be left out
in the open.”393 In all fairness to the mutesarif of Malatia, it should be acknowledged that
the repeated passage of convoys necessitated regular clean-ups of the roads, a chore that was
curiously assigned to the gendarmes. “From the government’s standpoint,” these putrefying
bodies betrayed rather too plainly what the real objective of the deportations was.
Three months later, doubtless in reaction to information that had reached Istanbul
through diplomatic channels, the minister of the interior reprimanded the vali of Mamuret
ul-Aziz, complaining that “there are still bodies out in the open ... or remains.”394 It seems
that transmitting these instructions to the kaymakams and the commanding officers of the
gendarmerie, who were threatened with court-martial,395 finally convinced them “to re-open
the trenches and dig them deep enough that dogs could not get into them.”396 The mode of
transport generally used to deport the Armenian population – walking – certainly reduced
the logistical problems involved in providing them with an escort, but it also generated a
number of secondary effects: epidemics broke out in the deportees’ wake, ravaging the civil-
ian population.
The Authors of the Massacres in the Vilayet of Harput

Although we can quite clearly discern the role that Vali Sabit Cemal Sağiroğlu,397 General
Süleyman Faik Pasha,398 the commander of the Eleventh Army Corps, and the police chief
Süleyman Bey Zâde Reşid Bey played in the arrests, torture, and house searches, as well as
the organization of the deportations and “orphanages” and the “protection of the convoys,” it
is harder to asses their part in the atrocities to which the imprisoned men and the deportees
were subjected. Obviously, the national authorities wanted to separate the administrative
procedures, where a semblance of legality was maintained, from the massacres entrusted to
the Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa, which were generally committed in remote areas in the absence of
witnesses.
In the vilayet of Mamuret ul-Aziz, several prominent members of the Young Turk club
took an active hand in those clandestine massacres. As the driving force behind these
crimes, one stands out from all the others – the deputy from Dersim, Haci Baloşzâde
Mehmed Nuri Bey,399 who was assisted by his brother Ali Pasha. It was Mehmed Nuri Bey
who organized and supervised the squadrons of çetes led by the two Kurdish chieftains of
the Reşvan tribe, Zeynel Bey and Haci Bedri Ağa; their field of operations was the plain
of Fırıncilar and the gorge immediately adjoining it.400 At a lower level, the deputy from
Malatia, Haşim Bey, and his son Haşim Beyzâde Mehmed, head of the squadron of çetes

based an hour’s distance from Malatia, in Taşpinar, played similar roles in this sancak.401 It
is harder to assess the criminal activities of the other Young Turk protagonists of Mezreh
and Malatia, whose names we have listed.402 The case of the CUP inspector in the vilayet
of Mamuret ul-Aziz, Boşnak Resneli Nâzım Bey, is even more problematic. Although a fair
number of foreigners resided in the vilayet’s capital, none of the reports we have mention
Boşnak Resneli even once. All we know, thanks to the diary of the German minister Hans
Bauernfeind and the account of a judge who officiated on the court-martial in Malatia, is
that he spent more than two weeks in this city; he organized a meeting of all the Young
Turk leaders at Haşim Bey’s house, where he also lodged, and facilitated the training of
the squadron of çetes who notably massacred the worker-soldiers of the region’s amele tar-
buris.403 There is every reason to believe that he engaged in similar activities in Mezreh,
where, however, he seems to have come in for criticism (like Haci Baloşzâde Mehmed Nuri)
from General Süleyman Faik Pasha and various other officers, who charged both men with
profiting from their positions to extort large sums “in the name of the Committee of Union
and Progress,” and thus “personally enriching themselves at the expense of the Armenian
deportees and the Syrians.” These officers even demanded that Resneli Nâzım be recalled
and that Hasim Bey be punished, suggesting to the vali that he refer the matter to “the
honorable Committee.”404
We likewise have only scant documentation on inspector Nâzım’s relations with the twin
hierarchies on which he depended, the Ittihad’s Central Committee and the political leader-
ship of the Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa. The only known telegram, dated 21 Haziran/4 July 1915, was
addressed to Nâzım Bey by the head of the Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa, Bahaeddin Şakir; it was twice
authenticated by the court-martial of Istanbul in 1919. It has apparently never been exam-
ined by historians, who, in citing it, copy one from the next the erroneous date of 21 April,
thus robbing the telegram of all significance. The real date shows it to have been sent the day
after the second convoy of deportees left Mezreh. The message is explicit and provides direct
insight into the way Bahaeddin Şakir supervised, from Erzerum, the criminal operations
underway in the area under the jurisdiction of the Third Army: “No. 5, for Nâzım Bey. Have
you undertaken the liquidation of the Armenians who have been deported from the region?
Are you eradicating the harmful individuals whom you say you have deported or exiled, or
are you limiting yourselves to displacing them? Give me clear information, my brother.”405
The connection between the Special Organization and the representatives of the Ittihadist
Central Committee appears clearly here, as does the nature of their relations.
Officers present in the area often witnessed the way the state’s policy toward the
Armenian population was translated into practice. Not all of them necessarily approved of
these measures. Many took, at the very least, a rather lucid view of them. Araks Mgrdichian,
the 21-year-old Euphrates College-educated daughter of the former British vice-consul in
Dyarbekir, Thomas Mgrdichian, reports conversations she had or overheard while treating
Turkish officers in the American hospital in Mezreh in summer 1915. Responding to col-
leagues who asked if the Armenians were truly guilty of the charges the government was
leveling at them, Captain Ahmed Rıza said wryly, “Even the Armenians have started won-
dering whether they are truly guilty of having fabricated bombs and dynamite. The poor
imbeciles!”406 On another occasion, Mehmed Ali, an officer who had abducted and “mar-
ried” the daughter of Professor Vorperian, a Euphrates College teacher, exclaimed: “Do you
imagine that we weren’t capable of punishing only those who were guilty – if any actually
were? Why do you suppose that the civil court did not resolve the problem, but passed it on
to the court-martial, which, in this war, had become savage? The plan was four years old.”407
Such statements, which were perhaps not particularly rare among Ottoman officers, show to
what extent the propaganda meant to stigmatize “the” Armenians came to influence broad
sectors of the population, until it came to affect the Armenians themselves.

Among the civilian officials working alongside the vali and implicated to one or another
degree in the anti-Armenian persecutions were Cemal Bey, the secretary general of the
vilayet; the head of the post office, Mektubci Şevkı Bey, who was also an influential member
of the Young Turk club; Hasan Effendi, the warden of the Mezreh prison; Asim Bey, the
kaymakam of Harput until August 1915; Hikmet Bey, the head of the department of commer-
cial litigations (umum hukukiye); and Edhem Kadri Bey, the kaymakam of Behesni. Among
military officials and officers in the gendarmerie, some played crucial roles in the arrest and
torture of the men, especially in the Red Konak: Süleyman Faik Pasha, the commander of
the Army’s Eleventh Corps; Major Ferid, a division commander; Arapkirli Mehmed, a sec-
retary in the gendarmerie; Arapkirli Ali Effendi; and Colonel Mehmed Vehib, who replaced
Süleyman Faik late in November 1915. Of course, the commission responsible for abandoned
property, headed by Mehmed Ali, assisted by Süleyman Sudi Effendi, Kuheddin Bey and
his son, and Şerif Bey and his two sons, supervised the confiscation of Armenian property,
in part to the personal benefit of its members. Among those who carried out the massa-
cres were the commanders of the squadrons of çetes of the Special Organization: Mulazim
Ethem Şevket; Haci Kahya from Izoli; Akçadağlı Sinanoğlu; Pulutlı Halil; Haci Şeih Ağa;
Mehmed Bey; and Zeynel Ağa and Haci Bedri Ağa, chieftains of the Revan tribe. They were
aided and abetted by a number of band leaders: Arab Mustafa Effendi; Arapkirli Genco Ağa;
Haci Feyzi; Arapkirli Çobanzâde Halil Pasha; Asim Bey; Arapkirli Kenan; and Arapkirli
Nalbandbaşi Mehmed Ali.408
The indictment that Fazıl drew up against Sabit Bey indicates that the vali took 15,000
Turkish pounds gold from Hovhannes Harputlian after killing him and deporting his
family.409 Another document accuses Sabit of depositing large sums at the Erzerum post
office, including orders of payment signed by people who were deported and killed on the
road to Malatia. The vali was also charged with ordering the head of the post to deposit
8,000 Turkish pounds gold in his account in October 1915.410 The judgment that General
Vehib Pasha passed on the crimes committed in the vilayet of Mamuret ul-Aziz confirms that
local officials acted with total impunity, having been protected by the supreme authorities
of the party-state:
The atrocities perpetrated in Mezreh, Harput and the surrounding area and, in par-
ticular, in Malatia, eminently deserve to be singled out and recorded. The fact that this
murderous apparatus, which was brought to bear even on women and children, some-
times operated under the very eyes of the leaders of the executive and responsible state
officials, with their full knowledge, like the fact that, despite pressing reasons to the
contrary, no legal prosecution was ever undertaken by either the gendarmerie or legal
authorities, means, at the very least, that the leaders of the government and govern-
ment officials closed their eyes to what was going on. The criminals, thus encouraged,
committed their crimes without restraint, because those crimes were tolerated.411
Thus, one is not surprised to learn that at the trial (which ran from 20 November 1919 to
14 January 1920) of the men implicated in the deportations from the vilayet of Mamuret
ul-Aziz,412 only two of the authors of these crimes – the parliamentary deputy Mehmed Nuri
and the head of the department of education, Ferid – were actually sitting in the dock.413 It
is no more surprising to observe that Bahaeddin Şakir, condemned to death “in accordance
with Articles 171 and 181 of the Ottoman penal code,” and Resneli Nâzım, condemned to
15 years in prison, were both absent. As for Haci Baloşzâdeh Mehmed Nuri Bey, he was
acquitted.414
Inasmuch as all the mechanisms of the party-state were involved in these acts, the ver-
dict was predictable. Moreover, when Enver Pasha passed through Mezreh in May 1916,

accompanied by the German military attaché Hans Humann, the minister of war gave the
American consul to understand that he knew about the reports on the atrocities perpetrated
against the Armenians in the region that the consul had transmitted to Istanbul. He was
also not unaware of the fact that the people whose honored guest he was that day had mas-
sacred the owners of the house in which he was being received (it was later acquired by Sabit
Bey).415 One more detail is symptomatic of the Young Turks’ determination to liquidate the
Armenians down to the last man, woman, and child: when Leslie Davis left Mezreh on 16
May 1917, he was not allowed to take with him the “American” citizens who had been living
in his home since early summer 1915.416

Chapter 8

the Vilayet of Sıvas
T
he vast Sıvas vilayet, one of the most densely populated in Asia Minor, had approxi-
mately 1 million inhabitants in 1914, including 204,472 Armenians and about 100,000
Greeks and Syriacs. The Armenians in the urban centers were the most conspicuous,
but non-negligible numbers of Armenians inhabited the countryside as well; they lived in
some 240 villages and hamlets, boasting 198 churches, 21 monasteries, and 204 schools with
a total enrolment of 20,599.1 Unlike the vilayets we have examined so far, the Armenians in
the Sıvas vilayet lived side-by-side with a Turkish-speaking (rather than Kurdish-speaking)
Sunni Muslim population, including 10,000 muhacirs who had settled in the region in the
wake of the Balkan War.2
The 30 March 1913 nomination of a new vali, Ahmed Muammer Bey – he held his post
until 1 February 19163 – seems to have exacerbated the degradation of the non-Muslims’ situ-
ation. In accordance with the wishes of Young Turk circles, as soon as he took office the vali
initiated a policy of boycotting Christian entrepreneurs and merchants after the Ottoman
defeat at the hands of the Balkan coalition. Muammer, a native of Sıvas and the son of a
magistrate, played a decisive role in creating a network of Ittihadist clubs in his native vilayet
from 1908 on.4 Thirty-two years old when he assumed his post, the vali was the very proto-
type of the new sort of man the CUP needed to implement its policy of creating a “national
economy” in the provinces: he was simultaneously the vali and the representative of the
Unionist Central Committee in this vilayet in the middle of Asia Minor, through which
he traveled extensively in order to broaden the circle of Ittihadist party activists and spread
party propaganda.5 According to Armenian sources, the real problems began only after the
adoption of the reforms in the eastern provinces. Like the Greek populations living on the
coasts of the Aegean, the Armenians of the Sıvas vilayet were the victims of the increasingly
harsh policies of the Young Turks. In particular, Ahmed Muammer carried out a plan of eco-
nomic harassment, the objective of which was to put an end to the Armenians’ “prosperity”
and bring Turkish cooperatives into existence.6 He even seems to have called on the hojas
of the vilayet to give their sermons a corresponding slant.7 This determined vali also cre-
ated schools in which Armenian teachers trained apprentices.8 He thus sought to eliminate
what seemed to him to be an Armenian monopoly over craft production. But Muammer
also attacked religious institutions; such as when he confiscated the land belong to the mon-
astery of St. Nshan, located near the city, in order to build a barracks for the Tenth Army
Corps on it.9 But the veiled economic boycott imposed by the authorities apparently did not
completely ruin the Armenians. In April and May 1914, several suspect fires broke out, one
after the next, in the bazaars of Merzifun/Marzevan, Amasia, Sıvas, and Tokat. In Tokat,
according to an Armenian middle school teacher, 85 stores, 45 homes, and three khans were
reduced to ashes by a fire that raged in Baghdad Cadesi, the street where many of the city’s

• Black Sea
•
Vizirköprü
Samsun
• •• •
Havza
Ladik
•
Kerasun
N
Gümüşhaciköy
Merzifun
•
•
Amasia • Erbaa
•
Niksar Alucra/Mehsudiye
• Suşehir
•
Mecidözü
•
Zile
Tokat • • •
Şabinkarahisar
Yozgat
• SIVAS
Yenihan
• • •Koçgiri/Zara
Koçhisar
•
Divrig
• Egin
Kangal
Şeyhkışla/Tonus
• •
•
Arapkir
Aziziye Gürün
• • •
Kayseri
• Darende
Malatia
•
businesses were located, on 1 May 1914.10 Three big flourmills were also ravaged by fires in
Merzifun, Amasia, and Sıvas.11 We have no proof that the local authorities had a hand in
these criminal fires, but Armenian circles were not unduly persuaded to believe that the fires
had been set on Ahmed Muammer’s initiative. When the general mobilization order, the
seferbelik, was announced in Sıvas on 3 August, every male of draftable age went to enroll at
the recruitment center that had been set up in the Ulu Cami mosque, formerly the Church of
St. Eranos. Over the next few weeks, the Church of the Holy Cross and some of the schools
that belonged to the 20,000 Armenians of Sıvas – such as the Aramian middle school or
the Sanasarian lycée – were gradually confiscated by the military authorities, who wished
to use them as barracks.12 By paying the bedel, some of the Armenian conscripts avoided
mobilization or were assigned to the Red Cross. As elsewhere, the Teklif-i Harbiyye provided
an opportunity for obvious abuses, to Armenian merchants’ cost: all means of transportation
in both the cities and the villages were requisitioned.13 Furthermore, the national Armenian
hospital assumed the costs of maintaining 150 hospital beds, which were put at the army’s
disposal.14
Among the striking measures observed in Sıvas after the Ottoman Empire entered the
war was to dispatch to the Caucasian front the Tenth Army Corps, made up of recruits from
the vilayet, including some 15 Armenian doctors and numerous Armenian soldiers.15 In
addition, 2,500 worker-soldiers were assigned to two labor battalions. The first improved the
road leading from the konak to the stone bridge at Kızılırmak; the second built a pipeline
two kilometers long to provide the city with drinking water.16 Sıvas also served as a rear base

Deportations and Massacres: Sıvas 431
for the Army of the Caucasus; in particular, the soldiers who fell victim to the dysentery and
typhus epidemics decimating the army because of catastrophic sanitary conditions were sent
here.17 Once the French Jesuit fathers had left,18 Reverend Ernest Partridge’s American mis-
sion was the only foreign institution remaining in Sıvas. The national Armenian hospital
and the establishment of the American Red Cross, directed by Dr. Clark, played a major part
in fighting the epidemics. Nevertheless, 25,000 epidemic victims were recorded.19
Two events that occurred in the Sıvas vilayet attest to the tension-fraught atmosphere
reigning in the regional capital. Since no one held the office of primate in the region, the
Armenian Patriarchate had named two auxiliary primates to head the dioceses of Sıvas and
Erzincan – Bishop Knel Kalemkiarian and Father Sahag Odabashian. In this troubled period,
the patriarchate deemed it indispensable to maintain an official presence in these areas, in
which the authorities recognized its right to represent the community. On 20 December,
the two prelates arrived in Sıvas together. Odabashian, a native of the city, stayed with his
family for a few days while waiting to find a vehicle that could take him to his new post.
It seems, however, that the Interior Ministry had raised doubts as to the prelate’s real mis-
sion. An encrypted telegram that it sent Muammer on 21 December 1914 informed the vali
that, “there are serious reasons for thinking that [Odabashian] plans to precipitate disorders
among the Armenians” and requested that he “put him under surveillance as soon as he
arrives.”20 The task of watching the 38-year-old vicar was entrusted to Halil Bey, the com-
mander of the çete squadrons; Emirpaşaoğlu Hamid, the leader of the Çerkez of Uzunyayla;
and the çetes Bacanakoğlu Edhem, Kütükoğlu Hüseyin, and Zaralı Mahir. They assassinated
Odabashian on the road between Suşehir and Refahiye, near the village of Ağvanis, on the
morning of 1 January 1915.21 The investigation that followed this murder, which had also
taken the life of Odabashian’s driver, Arakel Arslanian, offers a striking example of the
formalism and duplicity of the administration.22 The initial evidence indicated that “the
weapons used were of two different kinds, resembling a Mauser and a Martini”; however,
“since weapons of this kind are not just lying around, except in the Armenians’ homes, it
is possible that the authors of these murders are Armenians who committed the crime with
a particular purpose in mind.”23 The investigation proceeded to focus on the surrounding
Armenian and Greek villages, asking how people who had been absent from their village
on the day of the murder had “spent their time.”24 The kaymakam of Suşehir, the investigat-
ing magistrate, and the commander of the gendarmerie went to the scene of the crime and
interrogated witnesses. Thus, it was established that the murder was “committed by two
individuals riding gray horses, while the other mounts were of various colors,” that this band
was armed with “Mauser Gras and Martini” rifles, and that the individuals in question had
spoken Armenian, Greek, and Turkish. Zehni, the judge, observed, “the fact that they had
not touched the victim’s seven piasters gold, watch, baggage, or other personal belongings
seems to indicate that the motive for the crime was not theft, but that the murderers had
some other objective.”25 Suspicion focused on a Greek, Kristaki Effendi, from the village of
Alacahan in the kaza of Refahiye, who had been “recognized by his voice”; however, the
kaymakam of Suşehir thought that “the guilty parties were Armenians or Greeks from the
region of Erzincan.”26 The Armenians of Sıvas understood very well that this “investiga-
tion” was a masquerade staged by the authorities to cover up their own role in the murder
of the prelate, an event that, under other circumstances, would have caused a commotion.
Yet no one dared protest, whether in Constantinople or Sıvas.27 The accusations were, to be
sure, so implausible that Muammer felt a need to engage in diversionary tactics. Patriarch
Zaven notes in his memoirs that immediately after the murder of Sahag Odabashian, the
local authorities accused the Armenians of taking revenge by poisoning the bread delivered
to the Turkish soldiers, an accusation that spread through the population, leading to open
hostility toward the Armenians.28 On the night of 5/6 January, several soldiers from one of

the Kavakyazı barracks had shown signs of indigestion. This “poisoning” was blamed on
the bread, in which there were blue streaks, and taken as proof that a suspect substance had
been mixed in with the dough. Ahmed Muammer, who went to the barracks without delay,
observed that the Armenian soldiers there did not have the same symptoms, and concluded
that the Armenians had doubtless committed a crime against the Turkish recruits. The
Armenian soldiers were immediately confined to the basement of the barracks, while their
Turkish colleagues were put on a state of alert; armed men surrounded Armenian neighbor-
hoods and the authorities told the Turkish populace to get ready to react if the Armenians
staged an “insurrection.” In the course of the night, the accused bakers were arrested and
tortured in order to make them confess as to which party, the Dashnaks or the Hnchaks,
had ordered them to poison the soldiers’ bread.29 In the space of a few hours, Sıvas was trans-
formed into a city under siege; massacres would probably have ensued if Constantinople had
not stepped in to prohibit them. The investigation conducted the next day by Haci Hüsni,
an army physician, Dr. Harutiun Shirinian, and Turkish and Armenian pharmacists revealed
that the bread in question had been made from a mixture of wheat and rye flour, which
caused the blue streaks in it, but that it was perfectly safe to eat. They further noted that the
symptoms that had cropped up the night before had disappeared and that no one had been
poisoned.30 The local press, which was soon echoed by the press in Istanbul, nevertheless
reported the official version of events, according to which Armenian bakers had poisoned
the soldiers. This version was never retracted, despite Bishop Knel Kalemkiarian’s repeated
appeals to the vali.31 A witness also reported that a mutilated body found near the suburb of
Hoğtar had been exhibited in front of the town hall for 24 hours “in order to incite the Turks
against the Armenians.”32
The Armenians’ situation was not improved by the event that occurred shortly there-
after – an 18 January 1915 reception held in Sıvas for Vice-Generalissimo Enver, who was
on his way back from the front after the Ottoman defeat at Sarıkamiş. The famous Murad
Khrimian (Sepastatsi Murad), a former Dashnak fedayi who had been rehabilitated after
the proclamation of the Constitution,33 went out to greet Enver and had a conversation
with him. The minister emphasized that two members of the Dashnak leadership in Sıvas,
Vahan Vartanian and Ohannes Poladian, had shown great courage during the fighting, but
also stressed that the troops had been poorly trained.34 When Enver received a visit by the
Armenian religious and political leaders, he reminded them that he had been saved a few
days earlier by Lieutenant Hovhannes Aginian, who had died of his wounds shortly there-
after, adding that the Armenian recruits had fought bravely.35 These remarks, however,
remained confined to the context of this courtesy visit. As was the case in other provinces,
the Dashnaks remained the local authorities’ privileged interlocutors in the first few months
of the war. Murad Khrimian often met with Muammer to clear up “misunderstandings”
with him – that is, to defuse provocations. Thus, in fall 1914, he was able to negotiate the
staggered mobilization of different age cohorts with the authorities, the vali’s hostility to
the idea notwithstanding.36 Yet mistrust continued to be perceptible on both sides. Like
the valis of Dyarbekir and Trebizond, Ahmed Muammer too was the local leader of the
Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa. It was on his orders that, in November 1914, the president of the vilayet
court released 124 criminals from the prison of Bünyan to incorporate them into a unit
then being formed.37 An Armenian source observed that the squadron of çetes created in
late fall 1914 had initially conducted operations “amid the greatest possible secrecy, and,
later, in the open.”38 But Sıvas was also a city through which irregular troops sent from
the western parts of the empire passed in transit. For example, on 10 December 1914, a
unit of 1,200 çetes en route for Erzerum arrived in Sıvas and was given a hero’s welcome
by the Turkish populace. In contrast, the Armenian villagers’ memory of these men’s pas-
sage through the area was a much less happy one, for they wreaked havoc on the villages

of the plain.39 Bekir Sâmi Bey’s group, comprising 800 irregulars, 20 of them officers, spent
the month of January in Govdun, the village near Hafiz in which Murad Khrimian lived.
The çetes were, however, careful not to mistreat the population, with which they were bil-
leted, and even showed the celebrated former fedayi respectful deference.40 The handful of
abuses noted in this period may, moreover, be put down to these men’s criminal past. The
vilayet of Sıvas did not really begin to feel the effects of the war until after the failure of the
Sarıkamiş offensive. Thus, from 2 February on, the Armenian villages on the plain of Sıvas
were surrounded by what was left of the Third Army, which took up quarters there and
lived off the residents. Typhus raged among these soldiers and soon spread to the villagers as
well. The villages of Kızılbaş also had to help feed and lodge these men. Turkish localities,
however, were spared.41 Govdun seems to have been required to make a particularly heavy
contribution to the war effort, perhaps because Murad lived there. Although one-and-a-
half battalions of the regular army had already been billeted in the village, a new squadron
of çetes arrived from Istanbul to take up quarters there on 30 January. Now, however, the
tone changed: the Çerkez officer in command of the unit immediately attacked Murad
for having struggled “against Islam for twenty years,” and threatened the villagers. The
fedayi answered that the sole purpose of his fight had been to establish the “constitution,”
adding that “the village was not in revolt” and appealing for corroboration to the officer
responsible for the regular troops stationed in the village. The next day, when Murad visited
the commander of the brigade posted in the sector in order to request that he send these
çetes away, he was told that this squadron answered directly to the vali, not to the military
authorities.42 Murad therefore left for Sıvas in order to meet with Muammer. He described
the unbearable situation of the rural populations of the vilayet, who were expected to feed
and quarter thousands of soldiers. By way of his answer, the vali remarked: “It seems that
the Armenian population is unhappy over our successes.” In other words, the Ottoman
“successes” – the defeat at Sarıkamiş had not yet been publicly announced – supposedly
irritated the Armenians, who were suspected of harboring sympathies for the Russians.
Murad understood the message very clearly and immediately convoked a meeting of the
Armenian representatives of all confessions in order to evaluate the authorities’ intentions,
which were deemed alarming. The Armenian leaders decided to remain vigilant in order
to defuse provocations,43 the more so in that they had already observed that the authorities
had not reacted when, during the January 1915 debacle, Armenian soldiers responsible for
transport had been massacred near the Erzincan-Sıvas road.44 The Armenians’ alarm was
heightened when they learned on 8 February that the village of Piurk, located in the kaza of
Suşehir, had been destroyed under suspect circumstances by a recently formed group of çetes
that included Zaralı Mahir, one of the men who had murdered Sahag Odabashian.45 This
massacre, during which several men had been killed, was all the more symbolic in that Piurk
had had a reputation as an Armenian fedayi center in Abdülhamid’s day.46 The Armenians
were also worried because of alarmist remarks that German officers stationed in Sıvas were
supposed to have made, according to Dr. Hayranian, an army doctor educated in Germany
who was a friend of Dr. Paul Rohrbach’s.47 A German doctor, whom Hayranian had asked
to intercede with the authorities after the attack on Piurk, had answered: “What can I do?
What can I say? Think rather about how to die with honor.”48
In the first half of February, the arrival of between 1,500 and 1,700 Russian prisoners-
of-war on the plain of Sıvas offered the local authorities another opportunity to paint the
Armenians as suspect. Certain villages had been asked to lodge and feed these Russians.
Eight men who had arrived in terrible condition, suffering from typhus, died the first night,
despite the care the villagers gave them. The soldiers escorting them were nevertheless
opposed to the idea of burying them. Having ignored this prohibition to bury them, the
Armenian villagers were immediately accused of rebelling and treated accordingly.49 The

authorities pretended not to know that the Christian funeral rite required that the dead be
buried regardless of identity. It is, however, also possible to chalk these events up to the bit-
terness engendered by the defeat at Sarıkamiş.
In March, the Young Turk members of parliament from Çanğırı, Harput, and Erzerum
were invited to come to Sıvas by the CUP’s responsible secretary, Erzrumlı Gani, in order to
speak before the Young Turk club and in the mosques.50 According to a number of concur-
ring sources, Fazıl Berki, the representative from Çanğırı, declared: “Our true enemies are
close to us, among us – they are the Armenians … who are sapping the foundations of our
state. That is why we must first wipe out these domestic foes.”51 These remarks, based on a
speech that Bahaeddin Şakir had made in the same period,52 circulated so openly in Sıvas
that Bishop Kalemkiarian felt the need to go to see the vali and ask what they meant.53 The
role of Erzrumlı Gani Bey appears here for the first time. This Young Turk leader, a native
of Erzerum who had received his officer’s training at Istanbul’s Military Academy (Harbiye),
arrived in Sıvas in fall 1914.54 There, he organized a lecture that Dr. Şakir had delivered
before the Ittihadist club, probably on his way back to Istanbul in early March 1915.55 Gani
worked with the vali, Muammer, and his henchmen – the parliamentary representative
from Çanğırı, Dr. Fazıl Berki; the representative from Sıvas, Rasim Bey; and Colonel Ali
Effendi, the deputy commander of the Tenth Army Corps – on the plan to extirpate the
Armenians.56
Muammer, however, entrusted the organization of new squadrons of çetes in the vilayet to
the parliamentary representative Rasim Bey in March 1915.57 Approximately 4,000 çetes were
recruited and given gendarmes’ uniforms. This group was drawn, notably, from the Kurdish
population of Darende, Karapapak who had come from the Caucasus, and freed felons. Two
thousand of these “gendarmes” were to go to Sıvas, while the others were to be dispatched to
the neighboring villages.58 In the same period, there was a sharp rise in desertions among the
Armenian recruits, who had suffered increasing harassment and persecution. The medreses
of Şifahdiye and Gök were converted into detention centers for Armenian soldiers.59 Thus,
by March, the first signs of the events to come could be discerned. The most symbolic act was
the arrest, around 15 March, of 17 political leaders and teachers in Merzifun and Amasia –
among them Kakig Ozanian, Mamigon Varzhabedian, and Khachig Atamian – who were
immediately transferred to Sıvas and interned in the medrese of Şifahdiye.60 The Armenian
sources say nothing about the motives that the authorities invoked to justify these arrests,
but note that they preceded the arrests of the political and intellectual elites of Sıvas by two
weeks. In the provincial capital, the alleged flight of a Russian officer served as a pretext for
the arrests of a hotelier, Manug Beylerian; Cholak Hampartzumian; and, on 28 March, of
the pharmacist and Dashnak leader Vahan Vartanian, along with his colleagues Hovhannes
Poladian and Harutiun Vartigian; the Hnchaks’ Krikor Karamanugian, Murad Gurigian,
and Dikran Apelian; and the dragoman of the vilayet, Mardiros Kaprielian, all of whom
were summoned before Muammer and then immediately placed under arrest. On 7 May,
after spending 40 days in the central prison, these men were put in chains and sent to Yeni
Han on the Sıvas-Tokat-Samsun road. Muammer, the CUP’s responsible secretary Gani Bey,
and Colonel Pertev, the commander of the Tenth Army Corps, joined them in a place called
Maşadlar Yeri, where they interrogated the Armenian leaders about their plans for an insur-
rection and the quantity of arms in their possession, and then put them to death.61 Bishop
Kalemkiarian’s protests to the vali proved to be in vain, as did the request from Dr. Haranian
to liberate the detainees; indeed, Haranian’s bold intervention cost him his life.62 It was
Murad Khrimian, however, who was Muammer’s greatest cause of concern. On Monday, 29
March – that is, the day after the Sıvas leaders were arrested – the vali sent Keleş Bey, the
commander of the gendarmerie, to Sıvas, accompanied by a squadron. Keleş Bey told Murad
to go with him to Sıvas because Muammer “wished” to see him. After giving orders to set a

resplendent table for his guests, the fedayi disappeared without a trace.63 The forces of the
gendarmerie sent to look for him arrested the male population of the village of Khandzar,
which was suspected of having given Murad shelter, and proceeded to kill the men in the
Seyfe Gorge, a spot two hours to the east of the village.64 This massacre, which occurred in
early April, marked the end of the first phase of operations, the main target of which had
been the political elites of Sıvas and conscripts from the city.
Deportations and Massacres in the Sancak of Sıvas

In 1914, the Armenian population of the sancak of Sıvas alone was 116,817. The Armenians
lived in 46 towns and villages.65 The kaza of Sıvas had 37 towns and villages, with a total
Armenian population of 31,185, almost 20,000 of whom lived in the regional capital.66
Demographic considerations perhaps explain why the first operations, the official purpose of
which was to track down deserters and collect weapons, targeted only the Halys/Kızılımak
valley, focusing on the villages in the northern part of it. Moreover, early in April 1915 the
authorities took all the measures required to completely cut off relations and correspondence
between Sıvas and the neighboring villages: “no one knew what was going on, even in a vil-
lage just an hour away.”67
We have information about one of the battalions of çetes created on Muammer’s initiative,
the one commanded by Kütükoğlu Hüseyin and Haralı Mahir, the murderers of Father Sahag
Odabashian.68 This battalion conducted its operations in the localities of the Kızılırmak val-
ley from 2 April onward.69 It had been given the mission of arresting the adolescents, village
priests, schoolteachers, and notables who had not been conscripted. According to Armenian
sources, these operations were accompanied by looting, rapes, and murders, and were fol-
lowed by the transfer of the men who had been arrested to Zara/Koçhisar or Sıvas. Some of
these men were killed in the Seyfe gorge or at the level of the Boğaz bridge. The others were
interned in the city, in the medreses of Şifahdiye and Gök.70 We also know that a battalion of
gendarmes commanded by Ali Şerif Bey carried out operations in this valley. The killing of
the men of the villages of Khorasan and Aghdk, located on the outskirts of Koçhisar, were its
work; the villagers were put to death in the Bunağ Gorge.71 It is probable that the 4,000 çetes
stationed throughout the sancak were given similar missions in other districts during these
operations, which took place in April and May. A squadron even took up a position near
Sıvas, on the banks of the Kızılırmak in a place called Paşa Çayiri, which was converted into
a slaughterhouse for prisoners who had been interned in the regional capital.72
The Armenians of the city of Sıvas were not really targeted until May 1915. One of
the first measures taken concerned the Armenian employees of the Post and Telegraph
Office. The minister responsible for it issued an order by telegraph calling for their imme-
diate dismissal,73 which was followed by that of all other Armenian civil servants, such as
municipal physicians and pharmacists, gendarmes, and so on.74 The monastery of St. Nshan
came under full army control. Finally, the authorities ordered that the population turn in its
weapons on pain of court-martial. At the vali’s request, Bishop Kalemkiarian asked his flock
in a Sunday sermon to obey the government’s orders. Armenians and Turks handed over
their weapons (for the sake of appearances, the decree applied to the entire population). Of
course, Muammer invoked the Armenians’ lack of cooperation to justify launching a vast
confiscation campaign that led in turn to the arrests of the city’s notables (one of the first
to be imprisoned was the famous arms-maker of Sıvas, Mgrdich Norhadian).75 The govern-
ment’s propaganda now took on a more vehement tone. The authorities began by putting the
weapons turned in by the Armenians on display, adding to these the battle arms in the bar-
racks and photographing the pile. The vali also sent a report to the Sublime Porte in which
he accused the Armenians of treason.76

There also exist reports of a meeting held in Sıvas sometime in May that was attended by
Turkish notables and Çerkez and Kurdish chiefs (from the kaza of Koçkiri), to whom the vali
issued directives about the treatment to be meted out to the Armenian population. After the
Armenians had been demonized for several weeks, the situation seemed ripe for the transi-
tion to the practical phase of the extermination. A Turkish liberal, Ellezzâde Halil Bey, told
one of his Armenian friends, “You cannot imagine what they are preparing to do to you.”77
Among the Armenians, a rumor was making the rounds about how “black lists” containing
the names of the first men to be arrested were being drawn up for every quarter of the city. It
would appear that a general list was produced by combining material from three sources: the
heads of the various neighborhoods; artisans’ associations, which the CUP club had asked to
produce names; and the police. Hnchak Party and Dashnak Party clubs were searched and
their archives impounded.78 Down to the end of May, however, the arrests carried out across
the vilayet had involved only 400 to 500 men.79 Finally, there are indications that Muammer
made a tour of the kazas of his vilayet, notably Merzifun80 and Tokat,81 in late May and early
June.
Here, too, the first victims of this operational phase were those people most deeply involved
in local political and social life, as well as those with connections to foreign institutions, such
as the physicians at the American hospital or the teachers at Merzifun’s Anatolia College.
Thus, the authorities sought to isolate these establishments. They gradually requisitioned
their buildings and then forced the missionaries to leave the region.82 On 15 June, 12 people
were publicly hanged. These men were political activists, four deserters from Divrig/Divriği,
and people who had been accused, apparently unjustly, of a murder that had occurred sev-
eral years earlier.83 This spectacle took place shortly before the beginning of the systematic
operations conducted by the police and the gendarmerie that began on Wednesday, 16 June
1915. On that day, 3,000 to 3,500 men were arrested in their places of work or their homes
and interned in the central prison or the cellars of the medreses of Şifahdiye and Gök.84
Among them were teachers from the Aramian and Sanasarian lycées, including Mihran
Isbirian, Mihran Chukasezian, Hagop Mnjugian, and Hayg Srabian; Mikayel Frengulian,
a teacher from the American middle school; Avedis Semerjian, Krikor Gdigian, and Senig
Baliozian from the Jesuit middle school; the members of the Diocesan Council, including
its leading members Voskan Aslan and Benyamin Topalian; and staff members of chari-
table organizations, political activists, doctors, pharmacists, and all those who counted in
Sıvas, such as the police officers Ara Baliozian and Mgrdich Bujakjian, the surveyor Serope
Odabashian, the lawyer Mgrdich Poladian, the Telegraph Office employee Aram Aginian,
the municipal architect Hovhannes Frengulian, the photographer H. Enkababian, and the
former dragoman of the French consulate, Manug Ansurian.85 Ernest Partridge notes that
no proof whatsoever of the guilt of these men was put forward, that they were never indicted,
and that no one knew why the authorities had arrested them. The vali repeatedly assured
the American minister that they would be “freed and sent on their way with their families.”86
The Armenian bishop was given a more original explanation: Muammer told him that he
had had the men interned to protect them from the possibility of a massacre, since “prison
was the safest place” for them. He also advised the prelate not to get involved in these mat-
ters, especially because he was not yet acquainted with the Armenians of Sıvas. Only he, the
vali, knew “just how dangerous this element was.”87
The first round-up was followed by a second wave of arrests, launched on 23 June, that led
to the apprehension of around 1,000 men. Thus, a total of some 5,000 people were crammed
into the city’s central prison and the cellars of the medreses.88 Similar operations were con-
ducted in the second half of June in Tokat, Amasia, Merzifun, Zile, Niksar, Hereke, and so
on, with the apprehended men rapidly killed in the environs of these localities.89 In Sıvas,
Muammer seems to have opted for another method: as we shall see, it was only after carrying

out the deportations that he concerned himself, early in August, with the fate of these prison-
ers. Despite its proven utility, Sıvas’ Armenian national hospital, which had put 150 beds at
the army’s disposal and played an important role in fighting the typhus epidemic, was confis-
cated by the authorities. Most of its staff were arrested90 and put to death shortly thereafter.
The pretrial investigation of Gani Bey, the CUP’s responsible secretary in Sıvas, men-
tions a trip that he made to Istanbul in the second half of June 1915 in order to take part
in a coordinating meeting with his colleagues from other vilayets.91 We do not have further
details about the directives that were issued to the Ittihadist delegates there, but it seems
reasonable to suppose that they bore on the deportations that began in very many different
locales in early July.
The first to be deported were the inhabitants of the villages located in the upper part of
the Halys/Kızılırmak valley in the kazas of Koçhisar and Koçkiri. These deportees were put
on the road in the latter half of June, before the official publication of the expulsion decree.
As elsewhere, first the adolescent and adult men were arrested and killed, after which women
and children were set marching southward. By 29 June, the deportation of the villagers from
the Kızılırmak valley had already been completed.92
The official deportation order was not promulgated until late June – 30 June, to be
exact.93 On 1 July, Ahmed Muammer convoked the Armenian orthodox primate, Bishop
Kalemkiarian, as well as his Catholic counterpart, Bishop Levon Kechejian, to inform them
that the first convoy would have to leave the city on Monday, 5 July, bound for Mesopotamia.
On Kalemkiarian’s account, the vali justified this measure by recalling that the Armenians
had been living “for six hundred years under the glorious protection of the Ottoman state”
and had profited from its sultans’ tolerance, which had enabled them to preserve their lan-
guage and religion and to prosper to the point that “trade and the crafts were entirely in
[their] hands.” Finally, Muammer pointed out that if he had not been vigilant and antici-
pated developments, an “insurrection would also have broken out and you would have – God
forbid – stabbed the Ottoman army in the back.”94 This condensed historical overview no
doubt reflected the sentiment prevailing among the Young Turks at the time, as well as the
leitmotif of official propaganda.
Armenian sources depict the desperate attempts of some Armenian women to intervene
with the vali and Sıvas’s Turkish dignitaries, who advised them to convert while waiting for
“the storm to blow over.” It would appear that a few dozen craftsmen at most were author-
ized to remain in the city after agreeing to become Muslims. In any event, this possibility of
escaping deportation was briefly but vigorously95 debated by the detainees, who brought the
debate to a swift close since they seemed to have understood that this semi-official opening
was a lure. On Sunday, 4 July, a final church service was held in the cathedral. When it was
over, the bishop took the keys of the building to the vali, who refused to accept them.96
According to G. Kapigian, who observed these events with a certain perspicacity, Muammer
had deftly profited from the general despair in order to spread rumors to the effect that the
anti-Armenian measures were just temporary, even justifying the deportees’ hopes of a swift
return. Indications are that the vali had worried until the last moment that the Armenians
might rise up in revolt despite the fact that the community’s most vigorous elements had
been jailed. As in Harput/Mezreh, the Armenians tried to put their most valuable belongings
in the safekeeping of the American missionaries, especially Dr. Clark and Mary Graffam,
but the police limited their ability to do so by blocking the entrance to the American mis-
sion. Funds deposited with the Banque Ottomane were also frozen and then confiscated on
Muammer’s orders. The vali recommended that the Armenians register their property and
deposit it in the cathedral, which had been transformed into a warehouse to that end. Many
Armenians, however, chose to bury their savings. It must be added that the authorities had
prohibited the sale of moveable property in advance and this ordinance was, by and large,

respected.97 In other words, the Armenians’ assets were turned over in their entirety to the
commission charged with “administering” them. It must finally be noted that, shortly before
the departure of the first convoy, three regiments commanded by Neşed Pasha set out for
Şabinkarahisar in order to put down the Armenian resistance that had been organized
there.
The Deportation of 5,850 Families from Sıvas

Between Monday, 5 July and Sunday, 18 July, Sıvas’s 5,850 Armenian families were deported
in a total of 14 convoys, at a rate of one convoy daily, with an average of 400 households in
each caravan.98 The operation was carried out neighborhood by neighborhood – even street
by street – in an order that suggests the most affluent families were deported first and the
most modest quarters dealt with last. However, some 70 artisan households were allowed to
remain behind, along with nine students from the Sanasarian lycée, the vali’s son’s violin
teacher K. Koyunian, four physicians (Harutiun Shirinian, Karekin Suni, N. Bayenderian,
and Gozmas Mesiayan), the 80 orphans in the Swiss orphanage, three officers (Dikran
Kuyumjian, Vartan Parunagian, and Vartan Telalian), the pharmacists Hovhannes Mesiayan
and Ardashes Aivazian, and above all the approximately 4,000 recruits from the region
assigned to labor battalions.99 The inhabitants of a village near the city, Tavra – millers who
provided the city and the army with its flour – were also temporarily allowed to stay behind,
as were the peasants from Prkenik, Ulash, and Ttmaj, who produced the bulk of the vilayet’s
wheat.100
On the morning of 5 July, Muammer oversaw the departure of the first convoy from the
balcony of his residence. A dense crowd watched the spectacle, apparently with satisfaction,
exclaiming, “The thermalistes [hydrotherapists] are leaving.” A bridge known as Twisted
Bridge served as a checkpoint: the government officials stationed there recorded the names
of men, women, boys, and girls on separate lists.101
The first measure taken by the vali was to post a squadron of the Special Organization in
the Yırıhi Han Gorge on the other bank of the Kızılırmak river. This group, dubbed Emniyet
Komisioni, was commanded by Emirpaşoğlu Hamid, the chief of the Çerkez of Uzunyayla;
Halil Bey, the commanding officer of the squadrons of çetes and Muammer’s yaver (assist-
ant); Bacanakoğlu Edhem; Kütükoğlu Hüseyin, who spoke Armenian and was the most
knowledgeable about Sıvas’ Armenians; and Tütünci Haci Halil. These çetes’ mission was to
single out the men still present in the convoys, especially if they were young, and to suggest
that the deportees leave their money and valuables behind. They first looted the groups
of deportees even before they were put on the road.102 All the convoys from the sancak
of Sıvas followed, grosso modo, the same trajectory and were subjected to the same fate.
The deportations were carried out along a route that ran through Sıvas, Tecirhan, Mağara,
Kangal, Alacahan, Kötihan, Hasançelebi, Hekimhan, Hasanbadrig, Aruzi Yazi, the Kirk
Göz Bridge, Fırıncilar, Zeydağ, and Gergerdağ (the mountains of Kanlı Dere where the
Kurdish chieftains of the Reşvan tribe, Zeynel Bey and Haci Bedri Ağa, officiated), then
headed toward Adiyaman and Samsat, crossed the Euphrates near Gözen, and took the road
running through Suruc, Urfa, Viranşehir, and Ras ul-Ayn, or the road to Mosul, or, again,
the road that led to Aleppo via Bab and Mumbuc. The few known survivors were those who
reached Hama, Homs, or, in the case of the most unfortunate, Rakka or Der Zor.103 We shall
here content ourselves with describing in detail the fate of the eleventh caravan, which
left Sıvas on 15 July, which comprised 400 families from Karod Sokak, Dzadzug Aghpiur,
Holy Savior, Ğanli Bağçe, Hasanlı, Taykesens, and Han Paşi. Among them was the family
of Garabed Kapigian, a privileged witness to the events that transpired in Sıvas. Kapigian,
a former Hnchak party activist who had lived for a long time in Istanbul, was one of the

rare adult men over 40 still “free.” The escort of gendarmes was commanded by Ali Çavuş,
a Turk well known by a certain number of the deportees.104 After being looted for the
first time in the outskirts of Sıvas, the eleventh convoy continued its journey via Maragha
and Kangal, whose Armenians had already been deported. Kapigian notes, however, that
a banker from Sıvas, Ghazar Tanderjian, who had left with the first convoy, managed to
remain in Kangal by converting with his whole family to Islam. In the field near the village
that served as a campground, the deportees from Sıvas discovered two caravans who had
arrived the day before from Samsun, Merzifun, Amasia, and Tokat. The scant information
that they gleaned from the deportees of these convoys confirms that the same scenario had
unfolded in those towns as well. It should be noted, however, that all males over the age of
eight in these convoys were separated from the others and killed in Şarkışla by Turkish and
Çerkez villagers on the orders of Halil Bey. Before the convoy left, Kapigian saw a brigade
of Armenian worker-soldiers arrive. They had been charged with demolishing the church
in Kangal.105
On 24 July, the eleventh convoy from Sıvas arrived in the Yırıhi Han Gorge, located out-
side the village of Alacahan. Like the groups that had preceded it, the caravan had to pass
through this filter, where the çetes commanded by Emirpaşaoğlu Hamid Bey were waiting
for it. Hamid immediately ordered the men to step out of the convoy and line up in front of
the khan because he wished to address them. His remarks, reported by Kapigian, are worth
briefly pausing over. Very courteously, the çete leader apologized for his failure to safeguard
the roads against “the permanent attacks of the Kurdish savages.” It was because of these
attacks, he went on, that the government, “always solicitous of your welfare,” had dispatched
the Emniyet Komisioni to the Yırıhi Han Gorge and charged it with taking in hand and
registering in the deportees’ names all the gold, money, jewels, and other valuables they had
with them (“everything you have in your possession”). Hamid Bey promised that these items
would be restored to their owners as soon as the convoy reached Malatia. In a less friendly
tone, he warned everyone that systematic body searches would be conducted and that any-
one discovered to have held back the least little coin would be shot on the spot. Even before
the group was dispersed, Kapigian reports, a mounted “gendarme” galloped onto the scene
and announced that the convoy from Samsun, which had set out that very morning, had
been attacked by Kurds, who had looted the deportees and massacred a number of people.
Kapigian says that this carefully staged show, which was supposed to illustrate the dangers
to which the deportees were exposed around Yırıhi Han, hardly convinced the deportees.
Rather, it plunged them into a dilemma:106 how, in such an environment, should they hide
their possessions, the means of guaranteeing their survival? Obviously, this question con-
fronted all the deportees – or at any rate, all who possessed means. In this curious game
that consisted in relieving the deportees of all their possessions in order gradually to deprive
them of the means of survival, the victims and their executioners were in a one-way face-off.
Kapigian lists the stratagems to which the Armenians resorted: some swallowed gold coins,
others hid jewels on their children, and still others hastily buried their purses. The govern-
ment’s solicitude evaporated at this point. The çetes proceeded to carry out systematic body
searches on the deportees. Already experienced, they no doubt knew better than the victims
the various ways of hiding money and jewels. Threats, blackmail, and violence were enough
to change the minds of those deportees who had been trying to hold back at least some of
their possessions in order to be able to proceed on their way.
Thus, the Emniyet Komisioni served as a framework for the official pillage of the depor-
tees before they were turned over to the looters. In other words, the system that Muammer
had put in place in Yırıhi Han was designed to secure the lion’s share of the booty for the
Ittihadist party-state before the deportees were turned over to the çetes or peasants mobi-
lized along the routes that the convoys went down. However, the CUP’s official bodies had

to overcome the recurrent problem of the indelicacy or cupidity of the “civil servants” in
charge of these official stations set up for the seizure of Armenian property. This explains
the extraordinary formality that characterized the operations by which the deportees were
stripped of their property and the fact that someone close to the vali was generally on hand
with the obvious mission of supervising the operations. Kapigian notes the great care taken
by the commission to register the deportees’ property, counting and recounting their cash
and describing their jewels in great detail.
This formality, however, gave way to more muscular methods when the family heads were
summoned, one by one – a few of them were men, but most were women – to appear before
the members of the commission presided over by Hamid Bey in order to relinquish their pos-
sessions. Systematically, they were told that what they had turned over was far from being
everything they owned, a remonstrance that was usually accompanied by a bastinado with
which the commission obtained an additional effort from the deportees. The commission
worked all the more effectively because its members knew their victims rather well; they were
aware of the position they occupied in society and consequently had a rather precise notion
of the means at their disposal. After this ritual, which lasted for several hours, the çetes con-
ducted searches of the other members of the convoy, down to the most private parts of their
bodies. In the final stage of the operation, the notables who had escaped the round-ups in
the city were removed from the convoy and summarily killed.107 Kapigian’s brief description
of the fates reserved for the preceding and following convoys shows that the same procedure
was followed every time.
When the convoy reached Kötü Han on the boundary between the vilayets of Sıvas
and Mamuret ul-Aziz, its escort was relieved. Kurdish gendarmes now took the place of the
Turkish gendarmes. According to Kapigian, bakshish in the usual amount was not enough
to satisfy this new escort and convince it to step in when local villagers tried to profit from
the passage of a convoy by acquiring a few valuables or abducting a girl. The intervention of
a mullah made it possible, however, to curb these appetites, so that the profits were made by
the sale of fresh produce – at obviously exorbitant prices.108
It was, however, only after they reached Hasançelebi, in the northern part of the san-
cak of Malatia, that the convoys began to be systematically decimated. In theory, it was a
30-hour journey from Sıvas to Hasançelebi, but the eleventh convoy from Sıvas needed no
fewer than 15 days to make the trip, indicating that the individual stages of the journey
were not long and were probably even bearable for old people. Moreover, during this first
stage of the trek, human losses were limited to the dignitaries killed at Yırıhi Han. It was
as if it had been decided to bring the deportees out of their native sancak before mov-
ing on to the exterminatory phase in the proper sense of the word; it was as if the local
authorities wished to pin the blame for the programmed crimes on the civil servants of the
neighboring region or the Kurdish population, which systematically took the role of the
“black sheep.”
Hasançelebi was a site that had been chosen for the systematic extermination of all the
males in the convoys from Samsun and the kazas of the Sıvas vilayet. The advantage of the
valley that ran from the village outward was that it lay squeezed between high mountains:
deportees from the convoys that had arrived from Samsun, Tokat, Amasia, Sıvas and their
rural zones in the preceding days were concentrated in the immense camp located in it.
Amid indescribable chaos, the groups camped in two distinct areas. Kurdish çetes crammed
in young boys, adolescents, adults, and old men from this multitude; they were escorted from
the camp in small groups and briefly interned in a stable pressed into service as a prison.
According to Kapigian, those in charge of the camp granted the new arrivals a day’s respite
– that is, enough time to unload their carts and pitch tents. Around 300 men in the elev-
enth convoy from Sıvas were led off in this fashion.109 Here, too, the procedure followed was

almost mechanical. Every night, the people arrested in the morning were removed from the
stable, tied together in pairs, and escorted to a spot behind a promontory in a gorge. There
the executioners killed their prisoners with knives or axes and threw them from the prom-
ontory. The next morning new arrests were made, and so on. On Kapigian’s estimate, more
than 4,000 males in the 14 convoys from Sıvas were killed in Hasançelebi. Boys under ten,
however, were spared.110
Reverend Bauernfeind, who left his mission in Malatia on 11 August, went to Kırk Göz at
dawn the same day,111 and better understood
why our coach-drivers wanted to reach Hasanbadrig before the heat of noon at all
costs. The stench of the corpses – which is all too familiar to us – from about a hun-
dred, or perhaps more, individual and mass graves to the left and right, were so poorly
dug that, here and there, parts of the bodies stuck up out of them. Further on, the
graves disappear, but not the dead: men, women, and children lie stretched out beside
the road, in the dust, either in rags or stark naked, in terrible condition, more or less
decomposed. In the space of a four hours’ journey to Hasanbadrig (roughly twenty
kilometers), we counted one hundred bodies. It goes without saying that in this region
full of valleys, many of the corpses escaped our gaze.
Further north, shortly before Hekimhan, Bauernfeind again saw corpses, “as a rule, in
pairs – again, males – in a state that inevitably led one to suspect that they had met a violent
death. Because the terrain was so rugged, we were not able to see many others, but we could
smell them.” However, subsequent observations made by the German minister, who went the
other way, down the route the convoys had taken, confirm that no significant violence had
been inflicted on the deportees beyond Hasançelebi.112
Hekimhan, the next stage, seems above all to have served to eliminate the handful of
men who escaped being killed at Hasançelebi.113 For its part, the transit camp, located fur-
ther to the south, near the Kırk Göz Bridge over the Tohma Çay, where the secretary of the
Malatia gendarmerie Tayar Bey presided over operations with a squad of çetes “disguised as
gendarmes,”114 served to regulate the flow of convoys that converged on it from the regions of
the Black Sea coast, Erzerum, and the northern part of Harput. This no doubt explains why
the authorities appointed a Sevkiyat Memuri (“director of the deportation”) there.115 From
that point on, the convoys from Samsun and the different kazas of Sıvas took the route fol-
lowed by everyone, else and shared their fate.
The deportees from Sıvas, like their compatriots from other regions, were also con-
centrated in the immense camp at Fırıncilar, one of the main killing fields chosen by the
Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa. It was supervised by Haci Baloşzâde Mehmed Nuri Bey, a parliamentary
representative from Dersim, and his brother Ali Paşa.116 As was the case with other groups,
the authorities removed the boys under ten and the girls under 15 from the convoys in order
to send them on to Malatia, where they were ultimately killed.117 Kapigian, who had survived
up to this point by disguising himself as a woman, confirms the miserable plight of the refu-
gees, who had been weakened by the journey, deprived of means of transport, and stripped
of virtually all their belongings as a result of the successive acts of pillage to which they had
been subjected.118 It was in Fırıncilar that the deportees from Sıvas had been deprived of
their means of transport, which were officially confiscated by the requisitions commission to
meet the needs of the army.119
Here Kapigian observed the arrival of caravans of deportees from the Black Sea coast –
particularly Kirason, Ordu, and Çarşamba – as well as the villages of Şabinkarahisar. They
were in a more than wretched state because the women and children – there was not a
single man in these groups – had made the entire journey on foot. Fırıncilar also served as a

graveyard for the oldest deportees, who were unable to go on, and the small children aban-
doned by their mothers because they could no longer carry them.120
Kapigian’s convoy left Fırıncilar on 18 August, just before the third caravan from Erzerum
arrived there. All the groups took a mountain trail known as Nal Töken (“which makes
the horseshoes fall off”), then entered the appropriately named Kanlı Dere (“blood val-
ley”) Gorge, where Zeynel Bey and Haci Bedri Ağa, two Kurdish chieftains of the Reşvan
tribe, were waiting for them with their squadrons of çetes.121 One by one, the deportees
were stripped of their clothing and divested of their last possessions. The handful of men
still among them was killed, and the most attractive girls and young women were carried
off.122 The sites of Fırıncilar-Kanlı Dere went out of operation in September once the flood
of convoys had tapered off. According to Mrs. Aristakesian, who worked as a cook for the
commander in charge of the Fırıncilar “camp,” the last deportees who left, basically the sick
and elderly, were put to death in a nearby valley.123
Thus, the deportees who arrived at the next way-station, Samsat, were physically dimin-
ished and psychologically weakened, if not traumatized. From Samsat, they took the road to
Urfa through Karakayık Gorge. On the way, these groups were attacked at precise points and
gradually decimated, with the killing taking place notably on the banks of the Euphrates
south of Samsat, near the village of Oşin. A few remnants of these convoys nevertheless
managed to reach Suruc, Urfa, and then Ras ul-Ayn or Der Zor.124 In the fifth part of the
present study, we shall see the fate reserved for these survivors in the second phase of the
genocide.
The Kaza of Koçhisar

This kaza, which borders on Sıvas, was located in the upper Halys/Kızılırmak valley. In 1914,
it boasted 30 Armenian localities with 13,055 inhabitants and 28 schools with a total enroll-
ment of 2,483. The principal town in the kaza, Koçhisar, had barely 3,000 inhabitants, 2,037
of whom were Armenian.125
The main organizers of the deportations and massacres here were Vefa Bey, the interim
kaymakam; Kukuşoğlu Şükru, the mayor and a member of the Ittihad; Salaheddin, a sergeant
in the gendarmerie in Koçhisar; Mustaf, an employee in the Tobacco Régie; Adalı Hasan,
who organized the deportations in the kaza itself; the Turkish notables Hamdi Effendi, Rıza
Effendi, and Sehid Osman Nuri; and the chief of the çetes, Mehmed Çavuş.126
As we have already noted,127 the first arrests here came at the very beginning of April, in
both the city and the villages. They were carried out under the leadership of the çete leaders
Kütükoğlu Hüseyin and Zarah Mahir. Some of those arrested were put to death in Seyfe Gorge
or near the Boğaz Bridge; others were interned in the city in the medreses of Şifahdiye and Gök.
But the systematic arrest of the males did not begin until June, particularly in the villages, when
2,000 men, including all the village priests in the kaza, were confined in Koçihisar’s prison and
slain before the deportations, in line with the usual procedure. Every night, these men were
taken from the city in groups of 100 and killed in Seyfe Gorge or near the Boğaz Bridge.128
The first convoy, made up of villagers, left around 20 June. It was followed by a caravan
made up of inhabitants of Koçhisar, 500 of them males. After suffering a first attack by
Çerkez from Kuştepe, this convoy reached the village of Ulash, the population of which had,
for the time being, been allowed to remain so that it could bring in the wheat harvest. Here
the convoy was combined with another comprising 1,000 women and 200 men from the rest
of the kaza. Two days later, the group arrived in Hasançelebi, where 200 adolescents were
removed from the convoy and killed. The next day, at Hekimhan, the old men were removed
from the convoy and massacred. After crossing the Kırk Göz Bridge on the fifth day, the
deportees reached Fırıncilar in 36 hours. They remained there for seven days, during which a

number of girls and boys were abducted.129 This convoy was in fact one of the first to test the
system put in place by the authorities crossing the mountains of Nal Töken. According to a
survivor, Zeynel Bey – not Haci Bedri Ağa – ordered that the 200 men still alive be killed,
the deportees be pillaged, and the women be stripped in Kanlı Dere Gorge, where thousands
of corpses were already strewn over the ground.130 After passing through Adiyaman, the con-
voy reached the Göksu, near Akçadağ. A number of women were thrown into the river there
by Kurds; others were abducted. As they went on toward Suruc, the survivors were combined
with what was left of other convoys, thus forming a caravan of 1,500 people. About half of
them remained in Suruc, while others continued their trek toward Birecik, Bab, and finally
Hama, their “place of residence,” which a few dozen women from Koçhisar managed to reach
in fall 1915.131
The Kaza of Koçgiri/Zara

In this rather mountainous kaza in the upper valley of the Halys there were, in 1914, a mere
dozen Armenian localities with a total population of 7,651. The principal town in the kaza,
Zara, had 6,000 inhabitants, 3,000 of them Armenian. Traversed by the road leading from
Sıvas to Erzerum, Zara was mainly a farming town, but it also served as a way-station, with
an immense khan that belonged to the Chil Hovhannesians.132
As we have seen, the Armenians in this region were attacked very early on by çetes, nota-
bly by the squadron commanded by Zaralı Mahir, a native of the region who, from 2 April
1915, played a crucial role in putting the men of the kaza to death in Seyfe Gorge or near the
Boğaz Bridge.133 We do not know the exact date on which the convoys left Zara, though it
was probably between 20 and 29 June. We do know, however, that they took a different route
than the deportees from Sıvas, because they headed toward Divrig/Divriği and then Harput,
Maden, Severek, Urfa, Viranşehir, and Rakka.134
Apart from Mahir, those mainly responsible for the persecutions were the kaymakam,
Hüseyin Hüsni (who served in this post from 13 October 1912 to 5 August 1916), Kör Hakkı,
Kebabci Ahmed, and Bakkalci Ahmed.135 Because the army needed their services, a few
craftsmen, notably a blacksmith, were allowed to remain in the kaza on the condition that
they convert to Islam.136
The Kaza of Yeni Han

The two Armenian localities in the kaza, the administrative seat Yeni Han (pop. 1,461) and
Kavak (pop. 630), were located near the road leading from Sıvas to Tokat and Samsun.137
Responsible for organizing the deportation of the kaza’s Armenians toward the end of June
1915, after the men had been put to death in Maşadlar Yeri, near Yeni Han, was its kay-
makam, Reşid Bey, who held his post from 2 December 1914 to 12 November 1915.
The Kaza of Şarkişla/Tenus

This agricultural kaza, close to Sıvas and traversed by the Halys, boasted 26 Armenian local-
ities in 1914, with a total population of 21,063. The most important of these was Gemerek,
which was then home to no fewer than 5,212 Armenians. The kaza had some 20 churches
and 21 schools with a total enrolment of 1,988.138
The kaymakam, Cemil Bey, who served from 8 May 1914 to 4 September 1915, first organ-
ized the arrest of 400 villagers in the environs of Şarkışla, who were killed there night after
night in groups of twenty. The deportation took place early in July. In Kangal, one of the
first convoys was combined with a caravan from Sıvas, forming a group of 5,000 Armenians.

This convoy then followed the usual route, passing through Alacahan, where the men were
removed and liquidated, and Kötü Han, where Emirpaşaoğlu Hamid Bey’s çetes were wait-
ing for them. There, 2,000 men from Sıvas and the environs of Şarkışla were seized, tied up,
and brought before Hamid, who knew most of them from Sıvas and thus how much each
of them possessed. He managed to extract seven bags of gold from them before dispatching
convoys toward Hasançelebi, Hekimhan, Hasanbadrig, Kırk Göz, and Fırıncilar. Almost all
were eliminated during these stages of their trek; none reached Samsat.139
Gemerek, which together with the surrounding villages formed a dense group of Armenians,
was given separate treatment. Its müdir, Çerkez Yusuf Effendi, called on his Çerkez compatri-
ots from Yayla (in the kaza of Aziziye) for help in slaying the men of Gemerek, Çisanlu, and
Karapunar. A few notables from Gemerek were even publicly hanged, after which the women
and children were put on the road to Kangal, joining the flood of deportees from Sıvas and
regions to the north.140 Besides the müdir of the nahie of Gemerek, the main organizers of
the massacre of the males – adolescents over age 13 met the same fate as adults – were Kör
Velioğlu Ummet, Kayserlı Cemal Effendi, Talaslı Mükremin, Şarkışlayi Mehmed Effendi,
Colonel Talaslı Behcet Bey, and the müdir Ahmed Effendi.141
Approximately 3,000 Armenians from the villages of Shepni, Dendel, Burhan, and
Tekmen took refuge in a huge cave in the highlands around Ak Dağ, where they fought off
some 2,000 regular soldiers backed up by irregulars for several days. Some 15 men survived
the massacre that followed the fighting. The women and children were deported.142
The Kazas of Bünyan and Aziziye

On the eve of the First World War, there were only 5,887 Armenians in Bunyan and Aziziye;
1,106 lived in the latter kaza, almost all of them in the principal town.143 The arrest of the
Armenian notables here was orchestrated by the head of the local Ittihad club, Havasoğlu
Haci Hüseyin, with the support of the kaymakam, Hamid Nuri Bey (who held his post from 17
October 1914 to 22 October 1915). The pillage of Armenian property was directed by Hayreddin
Bey, the head of the emvalı metruke. It mainly benefited, however, a few Turkish eşrefs from
the district: Sofoyoğlu Mehmed, Feyzi Effendi, Haznedarzâde Kadir, Imamzâde Hakkı, Haci
Ahmed Arif, Yusufbeyzâde Adil, Yusufbeyzâde Sadık, Çarçi Hasanin Ali, and Hacimusaoğlu
Haci Ömer.144 The deportation route led through Gürün and Akçadağ to Fırıncilar.
Armenians from five localities in the neighboring kaza of Bünyan – Bunyan, the seat of
the kaza, with its 500 Armenians, as well as Gigi (pop. 350), Sarıoğlan (pop. 336), Seveghen
(pop. 829), and Ekrek/Akarag (pop. 2,700) – were also deported toward Gürün on orders from
the kaymakam, Nabi Bey, who held his post from 4 June 1915 to 31 August 1916.145
The Kaza of Kangal

In 1914, the kaza of Kangal had an Armenian population of 7,339; 1,000 of these Armenians
lived in the administrative seat of the kaza, Kangal, from which they were deported in late
June. The others lived in the district’s villages: Magahar (pop. 951), Yarhisar (pop. 703),
Bozarmut (pop. 224), Komsur (pop. 343), and Mancılık (pop. 1,919).146 In the last-named vil-
lage, the liquidation of the men took place in May and early June. One of the notables, Stepan
Hekimian, was even nailed to a cross and paraded through the village. The execution of some
100 men in Daşli Dere was personally supervised by the leader of the squadron of çetes in Sıvas,
Kütükoğlu Hüseyin. Among those killed were Murad, Asdur, and Hovhannes Karamanugian,
Misak Dzerunian, and Vartan Stepanian. The rest of the population, including the men, was
deported on 14 June. Only the 2,000 inhabitants of Ulash were temporarily spared, so that
they could bring in the wheat harvest needed by the army. In September 1915, they were

deported in turn toward the Syrian desert by way of Malatia, Adiyaman, and Suruc, on orders
from the kaymakam, Mohamed Ali Bey, who held his post until 11 March 1917.147
The Kaza of Divrig

The administrative seat of this kaza, Divrig/Divriği, had a population of 12,000, almost one-
third of whom were Armenian. Together with its 18 Armenian-inhabited villages, the district
boasted a total Armenian population of 10,605.148 Among the countless vestiges of the medi-
eval period sprinkled through the region was the monastery of St. Gregory the Illuminator,
a jewel of medieval Armenian architecture build in the eleventh century that was perched
on a rocky outcrop three hours north of Divrig near the village of Khurnavil (pop. 320). The
neighboring village of Kesmeh (pop. 580), and the native village of the Noradounghians also
boasted medieval churches, as did Zimara/Zmmar (pop. 1,250). Binga/Pingian (pop. 1,300), on
the right bank of the Euphrates, was a medieval citadel that was nearly inaccessible because
it was pressed up against a rock face close to the Euphrates. Its only access route ran over a
suspended bridge that had been built in the eleventh century. In the southwestern part of
the kaza was a string of Armenian villages on the two banks of the Lik Su: Arshushan (pop.
310), Kuresin (pop. 240), Odur (pop. 215), Parzam (pop. 510), and the village around the mon-
astery of St. James that the Turks called Venk (from the Armenian word vank, monastery)
(pop. 290). Finally, there were five Armenian villages on the right bank of the Çaldi çay, in
the easternmost part of the district: Armdan (pop. 1,605), Palanga (pop. 480), Sinjan (395
Armenians), Mrvana, and Shigim.149 When the general mobilization order was issued, the
recruits from the district of Divrig were assigned to an amele taburi based in Zara.150
In the administrative seat of the kaza, Divrig, the primate Krikor Zartarian was sum-
moned before the kaymakam Abdülmecid Bey (who held his post from 1 March 1914 to
29 November 1915) in late March. Abdülmecid demanded that the weapons held by
the Armenians in the town and the villages be handed over to him in one week’s time,
along with the deserters. The Armenians’ response was apparently judged unsatisfactory,
because the auxiliary primate, Father Serovpe Prigian, and several political leaders, such as
Khachadur and Armenag Menendian; Garabed Hayranian; Mgrdich and Hagopos Kljian;
Krikor, Dikran, and Mgrdich Kakanian; Melkon and Suren Guzelian; Mihran Doktorian;
Kevork, Haig, Toros, and Tatul Hayranian; Nshan Tahmazian; Sarkis Lusigian; Hovhannes
Shahabian; Khachadur Deombelekian; and Karekin and Aram Torigian, among others – a
total of 45 people – were arrested, tortured for two weeks (some, including the auxiliary pri-
mate, died as a result), and then dispatched to Sıvas.151
The victims of the second wave of arrests were Divrig’s craftsmen and merchants, as well
as its adolescents under draft age – a total of some 200 people. After being tortured for sev-
eral days running, these men were taken from the village, tied up, and led an hour’s distance
to the Deren Dere Gorge, where they were killed with axes. According to our witnesses, the
men were all eliminated in this fashion, with the exception of 200 who managed to flee to
the mountain villages inhabited by Alevites; some of them survived by pillaging Turkish
localities in the region.152
The deportations from the kaza’s villages, however, did not begin until 28 May 1915. The
peasants were first of all concentrated in Divrig, where the men and adolescents between
the ages of 14 and 18 were separated from the others and confined in a church before being
killed. The rest of the rural population was deported toward Malatia by way of Agn/Eğin and
Arapkir.153 The townspeople of Divrig were put on the road a little later. On 28 June, the city
was practically emptied of its men. On the morning of 29 June, the town criers announced
the deportation order, which gave people three days to make preparations to leave. On 1
July, the Armenian quarters of Divrig were surrounded by regular troops who proceeded to

expel the inhabitants. They were regrouped near the southwestern exit from the town and
were dispatched from there toward Arapkir after the abduction of young women and girls for
the harems of local dignitaries. The convoy was pillaged shortly after it set, at Sarı Çiçek, by
Kurdish villagers from the surrounding area.154
According to Hmayag Zartarian, the anti-Armenian operations in the region were con-
ducted by a squad of çetes commanded by Kör Adıl, a native of Trebizond. He was backed up
by Çadıroğlu Abdüllah, Topcuoğlu Hüseyin, Ğasab Süleyman Çavuş, Hafız Effendi, Leblebici
Polis Mohamed, Köroğlu Polis Ülusi, İzet Bey, Sıvaslı Küregsiz Hafız, and others.155
We also know about the fate of the 1,300 Armenians of Binga/Pingian, located on the
right bank of the Euphrates, thanks to the testimony of a survivor named L. Goshgarian.
According to Goshgarian, 100 recruits from the village were put to work on the Erzincan-
Erzerum road in a place called Sansa Dere, sharing the fate of the 4,000 to 5,000 worker-
soldiers assigned to the amele taburis stationed in the region. However, a few dozen young
men and adults did manage to flee to the mountains and go to Dersim. The rest of the popu-
lation was deported toward Arapkir on 23 June 1915.156
The Kaza of Darende

In 1914, the kaza of Darende had a population of only 3,983 Armenians. Somewhat more
than 2,000 of them lived in the seat of the kaza, also called Darende, while another 1,100
lived in the neighboring village of Ashodi.157 The kaymakam, Receb Bey, who had been
appointed on 8 February 1913, was dismissed on 21 May 1915 and replaced by Süleyman Bey
on 14 June. This might be taken as an indication that Receb refused to carry out Muammer’s
orders. We do not know anything at all about the circumstances under which the Armenian
population of the kaza of Derende was eliminated. The fact that it lies on the road between
Gürün and Malatia, however, suggests that it was dealt a fate similar to that meted out to the
Armenians of its northern neighbor.
The Kaza of Gürün

With its five exclusively Armenian villages and a handful of dispersed communities, the
kaza of Gürün had a total Armenian population of 13,874 in 1914. The seat of the kaza,
Gürün, isolated in a narrow, steep-sided valley, had 12,168 inhabitants, 8,406 of whom were
Armenian. The town was strung out along the two banks of the Melos/Tohmak, made up
of a succession of neighborhoods scattered through little valleys. The Armenians had 12
schools in Gürün. The town preserved its prestigious past, seen in the ruins of a medieval
citadel that had been restored early in the eleventh century and the “desert” (monastery) of
the Holy Mother of God in Saghlu. It was known not only for its commerce and craftsman-
ship, but also for the manufacturing of rugs, cotton fabric, and wool products. There were
three Armenian villages in the immediate vicinity of Gürün – Kavak (pop. 220), Karasar
(pop. 410), and Kristianyören (pop. 80) – and two more villages to the north on the road to
Mancılık: Karayören (pop. 560) and Çahırınköy (pop. 140).158
In contrast with what happened in many other regions, the kaymakam, Şahib Bey, who
held his post from 30 August 1912 to 7 November 1915, does not seem to have played a deter-
mining role in the persecutions. According to Armenian sources, it was the military com-
mander of Sıvas, Pertev Bey, who went to Gürün personally to transmit the order to begin
the operations against the Armenian population. Avundükzâde Mehmed Bey, a Turkish
notable from the town, and his three sons, Özer, Hüseyin, and Eşref, organized a meeting
at which, with the help of the local Ittihadist club, a local branch of the Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa
was formed under the name of Milli Cendarma. Captain İbrahimoğlu Mehmed Bey was

appointed the commander of this militia. The group charged with carrying out the massa-
cres and deportations brought together other notables who were members of the Young Turk
club: İbrahimbeyoğlu Dilaver, Küçükalizâde Bahri, Eminbeyoğlu Mehmed, Mamoağazâde
Emin, Köseahmedzâde Abdüllah, Sadık Çavuş, who was also the commander of a squadron
of çetes, Yehyaoğlu Mehmed, Karamevlutoğlu Talât Effendi, and Nacar Ahmed Abdüllah
Karpuzzâde.159 This committee charged Kâmil Effendi, the commander of the gendarmerie
and a well-known Young Turk, with drawing up the lists of Armenian notables to be arrested.
The first arrests took place in May. The first to be detained were the Armenian primate
Khoren Timaksian and Reverend Bedros Mughalian,160 followed by the town’s notables, who
were imprisoned in the Minasian khan, located in the Sagh neighborhood, and also in the
Turkish baths at Karatepe. Delibekiroğlu Mehmed Onbaşi in particular was charged with
supervising the torture sessions, which here too were designed to make the victims confess
the location of possible arms caches and the nature of the “plot” they were supposed to have
hatched.
The killing of the notables of Gürün began on 10 June 1915. Seventy-four men were
massacred in the Ulash/Ulaş valley near the village of Kardaşlar by 12 çetes in gendarme’s
uniforms under the command of Cendarma Ali Çavuş. On 27 June 40 more notables met the
same fate near Çalikoğlu.161 On 22 June 1915, some 20 men were put to death on the road to
Albistan by Tütünci Hüseyin Çavuş and his irregular troops.162 İbrahimoğlu Mehmed, the
leader of a squadron of çetes, as well as Gürünlı Üzeyer Effendi, Ömer Ağa from Setrak (a
village in Albistan), and Hakkı Effendi, a native of Ayntab, also played outstanding roles in
slaughtering the males of the region of Gürün and then Akşekir.163
It would appear that the committee subsequently decided to have boys between ten and
14 arrested and killed. Kasap Osman, one of the Special Organization’s killers, indeed took
on the job of dispatching a group of 120 boys to the valley of Saçciğaz, a Turkish village
located two hours from Gürün, where they were slain with knives and axes.164
Küçükalizâde Bahri, one of the most influential members of the local Ittihad and the Milli
Cendarma, personally murdered three of the principal Armenian leaders of the main town
in the kaza – Hajji Hagop Buldukian, Hagop Shahbazian, and Haji Artin Gergerian – in
Tel, near Aryanpunar. It was also Bahri who supervised the looting of the two convoys of
deportees from the kaza in Kavak, a Turkish village located on the road to Albistan. Early in
July, after the males were liquidated, the deportations were carried out under Bahri’s supervi-
sion with the help of local policemen (Abdüllah, Hamdi, and Sabri). Katırci Nuri Effendi,
the inspector of the convoys, and Deli Bekir Mustafa, aided by Hacioğlu Yusuf, conducted
the two convoys.165 The first passed through Albistan, Kanlı Dere, Kani Dağ, Ayranbunar,
Sağin Boğaz, Aziziye, Göbeg Yoren, and Fırıncilar, and then through Ayntab, Marash, Urfa,
and Karabıyık to Der Zor. The second convoy started off on the same route, but was then
set marching in the direction of Hama, Homs, and the Hauran. Many of the deportees from
Gürün were massacred in the vicinity of Marash.166
Deportations and Massacres in the Sancak of Tokat

The statistics compiled by the Patriarchate indicate that the sancak of Tokat had an
Armenian population of 32,281 in 1914, which lived in 27 towns and villages that boasted
28 churches, two monasteries, and 14 schools with a total enrolment of 3,175.167 Thus, the
Armenian presence in this western district of the vilayet of Sıvas was relatively modest,
although, from an economic point of view, it was not negligible. Tokat, where the prefec-
ture was located, was spread over a valley two kilometers long; its various neighborhoods
lay on the sides of the valley, forming a sort of amphitheater. On the eve of the war, there
were 11,980 Armenians and about 15,000 Turks in the city. But there were another 6,500

Armenians in the rest of the kaza of Tokat. They lived in 17 rural communities: west of the
city, in the valley of the Tozanlu Su and on the plain of Ğanova, in Endiz (Armenian pop.
280), Gesare (pop. 100), Söngür (pop. 160), Varaz (pop. 90), Çerçi (pop. 220), Biskürcuk
(pop. 550), Bazarköy (pop. 130), Kurçi (pop. 80); south of the city, in the Artova valley, on
the road to Yeni Han, Bolus (pop. 300), Yartmeş (pop. 400), Kervanseray (pop. 350), Çiflik
(pop. 326), Tahtebağ (pop. 262), Gedağaz (pop. 308); and, east of the city, near the road
between Tokat and Niksar, in Krikores (pop. 600), on the left bank of the Iris, and on the
right bank, Bizeri (pop. 280).168
The most striking event in the months preceding the outbreak of the war was the fire on
1 May 1914 that ravaged the street where many of Tokat’s businesses were located, Baghdad
Cadesi. As we have seen, this was not an isolated act.169 There is even every reason to
believe that these events reflected the general strategy adopted by the Ittihad in February
1914 with a view to diminishing the economic importance of the Greeks and Armenians.
When the general mobilization was announced, many Armenians paid the bedel in order to
avoid conscription; hence there were only 280 worker-soldiers from Tokat and Krikores in
the amele taburi that was formed to build a barracks in the city. In line with directives issued
by the Patriarchate, the military requisitions, despite the abuses to which they gave rise, did
not occasion protests.170 The situation deteriorated in late April 1915, when the CUP sent
its parliamentary representatives into the provinces of Asia Minor to preach elimination of
the “domestic foe.” Several Armenian witnesses attended a meeting organized in the Paşa
Cami at which a CUP representative attacked “those who, in our midst, seem to be friends,”
but whom “the Turkish people must make it a priority to purge.”171 This declaration led the
young Armenian primate, Father Shavarsh Sahagian, to multiply gestures of goodwill toward
the local authorities. The decree summoning the population to turn in all the weapons in its
possession, pasted up in every public building, compelled the primate to organize a discussion
with all the community leaders. According to Hovhannes Yotghanjian, who took part in
this meeting, all were aware of the impending threat, but there was disagreement as to what
to do about it. Shavarsh Sahagian and the local Hnchak leader M. Arabian were opposed
to giving up the weapons and suggested taking measure to organize the self-defense of the
Armenian neighborhoods. A majority of those present, however, pointed out that there were
no Armenian fighters available in the city apart from a few deserters who had taken refuge
there. The weapons were finally deposited in the Church of St. Stepanos and delivered up
to the authorities.
The subsequent events resembled those we have seen elsewhere. Irregulars carried out
search and seizure operations in the rural areas while gendarmes or soldiers ransacked the
Armenian households in Tokat for arms and all documents printed in Armenian. Early in
May, the Hnchak leaders Beyekh Simon and Garabed Gövjian and the Dashnaks Khachig
Seraydarian (an army pharmacist) and Garabed Arenderian were arrested, tortured, and
executed in prison.172 During a visit that Muammer paid to Tokat in this period, the vali
demanded that the Armenian primate turn over “imported arms” and dismissed all the
Armenian civil servants in the police force and gendarmerie. Apparently, the authorities
considered the situation sufficiently ripe by this time: on 18 May 1915, they proceeded to
arrest all of Tokat’s Armenian notables and teachers. The method they employed in carrying
out this round-up was also rather classic. The mutesarif, Cevded Bey (who held his post from
2 May 1915 to 4 February 1916),173 very courteously summoned all these notables – Kevork
Pasbanian, Hagop Boyajian, Hovhannes Kazanjian, Avedis Khdrian, Nazar Shishmanian,
and others – to the konak, but at the end of the meeting had them arrested and interned in
police stations. In the course of the day, the adolescents were also arrested in the streets and
confined in the food warehouse near the central square, where they were systematically tor-
tured.174 The remarks that Ahmed Muammer made to the Armenian primate early in June

during a working visit to Tokat clearly show that the authorities did not judge the number of
weapons they had so far confiscated to be satisfactory. The vali demanded that the prelate,
“on whom everything depends,” do what he had to convince his flock to give up their arms.
On Sunday, 13 June, Sahagian, in the last sermon he delivered, stated his conclusions, as it
were, before a distraught multitude: he told them that he had discreetly met with Muammer
three times, that the vali had tried to convince him to turn over “arms and deserters,” and
that the community leaders had decided to submit to the government’s orders “in order to
ward off the danger” threatening them, but that he could still not utter “the least little word
of consolation, because we are lost.”175 The prelate seems to have made an accurate assess-
ment of the situation. The next morning, when 300 deserters gathered before the cathedral,
ready to turn themselves in, he refused to go with them to the military authorities “so as not
to be their executioner.” On Wednesday, 16 June, a new stage opened with the systematic
arrest of the men, beginning with Father Sahagian. That afternoon, Sahagian was sum-
moned to the konak, where the police chief Mehmed Effendi informed him that he had to
go to Sıvas immediately to meet with the vali. He was killed that very evening on the way
there, in Kızın Eniş.176
Arrests continued to be made on 17 June. Died together in groups of ten, 1,400 men
were conducted out of the city in four convoys to Ardova, Ğazova, and Bizeri, where they
were shot. According to Lusia Zhamgochian, 17 clergymen, including the auxiliary bishop
Nerses Mgrdichian (1861–1915) and Father Andon Seraydarian, were murdered on 18 June
in Tokat’s citadel, after having been subjected to refined tortures. Subsequently, the young
men between 14 and 20 were put to death. By the end of June, only the 280 worker-soldiers
employed in constructing the Şube barracks, three army doctors – Seraydarian, Eminian,
and Misak Panosian – and a few artisans working for the army or the authorities, were still
“free.”177
The rest of the population was not deported all at once but according to age cohorts. The
Azar khan served as a detention center for older women, who were arrested by the police and
put on the road two days later; they were followed by the young women and then the last
remaining Armenians, who were marched down the Sıvas road by way of Çiftlik-Yeni Han
toward Şarkışla-Marash or, more frequently, Kangal-Malatia.178
Besides the mutesarif, Cevded Bey, those primarily responsible for the violence in Tokat
were Hoca Fehmi, a parliamentary deputy and member of the Ittihad; Osman Bey, the
commander of the gendarmerie; Mehmed Effendi, the police chief; Muteveli Nuri Bey, a
notable and member of the commission responsible for “abandoned property”; Latifoğlu
Ibrahim, a CUP member; the policemen Uzun Mahmud, Nuri, Ziya, and İbrahim; the gen-
darmes Reşidoğlu Fehmi (a sergeant), Salih, Muftioğlu Asem, and Hayreddin; the müdir of
Ğazova, Gurci Ahmed, who oversaw the massacres in his district; the çetes of the Special
Organization Salih Ağa, a butcher, Çerkez Mirza Bey, Çerkez Osman Bey, Çerkez Mahmud
Bey, Çerkez Elmaylizâde Haci Effendi, Salih Mehmed Bey, Alipaşazâde Enus Bey, Debelege
Effendi, Elmaylizâde İzzet, Elmaylizâde Tevfik, Elmaylizâde Osman, Karaderviş Şükrü,
Ekmeci Güzeller, Haci Bey Apulçavusoğlu Mustafa, Geproğlu Osman Nazıf, Abdüllah, Kör
Binbaşi Ferid, Cinçoğlu Ahmed, Latifzâde Osman, Latifzâde Filmi, Kaimakamzâde Tacir
Bey, Celani Haci, Istambolu Hikmet Bey, Muftizâde, and Cigeroğlu Osman Bey, the son of
Osman Bey.179
The Kaza of Niksar

Of the 3,560 Armenians in the kaza of Niksar, 2,830 lived in the principal town, also called
Niksar. Known in antiquity as Neocaesarea, Niksar lay 53 kilometers northwest of Tokat in
the fertile plain of the Kelkit Çay. Almost all the Armenians here were Turkish-speaking,

and, with few exceptions, earned a living as craftsmen, businessmen, or farmers. The 8 June
1896 massacres ruined the community, whose property was systematically pillaged; there-
after, the Armenians failed to recover the prosperity that they had enjoyed in the past.
There were also two Armenian villages in the kaza: Kapuağzi (with an Armenian-speaking
population of 650) and Karameşe (pop. 80).180 Here the men were slain and the rest of the
population deported in late June;181 the operations were carried out under the direction of
the kaymakam, Rahmi Bey, who held his post from 4 May 1914 to 8 August 1915.
The Kaza of Erbaa

In this kaza in the northern part of the vilayet, long a part of the vilayet of Trebizond,
there were nine Armenian localities in 1914 with a total population of 6,948. Half of the
kaza’s Armenians lived in its principal town, Herek, located on the left bank of the Iris
river 55 kilometers from Tokat. In addition to their traditional crafts, the Armenians of
Herek, who were Turkish-speaking, cultivated hemp and opium. The kaza’s eight Armenian
villages were all inhabited by Armenian-speakers from Hamşin who had settled in the
region early in the eighteenth century: Ağabağ (pop. 279), Çozlar (pop. 292), Ayvaza (pop.
313), Sarıkaya (pop. 263), Saharçal (pop. 180), Hayatgeriz (pop. 120), Gerasan (pop. 220),
and Cibrayl (pop. 320).182 The procedure applied by the authorities was the same as was
followed elsewhere; here, too, the women and children were put on a trajectory leading
through Sıvas-Kangal-Hasançelebi-Fırıncilar and beyond.183 Apparently, the kaymakam,
Abdel Settar Bey, who had assumed his post on 19 April 1914, disobeyed orders, for he was
dismissed on 1 June 1915 and replaced on 9 August 1915 by Rahmi Bey, who was trans-
ferred from Niksar.
The Kaza of Zile

In 1914, 4,283 Turkish-speaking Armenians lived in the kaza of Zile, located 30 kilometers
west of Tokat. All of them lived in the seat of the kaza; their principal occupation was
rug-making.184 The men, among them the Hnchak pharmacist Dikran Seraydarian, were
arrested in June and conducted, with their local priest at the head of the procession, to the
marsh of Ğaz Göl, where they were killed.185

the Sancak of Amasia
The sancak of Amasia, with its roughly 200,000 inhabitants, including 31,717 Armenians and
39,676 Greeks, was on the eve of the First World War an extraordinary museum of the cus-
toms of the native populations of Asia Minor. In the kaza of Amasia, all 13,788 Armenians
lived in the administrative seat of the kaza, also called Amasia, which was strung out in a
narrow valley traversed by the Iris. The biggest Armenian neighborhood, known as Savayid,
covered both slopes of a little dale. Located here were the Cathedral of Our Lady, the bisho-
pric, the Church of Saint James, the Armenian hospital, the big Bartevian middle school, a
Protestant church, a Jesuit middle school, and an Armenian Catholic church. There was also
a big Armenian population in the Deve neighborhood. Altogether, there were 12 schools
attended by more than 1,600 children. At the time, Amasia owed its prosperity in large
measure to weaving, which the Armenians had partially mechanized.186
We have already noted that the first arrests occurred early in Amasia, around 15 March.
The targets were political leaders and teachers: Krikor Jerian, Minas Ipekjian, Harutiun

Baghchegiulian, Nshan Adzigian, the pharmacist Toros Kaymakian, Tateos Mserian, the
elementary schoolteacher Krikor Vartabedian, and others. These men were systematically
tortured in order to induce them to turn over the archives of their parties and reveal where
the weapons they supposedly had were located. Shortly thereafter, they were transferred to
Sıvas and interned in the medrese of Şifahdiye.187 The other notables of Amasia were arrested
on 18 May, tortured for a few days, and then killed with axes on 23 May in an isolated spot
three hours from the city at Saz Dağ.188 Only after the vali had expressly paid a visit to the
city on 14 June did the arrests, torture, and systematic killing of the men – especially the
craftsmen – begin. On 29 June, 360 of them were taken from the city by night and tied
together in groups of four, with four other convoys of this sort having to be organized before
all were liquidated.189 The city, however, was unaware of the fate reserved for these men.
Rumor had it that they were safe and sound. There was even talk of an imperial pardon in
the air, but in the end the mutesarif Celal Bey announced the deportation order to the aux-
iliary primate, Mampre Fakhirian. Fakhirian ordered that the bells of the cathedral be rung;
the population streamed to the cathedral, where it learned that it would have to leave the
city in short order.190
The deportations began on 3 July and proceeded at the rate of one convoy per day for five
days. The last caravan, our witnesses, comprised approximately 1,000 people, among them
200 adolescents and old men who had not been killed with the rest of the men.191 After
passing through Kangal, all the males over the age of eight in the convoys from Amasia were
slain in Şarkışla around 15 July by Turkish and Çerkez villagers under the orders of Halil Bey,
the commander of the squadrons of çetes in the vilayet of Sıvas. The killings took place in
the presence of the kaymakam.192 Thereafter, these convoys took the route that the depor-
tees usually followed, but did not arrive in Hasançelebi until 28 August, or in Fırıncilar until
7 September, which shows how slowly the authorities led them on.193 Zeynel and Bedri were
waiting for them further on, in the Kanlı Dere gorge, where, our witnesses confirm, not a
single male over eight was left alive.194 The remainder of the trajectory of these convoys from
Amasia was classic: they passed by way of Suruc and Arabpunar, after which the handful of
survivors moved on to Bab, Aleppo, or Meskene-Der Zor.195
As one can readily imagine, the considerable economic stake represented by the seizure
of Armenian property commanded the authorities’ undivided attention. Celal Bey the mute-
sarif; Serri Bey, a member of the deportation commission (he became the mutesarif of Çanğırı
in 1919); Osman Nuri, also known as Körguzi Raşi Nuri, the commander of the gendarmerie;
the muftis Müneverzâde Haci Tevfik Hafiz and Ğüzluglu Hafız Hoca; Rüşdi Hafız; Salim or
Saleh Bey, the president of the local Ittihad club; Nalband İzzetoğlu Kâmil; Tıntin Hasan
and Haci Tevfik, two Unionists; Nalband İzzetzâde Haci Kismil, a Unionist and the mayor
of Amasi; Nafız Bey, a parliamentary representative from Amasia; Fatar Rezmi, an engineer;
Hamdi Bey, the head of the belediye; Topcioğlu Mustafa, the secretary general in the town
hall; Kürdoğlu Serhoş Hasan, a former parliamentary deputy from Amasia; and Ali Effendi,
the director of the orphanage, all bore a large share of the responsibility for the arrests, house
searches, torture, and the pillaging of the Armenians’ property.196
The Special Organization’s representative in Amasia, Timarhaneci Halil, who was also
an eminent member of the local Ittihad club and responsible for the squadron of çetes based
in the city, as well as Topcioğlu Şükrü, an officer in this squadron, played a central role in
the massacre of the men and boys of Amasia, along with their main collaborators: Topcizâde
Halil, Osman, Konfikten Rıza, Tlatıs Hasan, Kontraci Hasan and his brother, Ğabaş Ali; Cin
Sarac; Tatar Arabaci Mehmed; Topcioğlu Ziya; Göv Ömeroğlu Hasan; Bakal Kör Ahmed; Kel
Osmanoğlu Besim; Arpacızâde Haci Osman and his four sons; Tutunci Mustafa; Bazadoğlu
Mehmed and his brothers; Deli Beyler; Çaycızâde Nuri Bey; Abdoğlu Hulusi; and Ladikli
Ekizler.197

The Kaza of Merzifun

In 1914, the seat of the kaza of Merzifun, Marzevan/Merzifun, had an Armenian population
of 10,381, with eleven schools boasting a total enrolment of 1,221. There were also small
numbers of Armenians in the only two Armenian villages in the district – Yenice (pop. 140)
and Lidj/Korköy (pop. 145), located near the monastery of the Holy Mother of God, which
served as the seat of the bishop of the joint diocese of Amasia and Marzevan.198
Thanks to fuller documentation than we have for other areas, we may note a concrete
case of despoliation of Armenian property for the benefit of a few local notables. It occurred
even before the outbreak of the war. When, in autumn 1914, military requisitions began, four
men set out to appropriate 8,000 to 10,000 sacks of flour produced by seven large flour mills
owned by Armenians from Merzifun. Salihbeyzâde Hüseyin, the president of the municipal-
ity; the CUP’s local responsible secretary; the commander of the gendarmerie, Mahir Bey;
and a Young Turk merchant named Kiremicizâde Hadi officially confiscated these stocks of
flour to meet the “needs” of the army before quickly reselling them “at high prices” and divid-
ing up the profits among themselves.199 There is every reason to believe that this documented
episode hides abuses on a much larger scale that were committed by local Young Turks who
took advantage of their status as activists in the party in power.
The first arrests in Merzifun came in April: the targets were some 50 notables who were
either tortured to death or dispatched to Sıvas to answer for acts endangering state secu-
rity. In May, the local authorities proceeded to recruit 100 çetes from among the villages.
Meanwhile, the decree ordering that people turn in any weapons they kept at home was pub-
lished, providing the çetes with an opportunity to conduct house searches and make arrests
in the Armenian community.200 Muammer, after visiting Amasia on 14 June, also paid a visit
to Merzifun, apparently to accelerate the elimination of the men there. Indeed, the 1,200
men arrested on 12 June, shortly before his arrival in the city, were eliminated on Monday,
15 June.201 The first group, comprising 300 young men, was conducted to Elek Deresi, near
the village of Tenik on the road to Çorum, under the direct supervision of Fayk Bey, the
kaymakam,202 and Mahir Bey, the commander of the gendarmerie. The men were stripped
and killed with axes. Over the next few days, the other men met the same fate.203
The deportation order was made public shortly thereafter, on 21 June. The convoys were
rapidly put on the road and followed the same route as those from Amasia. Around 20 men
and fewer than 100 women and children reached Aleppo.204 According to an anonymous
witness who remained in the city,
the furniture and the other properties abandoned [by the women], without being offi-
cially inventoried in any way, was loaded on carts and piled up in the city’s Armenian
church, while the Armenians’ stores were looted by Turkish officials and the populations.
The stores that were thus emptied were put under seal as ‘abandoned property.’205
Aside from the few Armenians who were allowed to remain in Merzifun because they had
agreed to convert to Islam, a non-negligible number of schoolchildren, teachers, and members
of the Anatolia College medical staff, directed by Dr. George E. White, were also left in the
city. These people benefited from the protection of the American embassy and the consular
agent in Samsun, William Peter, who was responsible for watching over the interests of these
institutions and had repeatedly traveled to Merzifun to negotiate with the kaymakam.206 The
authorities had soon set their sights on Anatolia College, administered by the American
Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. They wished to take control of it and at the
same time get rid of the Armenians they found there. For the Americans, however, there
could be no question of accepting the least encroachment by the authorities. Dr. White

and Dr. Marden, responsible for the college and the hospital, reminded the kaymakam of
Merzifun in a letter that, “the Embassy telegraphs that necessary and precise orders have
been given, by the Ministry of the Interior and by the Pasha the Minister of War to the local
authorities, assuring in definite form the protection of our institution, the College, together
with all the persons connected with it without exception.”207 Refusing to make an exception
for Anatolia College, the Turkish administration demanded that all the Armenians on its
staff and all the Armenian students be deported with their compatriots in the rest of the city.
The question was therefore referred to the vali of Sıvas, to whom Marden and White sent a
telegram in which they declared:
on the ground that it is necessary for all Armenians to go to an appointed place, the
kaimakam had informed us regarding certain of our workers, ministers and profes-
sors, who have been many years in our congregation and are graduates of advanced
schools … that the local government has no authority to give them exemption.208
Marden and White also tried the same day to send a wire to the American ambassador
Morgenthau. The kaymakam, however, refused to transmit their cable, which pointed out
that “the employees of our Hospital would be included in the general despatch of Armenians
to an appointed place,” and, furthermore, that “if these persons are sent away without regard
to the needs of the institution, all our buildings for philanthropic purposes and our place of
worship for religious exercises will be closed and useless.”209
On 31 July, William Peter arrived in Merzifun in hopes of changing the minds of the local
authorities – specifically, the kaymakam Fayk Bey – so that the Armenians working at the
college would be spared deportation. The record of his interviews with the kaymakam, related
carefully and in detail by the American consular agent in his dispatches to Morgenthau,
illustrate the obstinacy with which the authorities endeavored to have the teachers, medical
personnel, and young girls of the college handed over to them.210
In the long report that Peter addressed to Morgenthau after his first visit to Merzifun,211
he noted that Professors Manisajian and Hagopian, both of Anatolia College, were among
the first to be arrested and that they had been “set free, after interventions on their behalf,
but only temporarily,” after he had “greased the palm of the commander of the gendarmerie,
Mahir Bey, arranging for him to be given the sum of 275 Turkish pounds by their lawyer.” It
seems that the American believed that, as a result, “the Armenian question had been set-
tled as far as they were concerned, but this was a royal error, for this was only the prelude to
further maneuvers.” The kaymakam accused the Americans of agreeing to safeguard “a mass
of objects belonging to the Armenians” and giving refuge to “a mass of refugees.” According
to the reports of the American doctors, the kaymakam, the commander of the gendarmerie
Mahir, and the mayor Hüseyin Effendi, “consoled the Armenians,” assuring them that “they
could remain where they were, while relieving them of as much money as possible and, when
no more was to be had, sending them off.” Emin Bey, the military commander, also gave him
certain indications about the methods used by these unscrupulous civil servants to pillage
the Armenians: “this trio had pried at least 500 Turkish pounds per capita from thirty-five
individuals, which amount to the neat sum of no less than 17,500 Turkish pounds.” Emin,
apparently shocked by these methods, had declared that he was ready to testify and suggested
that the American diplomat inform his superiors. The consul’s report reveals that the kay-
makam had indeed held “a few hundred Armenians in a monastery” for some time [undoubt-
edly the monastery of the Holy Mother of God near Korköy] where they were “again shaken
down for as much as possible before being sent off.”212
In a conversation that took place on 2 August, Peter asked the kaymakam not to inter-
fere in “American interests”; Fayk answered that he had to deport “all the Armenians in the

college and hospital – nurses and so on – and that nothing could be done about that.” Peter’s
remark, the purpose of which was to show that under these circumstances Dr. Marden would
have no choice but to shut down the hospital, with the result that Merzifun would remain
“without medical help,” obviously did not suffice to save the medical staff. “He was, more-
over, at a loss to understand what call foreigners had to be in [and] I could see that we had to
do with a very fanatic individual here.”213 Indeed, the authorities in Merzifun seemed to be
applying methods that had been tried and tested elsewhere, methods calculated to precipi-
tate the immediate departure of the missionaries, to make it possible to take over their build-
ings, and to liquidate the Armenians connected with their institutions. On 10 August, the
police chief and his men turned up at Anatolia College and demanded that the Armenians
in the college and hospital be turned over to them. According to White, 72 people, including
a number of professors, turned themselves over in order to prevent the police from investing
the institution. They were immediately put on the road to Zile, escorted by gendarmes. The
men were removed from the group in Yeni Han, tied up, and killed.214
According to information gathered by Peter, the kaymakam “demanded another 2,000
to 3,000 Turkish pounds in exchange for letting the girls in the school go.” The diplomat,
however, was persuaded that “it was pointless to give him any more money, since, ultimately,
they were going to send everyone away.”215 His prediction was on the mark: on the morn-
ing of 12 August, policemen and gendarmes entered the college by force and took the 73
student boarders into custody, along with a number of teachers. Apparently, Peter observes,
“the kaymakam, the commander of the gendarmerie, and the beledier-reis could not agree
as to how the money was to be divided up … and, while they were arguing over it, the girls
were put on the road.”216 According to White, the kaymakam came to see him in order to
suggest that the girls “change their names” – that is, convert to Islam – since most of them
no longer had fathers and were “subjects of the Turkish government and were the objects
of particular attention from the Turkish officials.” Apparently the officers, gendarmes, and
officials working in Merzifun had shown an inclination to “take in” these schoolgirls from
the American school, who had a reputation for being well bred. But, none of them agreed to
convert, and they “were sent off in the direction of Amasia.” Miss Gage, Miss Willard, and
Dr. White managed to accompany their wards as far as Amasia, where the mutesarif Celal
Bey had tried to arrest them. However, the Americans were able to accompany them further,
as far as Sıvas.217
After Anatolia College had been liquidated, only the American hospital remained
(briefly) in operation, thanks to a medical staff of 52 Armenians, on whose behalf White
and Peter interceded with the authorities, pointing out that deporting them would mean
closing the hospital. Nevertheless, during the night of 18/19 August, the first attempt was
made to arrest the Armenians. “However,” Peter notes, “since I was present, they did not
dare risk it.”218 The second attempt proved successful. In a letter that Peter sent the vali on
26 August, he told him that he “deeply regretted that you did not make an exception for
the American college and hospital … which have brought only blessings and benefits to the
region. How many of your soldiers were welcomed [to them] last winter and given all the
care they needed.”219
According to Peter and White, some 1,000 Armenians, nearly all girls and young women,
agreed to “register” as Muslims and enter harems, thus escaping deportation.220
The Kazas of Vezirköprü and Gümüşhaciköy

Constructed on the ruins of the ancient Neapolis, the seat of the kaza of Vezirköprü (also
called Vezirköprü) had only 6,300 inhabitants in 1914, 1,612 of them Armenians. The
Armenians had two schools (with an enrollment of 150) and the Church of Saint George.

The kaymakam, Bekir Bey, who held his post from 16 May 1914 to 21 January 1916, organ-
ized the elimination of the men and, thereafter, the deportation of the rest of the Armenian
population toward Sıvas and Malatia by way of Havza, Amasia, and Tokat.221 In 1914, the
4,064 Armenians of the kaza of Gümüşhaciköy all lived in the principal town of the kaza,
near Merzifun, which boasted two churches and six schools. This district was well known
for its silver and copper mines. The kaymakam, İbrahim Niyazi Bey, who held his post from
October 1914 to 2 July 1916, oversaw the massacres and the deportation along the same route
taken by the Armenians of Merzifun.222
The Kazas of Ladik, Havza, and Mecitözü

In the kazas of Ladik and Havza, which lay on the Amasia-Samsun road, there were no
more than 250 Armenians: 300 of them lived in Ladik and 50 more at an hour’s distance
in Yaremcaköy. Another 333 Armenians lived in the seat of the kaza of Havza, which was
known for its spa, constructed near the ancient Roman baths. Seven hundred Armenians
lived in the last of the kazas in the sancak of Amasia, Mecitözü, all of them in Haciköy.223 We
have no information about the fate of these small communities; they were probably swept up
in the flood of convoys from Samsun.
Resistance and Massacres in the Sancak of Şabinkarahisar

In 1914, the sancak of Şabinkarahisar, located in the easternmost part of the vilayet of Sivas,
had 23,169 Armenian inhabitants. They lived in 44 towns and villages, placed under the
jurisdiction of a diocesan council based in Şabinkarahisar that administered 38 parishes, two
monasteries, and 36 schools with a total enrollment of 3,040. In this mountainous, wooded
region, there was only one plain of any importance, the plain of Akşari/Sadağa, which lay
south of Şabinkarahisar. The town of Enderes/Suşehir lay in the western part of this plain.
Almost all of the sancak’s Armenian population was concentrated there.224
On the eve of the First World War, Şabinkarahisar, where the prefecture was located, had
an Armenian population of 4,918; the Armenians formed a majority here. They were con-
centrated at the foot of the medieval citadel, perched on a rocky outcrop in the upper quarter
around the Cathedral of Our Lady. Piled up one beside the next, their houses, with contigu-
ous flat roofs, were all interconnected: the roofs of one row of houses served as a street for the
next-highest row. To the northwest, a new Armenian neighborhood, known as Kopeli, had
sprung up in the latter half of the nineteenth century.
In 1914, there were also five big Armenian villages in the immediate periphery of
Şabinkarahisar, with a total population of 9,104. Four kilometers northwest of the city lay
Tamzara (with an Armenian population of 1,518). Buseyid (pop. 510) and Anerği (pop. 646)
lay five kilometers southwest. Ziber (pop. 752) and Şirdak (pop. 667) were located to the
south.225
According to our main witness, who took part in the resistance in Şabinkarahisar, 300
Armenian conscripts left for Erzincan and Bayburt in November 1914, after the general
mobilization (a good many older men were able to pay the draft exemption tax of 43 Turkish
pounds).226 In a report to the patriarch in Constantinople, the primate of Şabinkarahisar,
Father Vaghinag Torigian, noted that “every day brings fresh proof of rancor toward the
Armenians” in the form of requisitions resembling pillage, especially in the villages in the
vicinity of the city, which the authorities required to transport the requisitioned goods
using means of their own, despite most of their carts, horses, and oxen having already been
taken by the army.227 This, however, could hardly be called shocking in a country in which
the state had a reputation as a predator. The news of the 1 January 1915 murder of the

designated primate of Erzincan, Sahag Odabashian, between Suşehir and Refahiye228 – that
is, very close to the city – was obviously much more alarming for the Armenian leaders of
Şabinkarahisar. It was, moreover, Father Torigian, who went to the scene of the crime to
make arrangements for the victim’s burial.229 On his return, the prelate informed the pol-
itical leaders about his apprehensions. The massacre of Armenians soldiers that took place
on the road between Erzincan and Sıvas in January 1915, after the debacle at Sarıkamiş, fol-
lowed by the 8 February destruction by a band of çetes, under alarming circumstances, of the
village of Piurk, located in the neighboring kaza of Suşehir,230 convinced the Armenians of
Şabinkarahisar that preparations were being made to massacre them. However, as A. Haygaz
observes, no one anticipated the scope of the Young Turks’ extermination plan. Rather, the
Armenian leaders were expecting “traditional” massacres of the Hamidian kind, which gen-
erally lasted from one to three days, and against which well-organized resistance could prove
effective if it held out until orders came from the capital to put an end to the violence.231
The assassination in May of the priest of the nearby village of Anerği, Father Seponia
Garinian,232 the arrest and murder of Nazaret Hiusisian, an emblematic figure in the city,
and the arrest of well-known personalities such as Asadur Tiutiunjian, Ardashes and Mirijan
Burnazian, Krikor Dakesian, Garabed Garmirian, Rafayel Odabashian, and Garabed
Skhdorjian, compelled the Armenian leaders to take refuge in the quarter around the citadel.
Khosrov Medzadurian, Hmayag Margosian, Pitsa, Ghugas Deovletian, Hmayag Karageozian,
Vahan Hiusisian, and Shabuh Ozanian went underground.233 The authorities thereupon
launched the next phase of operations, which consisted in confiscating weapons and hunting
down deserters. This led to extremely violent search-and-seizure operations. Torigian went to
see the mutesarif, Mektubci Ahmed Bey, in an attempt to bring them to a halt. He proposed
to the mutesarif that he personally see to the confiscation of weapons,234 obviously a matter
of crucial importance for both parties. The Armenians finally decided to turn in their hand-
guns, hunting rifles, and a few Martinis, bringing them to the prefecture in a cart escorted
by two gendarmes. Haygaz wonders if the authorities really believed that this charade meant
that the Armenians were laying down their arms. The fact that the authorities proceeded to
recruit a militia of “volunteers” (gönülüler) made up of social outcasts, whose pitiful condition
was a subject of comment by witnesses,235 suggests that the mutesarif deemed it necessary
to reinforce his troops before taking new initiatives. The feeble potential of these recruits,
however, led him to increase the military capacity of the militia by freeing common-law
criminals.236 These initiatives left little doubt as to his intentions, which took concrete form
when, on the evening of Sunday, 6 June 1915, the mutesarif summoned his traditional inter-
locutor, the prelate, to the konak “for consultations.”237 He “consulted” Torigian by interning
him upon his arrival and having him tortured in the cellar of the konak. After undergoing
this ordeal, the prelate was dragged by two policemen – a Zaza and a Çerkez – into Ahmed
Bey’s office.238 With the mutesarif in his office was a delegate of the Young Turk Central
Committee, Nuri Bey, “an educated native of Istanbul,” who had arrived in Şabinkarahisar
only recently. Ahmed Bey mockingly asked the prelate how he was, without provoking the
slightest reaction from him. Then, more aggressively, he demanded that Torigian provide
him with a list of the insurgents and the number of weapons in the Armenians’ possession.
The exchange that followed showed that each man was perfectly well aware of his own
position.
Torigian: Pasha, I know what you are going to do; give the order to have me killed right
now.
Ahmed Bey: We are interrogating you.
Torigian: I am not in a condition to answer.

Ahmed Bey: To refuse to respond to representatives of the law is a crime of treason that
merits appropriate punishment.
Torigian: Gentlemen, what do you expect from a miserable clergyman who has been bro-
ken, crushed, and dishonored? You speak in the name of the law. But what law author-
ized you to turn a prelate over to policemen and order that he be beaten to death? By
what right do you accuse a whole nation of crimes that it has not committed? Over the
centuries, the Armenians have more than once experienced the justice of this country
and are convinced that justice has never existed in the Ottoman Empire and never
will … We Armenians are guilty of having failed to understand, over the centuries,
that this is a system that has been at work from the outset. After the constitution was
restored, not only ordinary people, but even our Hnchak and Dashnak revolutionar-
ies were duped; they believed that an end would be put to unjust practices … But the
Adana events go to show that, in this country, in which neither conscience nor God
exists, there can be no justice.239
Several blows from the Ittihadist delegate, accompanied by the exclamation “Shut up, dog,”
led to a new reply from the prelate: “You see, effendi, you have proved that I am right. An
educated, cultivated young man, ci-devant an official representative of the Istanbul Ittihad,
raises his hand against a people’s spiritual shepherd.”240 It would be an understatement to
say that these exchanges express all the accumulated rancor of the Armenians toward the
regime and the predator’s mentality of the young delegate of the Ittihad and the high-rank-
ing official, both fully aware of how much power they had.
The Armenian clergyman, who was 45 years old, understood perfectly well the fate that
awaited him and refused to play the role of the guilty party any longer. On Monday, 7 June,
he left the city, guarded by some 15 gendarmes, and was murdered the same day near Enderes,
the seat of the kaza of Suşehir, by Kucurzâde Kâmil Beg.241 It was not until the morning of 16
June that the population of Şabinkarahisar learned what had happened to its primate.242
In this densely populated urban center with an Armenian majority, the systematic arrest
of the men, the prelude to deportation, required that the authorities display a certain tacti-
cal skill. The meager results of the searches conducted in the upper quarter around the
citadel compelled the mutesarif to limit himself to launching an operation against the cent-
ers of craft and commerce located below the city. On 14 June, soldiers and çetes surrounded
these buildings and hurriedly arrested 300 men, who were then imprisoned in the basement
of the konak. A squadron of çetes, commanded by someone named Kel Hasan, also made
its way into the city’s lower quarters and carried out arrests throughout the night. Hasan
was, however, unable to penetrate the quarter around the citadel.243 On the morning of
15 June, an Armenian commando tried to free the prisoners confined in the konak; the
prisoners, however, were executed when the commando reached the area.244 On 16 June,
the inhabitants of Şabinkarahisar saw, in the distance, the village of Anerği in flames, while
the news of the murder of the primate made the rounds. According to Haygaz, the inhabit-
ants of the city now spontaneously barricaded themselves in their neighborhoods; people
from nearby villages, attacked by irregulars, took refuge in the city; and the Armenians
of the city’s lower quarter, known as the “Orchards,” began to withdraw to the heights.245
There were, moreover, skirmishes between the squadron of çetes commanded by Kel Hassan
and Armenian butchers in the city’s Middle Quarter. On Thursday, 17 June, more villagers
from the vicinity arrived in Şabinkarahisar. A military council was then created, made up
of Ghugas Deovletian, Hmayag Karageozian, Vahan Hiusisian, Hmayag Margosian, Krikor
Baronvartian, Aleksan Dakesian, and Khosrov’s lawyer, Divrig.246 The fire that had broken
out that same day in the lower quarters, where the houses were mainly built of wood, spread,
accelerating the concentration of the Armenian population in the upper quarter and, later,

in the citadel, where according to Armenian sources between 5,000 and 6,000 people, three-
quarters of them women and children, found refuge.247 An abrupt shift in the wind drove the
flames toward the Turkish quarters, destroying all the government buildings located in the
city’s lower quarters.248 The Armenians were, however, unaware of the extent of the panic
that had swept over the local authorities. It should further be noted that during the massacre
of the prisoners in the konak, when someone named Karnig Beylerian seized a gendarme’s
rifle and killed the commander of the gendarmerie and his assistant, the mutesarif and the
mayor fled.249
The main problem confronting the military council, which was made up of local notables,
was the lack of fighters, especially young men. According to Haygaz, there were fewer than
500 people capable of “bearing arms,” and they had only 200 weapons in their possession,
including 100 Mauser rifles.250 The other problem was the lack of water: the Armenians
were forced to go down to the springs every night in order to procure enough to meet their
minimum needs.251
After five days of relative calm, Vali Muammer of Sıvas arrived in Şabinkarahisar on 20 or
21 June, with army units equipped with cannons in order to conduct the siege of the citadel.
He immediately sent a message to the insurgents, demanding that they lay down their arms
and surrender, promising that their lives would be spared in exchange.252 The military coun-
cil rejected the offer, and the Ottoman artillery began to pound the Armenians’ positions. It
seems, however, that this shelling did not produce the anticipated results. Rather, the scraps
of metal from the hundreds of shells that came raining down on the citadel appear to have
served as raw material with which to make crude bullets.253 The army units that had come
from Suşehir launched the first assault on 25 June.254 They pressed the attack for several days,
affording the Armenians an opportunity to recover arms and ammunition from the attackers
killed beneath the citadel. On 27 June, Muammer sent a new message to the military coun-
cil, this time threatening to inflict exemplary sanctions on the men who had precipitated
these “disorders” and were responsible for the fire and the destruction of the city.255 Thus, he
blamed the fire on the Armenians, even though it had broken out in the Armenian quarters
and wreaked havoc there before spreading to the lower part of the city.
As far as the strategy adopted by the two parties is concerned, it would seem that Muammer
favored a massive assault aimed at quickly crushing the Armenian resistance, whereas the local
notables wanted to conduct a classic siege that would inevitably lead to water and food short-
ages. At all events, the authorities waited for several army battalions that had been dispatched
from Erzincan to arrive, along with several squadrons of çetes256 and three regiments from Sıvas
commanded by Neşed Pasha,257 before launching the assault to break the Armenian resist-
ance. This offensive was opened on Sunday, 4 July, with 6,000 men thrown into the battle.258
Around 300 Armenian combatants and, probably, more than 300 attackers fell in the course
of these violent clashes. The citadel was now defended by only 200 men, many of them adoles-
cents.259 On the night of 8 July, the last Armenian fighters, running out of food and ammuni-
tion, attempted a sortie. On the morning of the 11th, the twenty-seventh day of the siege, a
white flag was hoisted above the citadel.260 After hesitating, soldiers and çetes surround the
citadel: the handful of males over fifteen were shot on the spot, while some 300 boys between
the ages of three and 15 were separated from the others.261 According to our witness, who was
in this group, there followed heated discussions involving a hoca, the military men, and the
local notables about what to do with these children, who were ultimately reintegrated into the
group of women assembled in the cathedral and the adjacent buildings. Some of the women
chose to take poison. The rest were exiled to the deserts by way of Agn and Fırıncilar.262
Among those who bore the main responsibility for what happened in the sancak of
Şabinkarahisar, in addition to the mutesarif Mektubci Ahmed Bey, the CUP delegate
Nuri Bey, the lawyer Edhem Bey, Pel Hasan, Gugug Mustafa, Tatar Haliloğlu Tahsin,

Hacihaliloğlu Mahmud, Ciğuloğlu Şerif, Aydınoğlu Şerif, Saleh Kasab Asim, Karamil
Azımzâde İsmail, Faik Çavuş, Tamzaralı Müdir Ali Osman, Ömer Feyzi (a deputy in the
Ottoman parliament), and Tokatlı Komiser Sâmi played crucial roles in arrest and killing
the men of the city, and also in the looting and deportations that took place in the rest of
the region.263
The Kaza of Suşehir

The 35 Armenian villages in the kaza of Suşehir, almost all of which lay in the plain of
Sadağa to the east of the seat of the kaza, Andreas/Enderes, had in 1914 a total Armenian
population of 13,430. Located some 30 kilometers southwest of Şabinkarahisar, Enderes had
an Armenian population of 2,784 in 1914. Together with the inhabitants of the 18 biggest
Armenian villages in the kaza – Sis (pop. 785), Piurk (pop. 1,716), Mshagnots/Muşagemiz
(pop. 844), Gtanots/Krtanos (pop. 325), Alamlik (pop. 219), Ezbider (pop. 352), Ğaraş (pop.
104), Sevindig (pop. 375), Aziller (pop. 2,489), Abana (pop. 444), Yeniköy (pop. 214), Tmluc
(pop. 173), Aghvanis (pop. 700), Komeshdun (pop. 107), Beyçiftlik (pop. 76), Aghravis (pop.
923), Avand (pop. 126), and Hamam (pop. 197) – the Armenians of Enderes were massacred
or deported by way of Agn and Fırıncilar in the latter half of June 1915, under the supervision
of the kaymakam, Ahmed Hilmi, who held his post from 10 November 1913 to 23 November
1915.264
The Kaza of Mehsudiye

The Armenian population of this kaza, put at 627, was essentially concentrated in the seat of
the kaza, Mehsudiye (pop. 140), and in Karamahmud (pop. 350). These Armenians too were
massacred or deported late in June 1915 by the kaymakam, Nafi Bey, who held his post from
9 April 1914 to 19 July 1916.265
The Kazas of Köyulhisar/Kızılhisar and Hamidye

In these two districts in the western part of the sancak of Şabinkarahisar there were only
a few dozen Armenian households left by 1914: 20 in Köyulhisar, the seat of the kaza (pop.
100), 15 in Mushal (pop. 90), and 70 in Masudiya, the seat of the kaza of Hamidye.266
The kaymakam of Kızılhisar, Sermed Yaşar, who held his post from 1 June 1915 to 9 July
1916, and the kamaykam of Hamidiye, Celal Bey, who held his post from 7 April 1914 to 11
April 1916, organized the massacre of the men and the deportation of the rest of the popula-
tion by way of Agn and Fırıncilar in these two kazas.267
Sıvas in the Aftermath of the Deportations

As we have seen, the system used to eliminate the Armenians of the vilayet of Sıvas had
a distinctive feature: some 5,000 men were held in the central prison and the cellar of the
Şifahdiye and Gök medreses in Sıvas for almost a month after the departure of the convoys
of deportees.268 We do not know what brought Ahmed Muammer to leave them alive for so
long, and we have no information about the conditions in which they lived in prison. We do
know, however, how these men were methodically liquidated in two stages, at two different
sites relatively close to Sıvas. Those interned in the medrese of Gök were the first to be massa-
cred. From 2 to 7 August, groups of 100 to 200 men were taken from this medrese every night
and led up to Karlık, on the heights of the monastery of St. Hagop in the Çelebiler valley,
approximately four hours northwest of Sıvas. There they were killed with axes.269 The second

group, the prisoners held in the medrese of Şifahdiye, was liquidated between 8 August and 12
August. These men were led in groups of 200 to 300 to a school for apprentices located near a
farm three hours away from Sıvas. There they were put to death under the supervision of the
Ittihad’s responsible secretary, Gani Bey,270 Şekeroğlu İsmail, Halis Bey, Sobaci Şükrü (the
müdir of Sğcakışla), Ğarza Dürger Hasan – Şükrü and Hasan destroyed the villages of Dendil,
Burhan, Karagöl, and Chepni – as well as the commander of the garrison, Ali Bey; Haci
Ömer; Ömer’s sons Veysel and Hanif; Nurioğlu Süleyman; Tekkeşin İbrahim; Evilya Effendi;
Tayib Effendi; the grocer Nuri; Arpacı Şükrü; Ziya Effendi, the director of the Sultaniye mid-
dle school; and the Unionists Bakal Aziz and Bakal Behcet.271
Around the middle of August, according to the Islamicized craftsmen who were allowed
to remain in Sıvas, Muammer organized a big banquet after liquidating all the Armenian
men, expressing his satisfaction over his accomplishment.272 It is possible that the slaughter
of these men was postponed until the vali’s return from Erzincan, where he participated,
around 31 July, at the meeting of the valis of Erzerum, Trebizond, Harput, and Sıvas chaired
by Bahaeddin Şakir.273 It is reasonable to suppose that the meeting was held to assess the first
phase of operations and decide on complementary measures, such as the fate of the worker-
soldiers.
Reverend Bauernfeind, who traveled through Ulash and Sıvas on 16 August 1915, wrote in
his diary, “There are no more corpses, but adult Armenians working to bring in the harvest.”
Of course, Bauernfeind could not know that these peasants from Ulash would be dispatched
southwards a few days later, after the harvest had been brought in.274 He observed at the
entrance to the city that “the road [had] been repaired by Armenians” (who would be killed
the following year) and that “male and female Armenian employees, including adult males, are
still employed at the [American] hospital,” but would “have to leave in the next few days.”275
The German minister thus saw the last traces of the Armenian presence in Sıvas, which Vali
Muammer, who had made judicious use of these Armenians’ labor power, was now preparing
to eliminate by overcoming the resistance of the American missionaries.276
Arriving in Gemerek, on the road to Kayseri, on 18 August 1915, Bauernfeind discovered
a city “whose Armenians [had] now departed”; it “gave him the impression of being deserted
and destroyed.” He had nevertheless been able to converse “in French and in Turkish with the
commander and an army doctor,” an Armenian “who belonged to a battalion of Armenian
laborers.” Bauernfeind had encountered an amele taburi in Gemerek that comprised 900 men
from Kayseri.277
On 28 September 1915, Muammer sent a coded wire to the interior minister, informing
him that so far 136,084 Armenians from Sıvas and the areas administratively attached to it
had been deported toward Mesopotamia (the vali wrote “Cizre”).278 If we make allowance for
those who were massacred locally, the conscripts incorporated into labor battalions, and the
Islamicized young women and children, this figure seems altogether plausible.
In the written deposition he submitted to the Mazhar Commission in December 1918,
General Vehib Pasha, who had succeeded Mahmud Kâmil as the head of the Third Army
in February 1916, observed: “In the province of Sıvas, all the Armenians, with the excep-
tion of those who had converted to Islam, were deported … The officials employed in
this province had a direct, pernicious relation with the crimes committed and knowingly
helped perpetrate them. That is my conviction.”279 He also noted that, “as ‘abandoned
property,’ the sums collected and precious objects and jewels transformed into cash were
amassed and preserved, and, consequently, were not looted.” This, he said, confirmed that
Muammer, someone with “an exalted sense of honesty, honor, and loyalty,” had followed
the instructions he had received from the capital.280 Other sources, to be sure, incline us
to make a less flattering assessment of Muammer’s activities. While it seems to be an estab-
lished fact that the vali, defending the interests of the party-state, succeeded in preventing

in the area under his jurisdiction the kind of pillage that went on elsewhere, as we have
seen, indications are that he nevertheless imitated a number of his colleagues, personally
appropriating the property of some of those under his administration. He also managed
to cover up, with undeniable skill, the massacres perpetrated on his orders, thus creating
the impression that he had carried out an administrative deportation in legal form. From
this point of view, Muammer Bey proved to be one of the most effective valis, the one who
executed the orders he received from the capital with the greatest fidelity, the debacle of
Şabinkarahisar aside.
Shortly after the Mudros Armistice was signed, at a time when Turkey was still endeavor-
ing to settle its accounts with its Young Turk elite, a Turkish officer posted in Sıvas during
the war wrote an open letter to the ex-vali of Sıvas. “In the name of humanity,” he declared,
“I have the right to ask you for an account of the number of people you massacred.”281 To
make what he said more credible, this witness reminded the vali of the acts of theft he had
committed and “made others commit,” and went on to ask him, “where are the twenty-eight
rugs that belonged to the money-changer Dikran Effendi? Or the eighteen jewels of various
kinds that belong to Baghchegiulian Effendi? Or the jewels worth four thousand pounds
that belonged to Miss Virgin, Mgrdich Effendi Mardikian’s sister-in-law?” Finally, this officer,
whom Muammer had had brought before a court-martial in Sıvas, recalled that he had been
in the vali’s office when Muammer had summoned the “jeweler Lifter and asked him to assess
the value of the jewels contained in eleven walnut chests,” threatening to kill Lifter “if he
dared reveal anything about the matter.”282
In a report submitted to the Istanbul court-martial, Captain Fazıl was hardly more ten-
der with the vali of Sıvas: he portrayed him as the main culprit in the destruction of the
Armenians, a man who had ordered the “gendarmes” to kill and had amassed a fortune of
60,000 Turkish pounds at the deportees’ cost.283
These revelations, doubtless inspired less by moral considerations than by a spirit of
revenge, do not only tarnish the bright image of an exemplary vali, but also illustrate the
day-to-day practice of most of the Young Turk leaders. General Vehib’s favorable declaration
about Ahmed Muammer remains a mystery, especially in view of the vehemence with which
the general denounced the vali’s role in the destruction of the Armenians of the region, and
in light of the serious conflict between the two men after the July 1916 massacre of several
thousand Armenian worker-soldiers in a gorge lying between Sarkışla and Gemerek.
The July 1916 Liquidation of the Amele Taburis of Sıvas

We have noted that the great majority of Armenian worker-soldiers who served in the amele
taburis of the five other eastern vilayets, including those males under 18 and over 45 who
were recruited late in the day, were put to death in the wake of the deportations. It must be
emphasized that, in contrast, Armenians in the labor battalions who were liquidated in the
vilayet of Sıvas perished a full year after the deportations had come to an end.
Aside from the amele taburi, comprising 900 men from Kayseri who were put to work in
Gemerek,284 a labor battalion of some 500 men was present in Hanlı, halfway between Sıvas
and Gemerek.285 Additionally, a considerable number of craftsmen-soldiers were employed
by the army, especially in Sıvas. These units were under the orders of Colonel Behcet Bey
and the commanding officers Hikmet Bey, Nuri Bey, and Ali Şefik Bey.286
For as long as the Third Army was under the command of Mahmud Kâmil, it seems that
the elimination of the worker-soldiers posed no problems for the military authorities. When,
however, General Vehib Pasha became the commander-in-chief of the Third Army, it is
clear that the Special Organization, the CUP delegates, and the valis were no longer able to
decide the fate of these men without first consulting the supreme commanding officer under

whose orders these recruits were serving. We have virtually no official documents about the
circumstances surrounding the destruction of the amele taburis in fall 1915; virtually all
our information comes from survivors’ reports. Thus, the military inquiry into the massacre
of the worker-soldiers from the vilayet of Sıvas that was conducted in fall 1916 on Vehib’s
orders, and reopened by the Mazhar Commission in November 1918, is of even greater inter-
est than it otherwise would be.
In the deposition he submitted to the Mazhar Commission, Vehib stated, “Military imper-
atives made it necessary to send Armenians serving in the labor battalions to the Fourth
Army. It was decided to bring them together in Sıvas in order to send them from there to
Aleppo. Orders to this effect were issued to the vali.”287 It can clearly be inferred from this
formulation that the military authorities deemed it necessary to remove these men from the
front line, which ran through Enderes/Suşehir at the time. Muammer, who often appeared
at the headquarters of the Third Army to resolve problems having to do with provisioning
the troops, was precisely at Zara when this decision was made. According to Armenian
sources, he had even telephoned orders from Zara to concentrate the Armenian worker-
soldiers in Sıvas in the medreses of Şifahdiye and Gök in order to send them from there to
Bozanti and Syria.288 While grave charges weighed against the commander of the gendar-
merie of Şarkışla, Mescizâde Nuri, who carried out the massacre of the Armenian worker-
soldiers of Sıvas, the vali of Sıvas was also under heavy suspicion. Thus, Nuri declared that
Muammer had telephoned him and told him to send the amele taburis “to Kayseri in one
hour.”289 Translated into plain language, this was an order to liquidate them (it was a several
days’ march from Kayseri to Sıvas). In response to inquires by the Mazhar Commission into
the death of these soldiers, Vehib declared that he had demanded an explanation from Nuri
and that the commander had “said that the order had been communicated to him orally by
Muammer Bey in the course of a telephone conversation”; however, Vehib added, Muammer
had denied “ever having issued such an order.”290 In view of the special position of the vali,
who was also the head of the Special Organization in the region under his jurisdiction,
it is more probable that Muammer did indeed issue orders to massacre these thousands
of men after himself receiving such orders from his superiors. The decision of the Third
Army’s commander to assemble the worker-soldiers under his jurisdiction in the vilayet
of Sıvas with a view to putting them at Cemal Pasha’s disposal was certainly perceived by
the Young Turk network as an opportunity to eliminate them. Doubtless, Istanbul assumed
that it would not occur to the commander of the Third Army to inquire into the fate of
these men who were supposed to have been transferred to Syria. However, three months
after the departure of these labor battalions, Vehib, who had “received no news indicating
whether or not they had arrived at Aleppo,” began to wonder what had become of them.291
He asked Ahmed Cemal, the commander-in-chief of the Fourth Army, for “an explana-
tion.” Cemal replied that these “soldiers had not arrived in the area under his jurisdiction.”
Vehib therefore turned to Muammer, who “informed [him] that all the Armenian soldiers
had been massacred between Şarkışla and Gemerek by Nuri Effendi, a captain in the gen-
darmerie who was under orders to dispatch them [to Aleppo].” The inquiry conducted by
Vehib “established that he had intentionally massacred the soldiers in question.”292 Nuri
Bey was summoned to the headquarters of the Third Army in Suşehir and brought before
the Military Council, which condemned him to death. “I took the responsibility,” Vehib
wrote, “before my conscience, of issuing an order to carry out the sentence, so that this
would serve as a clear example for others.”293
But Vehib did not content himself with punishing someone who had merely carried
out orders. He demanded that the man who had given the order, Ahmed Muammer, be
brought before a military court. According to Bishop Knel Kalemkiarian, who met with
Talât in this connection, the fact that the interior minister and İsmail Hakkı visited Sıvas

on 29 November 1916 was directly related to this affair.294 On the pretext of carrying out
a “general inspection tour,” the two Young Turk leaders “in fact came in order to smooth
over the dispute between Vehib Pasha and Muammer.” Vehib supposedly demanded that
the capital “immediately relieve [Muammer] of his duties” and is said to have remained
“inflexible to the end,” so that the interior minister was finally forced to transfer the vali
to Konya.295
After the Mudros Armistice, when the governmental commission of inquiry began to
investigate Muammer’s activities during the war, its president, Hasan Mazhar, turned to
Vehib for additional information on the vali’s role in the murder of the worker-soldiers.
He notably asked him whether there was “anything having to do with Muammer Bey in
the minutes of the interrogation of Nuri Effendi” and, furthermore, whether the vali had
“interceded in his favor” with Vehib when the death sentence was handed down. The
general responded: “Nuri Bey simply declared that he had received the liquidation order
from Muammer Bey.” However, Vehib went on, Nuri had not been able to show him a
written order, so that “Nuri’s affirmations remained mere words, without the least proof
to back them up and lacking all legislative or official character; thus they were considered
to be worthless.”296 The prudent general was, however, careful to say nothing about the
steps he had taken in Istanbul with a view of obtaining Muammer’s resignation after the
Armenian soldiers’ “lamentable end.” He did, however, testify that when he asked the vali
to send Captain Nuri to his headquarters, Muammer had wanted to “know why he was
being sent for.” A few days later, when Muammer went to the headquarters in Suşehir to
resolve “problems having to do with provisioning the army,” the vali “stated orally that
the investigation that he had conducted had revealed that Nuri Effendi was the author of
the crime in question ... and that he had informed the interior minister of this.”297 These
confidences in the form of justifications were apparently not enough to convince the gen-
eral. They reflect a concrete situation of a kind we rarely have the opportunity to observe,
one in which a Young Turk leader, suddenly confronted with his responsibility for issuing
orders to commit a crime, unhesitatingly sacrificed one of his subordinates to protect him-
self and his party.
According to reports collected by N. Kapigian, 500 craftsmen-soldiers from the city of
Sıvas, among the 3,000 men interned in the city’s medreses early in July 1916, were quite
promptly released. The others were sent to the gorge located on the southern slopes of the
Dardaşlar mountain chain and massacred at Taşlı Dere, on the road to Şarkışla, near Gemerek,
on Captain Nuri’s orders.298 It seems that German officers witnessed these summary execu-
tions.299 Bishop Kalemkiarian reports that, accompanied by the German vice-consul, Karl
Wert, he went to see the vali, who had returned from the headquarters of the Third Army
the day before, to ask why the Armenians had been imprisoned. The vali declared that “the
commander of the Fourth Army had asked that the soldiers be sent to him so that they could
be put to work on building the railroad in the Bozanti area,” but that they had in fact “been
massacred with unimaginable savagery, with axes, swords, clubs, and bullets, or were thrown
over cliffs by criminals.”300
According to a file assembled by the British authorities, the CUP’s responsible secretary
in Sıvas, Gani Bey, participated personally in the liquidation of another amele taburi in Yon
Yukuş, three hours from Sıvas.301 In the same period, the 500 worker-soldiers working near
Hanlı were put to death at Kayadipi, seven hours from Sıvas,302 while the 900 men in the
battalion based in Gemerek met the same fate near the Ortaköy spring.303
Three army doctors, Baghdasar Vartanian, Maksud, and Hayranian, were the last victims
of these mass murders; they were first relieved of their duties and then murdered in Sıvas’s
central prison. High-ranking German friends of Hayranian’s, who had close relations with
German officers based in the city, had interceded directly with Enver Pasha on his behalf.

But even this powerful protection does not seem to have sufficed to restrain Muammer.304
There is every reason to believe that the vali did not want to see a physician on such good
terms with the empire’s German allies survive, the more so as Hayranian had been a witness
to the vali’s criminal activities.
Thus, a total of around 5,000 Armenian recruits, who may be considered the remnants of
the Third Army’s amele taburis, were liquidated in the course of July 1916.
Those Responsible for the Massacres in the Vilayet of Sıvas

In a document addressed to Sıvas’s police chief, Rifat Bey, in December 1918, Hasan Mazhar,
the head of the government commission of inquiry, asked 39 questions that, as it were, out-
line the basic structure of the program to liquidate the Armenian population of the region.305
We do not know if Rifat Bey responded to this questionnaire. But some of the questions are
virtually answers in and of themselves. They not only echo a number of the events we have
just reviewed, but also provide more precise information about them, and show, in the proc-
ess, how familiar Hasan Mazhar was with the mechanism put in place by the CUP. We list
below all these questions. Some have been followed by the beginnings of an answer or more
precise information, when we were in a position to supply it.
1) Who was the president of the Union and Progress Club in Sıvas? Şekerlıoğlu
İ smail.306 2) Who were the members of the Committee of Union and Progress in Sıvas?
Kol Agasi Ali Effendi, Sopaci Şükrü, police lieutenant Hafız, police lieutenant Mahmud,
Muammer’s yaver, his hit-man, Çerkez Mahmud, who executed Manuel Dedeyan and his
students at the Sanasarian lycée, Ali Şerif Bey, who supervised arrests and tortures, as
well as search-and-seizure missions in the villages, Sadullah Bey, Behcet Bey, the com-
mander of the amele taburis, and Pertev Bey, the commander of the Tenth Army Corps
stationed in Sıvas.307 3) Did the vali, Muammer Bey, go to the Club every day? Very prob-
ably. 4) How many days did Dr. Bahaeddin Şakir, a member of the Central Committee,
spend in Sıvas, and in whose house did he stay? This corroborates that the head of the
Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa paid a visit to Sıvas. 5) What did he say when he was there? 6) How
many days did Talât Bey, the minister of the interior, spend in Sıvas, and in whose house
did he stay? We do not know if this is an allusion to Talât’s visit of November 1916, con-
nected to the decision about Muammer’s fate, or an earlier stay. 7) Who formed the bands
of çetes known as the Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa? Muammer, with Rasim Bey, the parliamentary
deputy from Sıvas who organized the squads of çetes in the vilayet.308 8) What is the
name of the parliamentary deputy from Kangal who made a speech before the Union and
Progress Club and in the mosques (in Sıvas)? He said there: “O Muslims, your enemies
are not the foreigners, not the Russians or the British. Your enemies are in your midst.”
This was most likely the deputy from Çanğırı, Dr. Fazıl Berki Bey, who made more or
less the same remarks in Uli Cami.309 9) How did Muammer Bey react when Talât gave
speeches in the mosque and before the Club? In them, he said: “O Muslims, we have
completely exterminated the Armenians; we give you all their property, their shops,
stores, and houses. From now on, trade is in your hands and will be exclusively yours.” 10)
Who released the convicts (from prison) so that they could be enrolled in the Special
Organization? 11) How many prisoners were recruited by the Special Organization, and
how many were recruited by the gendarmerie? 12) What tasks were the battalions of
worker-soldiers assigned? 13) How many churches were demolished in Sıvas? 14) Why did
Muammer Bey demolish all the houses in the village of Tavra and transform this village
of 300 households into farmland? 15) What is the secret of the destruction of the big
Armenian churches and the 300 to 500 houses of the Hülluklik neighborhood (in Sıvas)?
16) Of you and Muammer Bey, who issued the order to replace the crosses on the church

belfries with crescents and called on the people to pray from these belfries? 17) The
gravestones in the (Armenian) cemetery were torn down and their epitaphs were effaced
by certain people. Then these monuments and stones from the destroyed churches were
brought to the area in front of the prefecture building, where the Turan Hotel, the
Committee of Union and Progress Club, the prefecture’s printing-house, and the drafts-
men’s office was constructed. Was this operation carried out on orders from Muammer
Bey? 18) Were worker-soldiers employed (for this purpose)? When were they summoned
to Sıvas to build these buildings, before their deportation and massacre? 19) Was it not
on Muammer Bey’s orders that 52 Armenian soldiers who had fought in Çanakkale and
been wounded in battle were forced to join a labor battalion? 20) Who presided over
the groundbreaking ceremonies for the Turan Hotel and the Union and Progress Club?
21) Who presided over the inauguration of these buildings when they were completed?
22) Who attended the groundbreaking and inauguration (ceremonies) of these build-
ings? 23) When did you learn, in Sıvas, the news of the massacres and liquidation of the
workers of the battalions that was carried out by Nuri Effendi in the Tenus district? 24)
When did Muammer Bey learn of these major crimes? Did he order that investigations be
conducted, and were they really carried out? 25) Were the mutesarifs of Azizyie, Kerdun,
and Tenus questioned? 26) If an investigation really was carried out, what was the rea-
son for it? 26) When were weapons collected? How many days after the deportation
did this procedure begin? 27) We have been apprised that, during the deportation of
the Armenians from Sıvas, Muammer Bey declared to the populace: “Any Muslim who
hides an Armenian in his house will be hanged in front of it.” This proclamation was
published in the provincial newspaper by the Şeyh press. Do you have this newspaper?
28) In your capacity as director of the police, did you issue travel permits (vezika) to nine
people who were with the Bishop, Mr. Karnig Tughlajian, and Aram Musheghian, who
wished to use these permits to Constantinople? 29) What happened in the monastery of
Saint Nshan? 30) What was the role of the Special Organisation? What was the position
of Dr. Bahaeddin Şakir, the president of this organization? 31) What was the date on
which the head of the postal service between Kayseri and Sıvas laid down his functions?
32) How many Armenian officials were serving in the administration of the vilayet? How
many Armenian judges were there on the bench? What were their names? 33) Who was
the dragoman of the vilayet? 34) Which judges were relieved of their official duties and
deported with Oskan Aslan Effendi, the director of the forests and mines? 35) Why were
these judges and Oskan Aslan Effendi imprisoned before being deported? Who ordered
that they be deported? 36) Is it true that Vartanian, Vartoyan, and Manug Beylerian, the
dragoman of the vilayet, were deported and murdered with four or five other Armenians?
37) Twenty or twenty-five days after they were deported, were other men arrested and
imprisoned? 38) Hulusi Bey, with 150 of his men, went to Kangal to find the caravan of
Armenian women deported from Sıvas; he mistreated them and took from them a con-
siderable quantity of gold and precious objects which were loaded into three vehicles,
one with springs and two without. What portion of this plunder was allotted to the vali?
Do you know if a register was established in which the quantities of gold and valuable
objects were noted? 39) The Union and Progress delegate in Sıvas was Gani Bey. Who
asked you to include him on the police commission?310
This “questionnaire” reconstructs the mechanism that was set in motion at the regional
level while spelling out the role played by the administration, on the one hand, and the
secret centers, on the other, in the plan to liquidate the Armenians and seize their prop-
erty. It is usefully completed by a list of those who bore the main responsibility for the
massacres and deportations in the vilayet.311 In addition to the leader of the local Ittihad
Club, Muammer, and the CUP representative, Gani, the following people were involved:

Bacanakzâde Hamdi, the president of the municipality; Mustafa Hoca of Turkal, a mem-
ber of the Deportation Committee that compiled a list of the city’s Armenian elite to be
liquidated; Colonel Ali Effendi, a member of the Deportation Committee; Rıza Effendi,
Colonel Ali’s brother, the leader of a squadron of çetes; the mullahs Derindeli Hoca, Gamalı
Hoca, İzzet Hoca and Öçenoğlu Mustafa, who urged that the Armenians be eliminated in
the sermons that they preached in the mosques; Halil Bey, the commander of the gendarm-
erie; Ali Şevfik, a major in the gendarmerie, one of those who organized the massacres in
the kaza of Suşehir; Rifat Bey, the police chief, who had the Armenian notables arrested
and organized the seizure of their property; the defterdar (administrator of the land regis-
ter) Tevfik, a member of the commission responsible for abandoned property; Akıpaşazâde
Murteza, Tevfik’s secretary; Nür Bey, the director of the newspaper Sıvas, “who published
many articles about the atrocities that Armenian çetes inflicted on Turks”; Emin Bey, an
auditor; Hayri Effendi, an official on the committee to sell “abandoned property” who was
responsible for settling muhacirs in houses that had belonged to Armenians; Mahmud Çete,
a police lieutenant at the head of the convoys of deportees who engaged in pillage and
perpetrated massacres near Hasançelebi; Celal, an assistant of Muammer’s who perpetrated
massacres at Çelebiler and Tavra; Keleş Bey, an officer in the gendarmerie who ordered
and supervised massacres; Halis Bey, an officer in the squadron of çetes, the director of
the commission of the Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa in the vilayet; Emirpaşaoğlu Hamid, the chief of
the Çerkez of Uzunyayla; Bacanakoğlu Edhem, a çete; Kutugünoğlu Hüseyin, a çete; Zaralı
Mahir, a çete (the last five people were all implicated in the murder of the vicar Sahag
Odabashian); Cizmeci Haci, a carrier or car; Çerkes Kadir, a çete accused of having received
and transferred, along with the five last-named people, 48 sacks full of jewels and a sack
containing 30,000 (Turkish) pounds in gold from Hasançelebi and Hekimhan to Sıvas,
where they were turned over to Muammer; Sobaci Çil Şükrü, an auxiliary gendarme who
was charged with establishing the whereabouts of the people to be arrested; the müdirs of
Ulaş/Ulash and Agcakışla, who were implicated in the massacres in their districts; Ğarga
Durğere Hasan, a çete who perpetrated massacres in the Armenian villages around Ulaş;
Haciömeroğlu Veysel, a çete; Hanif; Nuribeyoğlu Süleyman and Nuribeyoğlu Kâzım, who slit
the throats of people interned in the prison of Sıvas near the farm of the Balahor, on the
road leading from Eni Han to Sıvas, together with Kurdish emigrés; Tekeşen İbrahim, an
accomplice of the people just named, along with Tayib Effendi, an official at the town hall;
Nuri, the grocer; Arpaci Şükrü; Bakal Aziz; Bakal Behcet; and Berber Şükrü (one of those
who murdered a Sanasarian lycée teacher named Menjukian).
We should also mention the activities of Sâdullah, an officer in the gendarmerie and the
head of the prison guards in the fortress of Sıvas (the prison of the court-martial), where
he murdered Armenian prisoners in July 1916, as well as Colonel Pertev Bey, the military
commander of the Tenth Army Corps; Tevfik Bey, the director of farms (çiftlik müdüri);
Aherpaşazâde Halid, his secretary, who took part in the massacres of worker-soldiers in the
gorge of Çelebiler; Aherpaşazâde Murteza, one of those who stole Armenian property in
Sıvas; Avndukzâde Nusin and Handenezâde Hasan, who looted stores; Kâzım, an assistant
to the vali and a çete who was implicated in the massacres in Kangal; and Ahmed Bey, the
head of the Turkish orphanage in Sıvas, who was implicated in the murder of Armenian
children.312
The French-language Istanbul daily announced in its fifth issue, published on Friday, 13
December 1918, that Muammer Bey had been arrested in the Ottoman capital. With his
colleague from Dyarbekir, Dr. Reşid, he was one of the first of the accused to be placed under
arrest.

Chapter 9

the Vilayet of Trebizond
W
edged between the Black Sea and the Pontic mountain chains, the vilayet of
Trebizond, which had a surface area of 32,400 square kilometers and 1,500,000
inhabitants, was one of the most densely settled regions in the Ottoman Empire
on the eve of the First World War. It was at the time divided into four sancaks: Trebizond,
Canik, Lazistan, and Gümüşhane. Its population was essentially made up of Greeks, Turks,
Lazes, Ajars, and Abkhaz, but it also had a flourishing Armenian minority 73,395 strong.
They lived in 118 towns and villages and had 106 churches, three monasteries, and 190
schools with a total enrolment of 9,254, and a few Catholic and Protestant schools as well.1
In Trebizond alone, where the vali resided, there were 5,539 Armenians, including 750
Catholics and 150 Protestants.2 The city was an important port of transit in which there
were a large number of khans, consulates of all the great powers of the day, the offices of the
fleet owners, and the homes of the richest Greek and Armenian merchants, located near the
port around Central Square, popularly known as Gâvur Meydan.
In the first years of the constitutional regime, the Armenian political parties took an
increasingly important part in the affairs of the Armenian community. During the legisla-
tive elections, the ARF also established close ties with the local Young Turks, who had a
very narrow social base outside the circles of notables. Among the Armenians, the ARF too
faced the opposition of conservative circles and even of the primates who came and went
in rapid succession until the 8 July 1913 election of a young prelate, Kevork Turian.3 The
Balkan War afforded the Trebizond Armenians an opportunity to show their attachment to
the Ottoman fatherland by serving in the army. Trebizond’s Dashnak club even offered lodg-
ing to Ottoman officers.4 When the newly elected patriarch, Zaven Der Yeghiayan, passed
through the port in December 1913, the prelate was given a very respectful welcome by the
local authorities and the CUP delegate, Ömer Naci.5
However, with the agreement on the reforms in the Armenian provinces, a policy of har-
assing the Armenian population of Trebizond was initiated. It took various forms. Thus, the
“patriotic” fundraising drive that Trebizond’s Ittihadist club launched in February 1914, offi-
cially organized for the purpose of “purchasing warships,” was entrusted to local delinquents6
who “extracted large sums of money from the Armenians and Greeks, sometimes going so
far as to loot their stores.”7 It also seems that, as had happened elsewhere, instructions were
issued in the capital to boycott Greek and Armenian merchants in Trebizond.8
When war broke out with Russia, Trebizond obviously constituted a strategic port of the
first importance for the Ottomans; the Young Turk government planned to launch large-scale
operations from the city. We have, moreover, seen that even before hostilities commenced,
the CUP sent some of its most eminent members here: Major Yusuf Rıza Bey, a member of
the Ittihad’s Central Committee, who was put at the head of the Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa,9 and

•
Bafra Black Sea
•
Samsun Rize
çarşamba •
• Terme • •
Uniye Fatsa
Ordu
•
• •
• Görele Trebizond
• Tirebolu
•
Rize Hamşın
Giresun •
•
Sev Ked
Trebizond
Gümüşhane
• N
Yenibahçeli Nail, a renowned CUP fedayi, who served as the party’s delegate in the vilayet.10
The two men were briefly involved in a conflict about which of them was to command
the squadrons of the Special Organization in the region; Major Rıza emerged victorious.11
Nail managed to assemble 700 çetes by early November, all of them convicts released from
prison.12 The real political boss of the vilayet nevertheless appears to have been the vali,
Cemal Azmi, who also played a significant role in recruiting çetes by appealing to the bands
of brigands who infesting the vilayet’s mountainous regions and obtaining an amnesty for
them. Appointed to his post on 7 July 1914, shortly before the general mobilization (he held
his post until 2 February 1917), Azmi was to be one of the main architects of the liquidation
of his vilayet’s Armenian population.13
As if to announce events to come, one of the buildings of the Armenian middle school,
which abutted the Russian consulate, was burned down a few days before the general mobili-
zation order was issued. The local Young Turks came under heavy suspicion.14 But it was the
shelling of the city by Russian warships in early November 1914 that revealed the first signs
of hostility toward the Armenians. The home of a notable, Sarkis Injearabian, was searched
and its proprietor arrested, accused of having flashed signals to the Russian ships.15 The
inquiry that followed proved that the charges were baseless, but it had poisoned the atmos-
phere nonetheless. Must this incident be interpreted as a sign of the authorities’ deliberate
wish to heighten suspicion of the Armenian population, or should it simply be attributed to
the climate of tension spawned by the war? Let us leave the question in suspense.
The Young Turk plan went into its operational phase in Trebizond on 2 May 1915. On
that date, the gendarmerie proceeded to conduct a systematic search of Armenians’ homes
in both the towns and villages, looking for possible deserters, arms, and “Russian spies.” The
operation turned out to be fruitless, but Cemal Azmi refused to make a public statement on
the subject, as the primate, Turian, had requested. The operation nevertheless helped sow
a climate of terror within the Armenian population.16 Apparently in order to allay its fears,
the vali took the initiative of creating a propaganda committee made up of notables and
clergymen, including Turian, and asked it to go to Armenian towns and villages to assure the
inhabitants of “the government’s good will.”17
On 5 June, the CUP delegate Nail organized a meeting in the city park. There he made
a speech of a Turkist and Islamicist bent in which he alluded to Tamerlane, “the Russian
infidel, and his friends; the time has come to show them the strength of our swords.” In line
with the constitutional tradition, a Dashnak Armenian schoolteacher, Toros Effendi, was
invited to speak on the glorious past of Osman’s descendants and “the Armenian people’s

Deportations and Massacres: Trebizond 469
loyalty to the courageous Turkish people.”18 This ambiguous initiative was supposed to inspire
local Armenian leaders with new confidence. But the fact that on 17 May 1915, Trebizond’s
Armenian notables approached the vali in order to suggest that they cede all their real estate
and moveable assets “if the authorities limited themselves to imprisoning them under the
surveillance of gendarmes” shows that Armenian circles were aware of the danger threaten-
ing them.19 A few days later, around 15 June, their apprehensions were confirmed when Azmi
issued an order to conduct Father Turian20 to the court-martial in Erzerum “in order to give
testimony,” and then had him murdered on the road between Erğana and Gümüşhane by
the gendarmes guarding him.21 Several witnesses, both Turkish and Armenian, affirm that
the course of events was accelerated after Bahaeddin Şakir paid a visit to Trebizond around
22/23 June. According to Dr. Avni, Şakir “kept in permanent touch with the vali and Nail
Bey while he was there; then he left.”22 Philomene Nurian affirms, for her part, that “the vali,
after holding a long conversation with Şakir, who had arrived from Erzerum, issued orders
to expel the Armenians.”23 Siranush Manugian even states that Şakir arrived in Trebizond
“with a sealed envelope ... .The deportation committee then went to work in line with the
instructions contained in the envelope.”24 Apparently, the working visit of the leader of
Trebizond’s Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa did not go unnoticed, and its effects rapidly made themselves
felt. On 24 June 42 notables, including the Dashnak leaders, the city’s leading businessmen,
and teachers, were summoned to the konak and informed that they were to be “immediately
transferred to Samsun for an investigation already in progress.” Put aboard a boat the next
morning, these men were killed on the Black Sea opposite Platana, 15 kilometers west of
Trebizond,25 by çetes under the command of Tekkeli Neşad.26 These facts were corroborated
by Louis Vidal, a French citizen who worked for the Singer Company in Trebizond, at the 7
April 1919 sixth session of the trial of the criminals of Trebizond.27 According to Vidal, the
men were put aboard a barge that set sail for the open sea and then drowned. However, “one
of these Armenians managed to swim ashore ... He reported that all of those who had been
with him had been drowned.” The man took refuge with a sailor named Bedros before “the
police then transferred him to the hospital,” where “he was poisoned by Ali Saib,” the direc-
tor of the Health Department, as member of the medical staff, Der Tavitian, informed him.28
Nâzım Bey, the former president of the committee responsible for “abandoned property,” and
Dr. Avni Bey, a health service inspector, gave an account this episode that was quite similar,
that culminated in the drowning on the open sea of the Armenian elite, and also of the tragic
end of the restaurant owner Vartan, who died the day after he was admitted to Trebizond’s
military hospital.29 It is all but certain that the police transferred him to the hospital for no
other purpose than to prevent him from testifying about what he had seen. While maintain-
ing a humanitarian facade, Cemal Azmi was thus able to have him personally poisoned by one
of his henchmen, the director of the Health Department.
On the testimony of a witness at the Trebizond trial, a meeting was organized under the
chairmanship of the vali immediately after Şakir’s departure, and was attended by Trebizond’s
leading Young Turks. Azmi held another meeting with the mutesarifs and kaymakams of the
vilayet. At these meetings, the vali declared that he favored deporting the Armenians and
staging a massacre outside the city. The “Agent” Mustafa as well as Mehmed Ali were “parti-
sans of an immediate massacre, while others suggested that the Armenians not be massacred
in the vilayet.”30 This observation indicates something interesting about the methods cho-
sen by the local Ittihadist leaders, divided between those who espoused radical methods and
the partisans of a more prudent approach. Azmi himself suggested draping the deportation
of the Armenians in a semblance of legality and avoiding massacres too close to the city,
where so many foreigners could witness them. Thus, he complied with the recommendations
of the Ittihad’s Central Committee. It is also noteworthy that the committee that decided
the Armenian population’s fate was made up almost exclusively of civil and military officials

belonging to Trebizond’s Ittihadist club. Besides the vali, the club included the CUP delegate,
Yenibahçeli Nail Bey;31 Imamzâde Mustafa, who managed the Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa’s armory in
Lazistan and later those in Trebizond;32 Mehmed Ali, chief customs officer and president of
the local Red Crescent; Pirizade Şevki, an officer; Talât Bey, the commander of the gendar-
merie; and Dr. Yunüz Vasfi Bey, the head of the Health Department.33
The legal basis for the persecution of the Armenians orchestrated by the local Ittihadists
was here provided by the official decree, promulgated on 26 June 1915, ordering that the
Armenians be exiled within five days.34 Trebizond’s Armenian notables, as well as the
German, Austro-Hungarian, and American consuls who were informed of the conditions
under which this decree had been executed in the neighboring region of Erzerum, appealed
to the goodwill of the ministers Talât and Enver and interceded with the vali in hopes of
obtaining more favorable arrangements for people in certain categories, such as women, chil-
dren, old people, Catholics, and Protestants. As we have seen elsewhere, the local authori-
ties and the CUP delegate Nail gave them reason to hope that the elderly, Catholics, and
Protestants would be spared.35 Here, however, we see a notable difference from other vilayets:
there were no systematic arrests of the men before the deportations began. Apart from the
political activists apprehended on 24 June, only 300 young men were arrested the day the
deportation order was issued, put aboard a cargo ship that proceeded to cast anchor opposite
Platana. The çetes charged with murdering these men and throwing them into the sea were
then transported to the spot on motorboats.36
Among the other arrangements made at Trebizond that are significantly different from
those made elsewhere was the fact that the Armenian population was not authorized to
sell its moveable assets or purchase any means of transportation before being deported.37 In
contrast, it was authorized – “whenever the parents so desire” – to leave children – girls up to
the age of 15 and boys up to the age of ten – in homes baptized “orphanages by the Turks.”38
The Greek metropolitan, Bishop Chrysantos, who seems to have been well aware of the
nature of the orders that Şakir had issued, had interceded with the vali on the eve of the
departure of the first convoy of deportees to convince him to spare the children and create
an orphanage for them, claiming his prelacy and the Greek community were willing to take
charge of the institution. A committee chaired by Cemal Azmi himself, with Chrysantos
as its vice-president, was formed in order to organize the functioning of the orphanage. But
the local Ittihad Club and its leader, the CUP delegate Nail Bey, opposed this initiative and
succeeded in having the orphanage closed. Its children were distributed among the Turkish
“homes.”39 For their part, Dr. Crawford, the director of Trebizond’s American school, and
his wife admitted several dozen Armenian children into their institution, and also accepted
deposits in the form of money and jewels from the future deportees, in violation of the
rules laid down by the authorities. The authorities thereupon successfully demanded that
the children and the Armenian goods left on deposit be turned over to them.40 In other
words, the humanitarian initiatives encouraged by the vali were rapidly transformed into an
opportunity to buttress the program of “Turkification” of children espoused by the Ittihadist
Central Committee in Istanbul. Informed of the massacres that had recently been commit-
ted in the neighboring region of Erzerum, the Trebizond Armenians had no illusions about
the fate that awaited them and gladly turned over their children when the Greek metropoli-
tan and the American missionary offered them that alternative. The ostensible magnanim-
ity of Cemal Azmi, which was highly praised by Bishop Chrysantos, was in the end only an
artifice designed to get control of the children, whom Nail parceled out among the “homes”
known as baş baba or orta baba.41 They were sometimes also placed in Turkish households
as adoptive children or sexual objects, or else admitted to the Red Crescent’s hospital, where
they were given “medical care” or invited to make a last voyage to the Black Sea.

The Functioning of the Young Turk Machinery in Trebizond

The trial of the criminals of Trebizond, which was held before Istanbul’s Court-Martial no.
1 from 27 March to 22 May 1919, led to revelations that shed light on the role of Trebizond’s
Young Turk leaders and the “deportation committee” that they set up. The testimony of the
principal authors of these mass crimes, corroborated by the evidence given by high-ranking
officials and officers as well as Armenian survivors and other Ottoman subjects, constitute
the fullest body of information we have for a single region. It makes it possible to compre-
hend the internal functioning of the local structures created to extirpate the Armenian
population.
It must, however, be noted that, of the 19 sessions of the Trebizond trial, only the final ver-
dict, handed down on 22 May 1919, was published in the 6 August 1919 (no. 3616) Takvim-ı
Vakayi [Official Gazette].42 The trial record and incriminating evidence presented during the
various sessions of the trial were published, in whole or in part, by semi-official or independ-
ent Turkish newspapers.43
The Poisonings at the Red Crescent’s Trebizond

Hospital and the Drownings at Sea
When the deportation of the Armenians from Trebizond began, the hospital of the Red
Crescent apparently served as a reception center for Armenians who were old and incapaci-
tated or pregnant, as well as for Armenian children. These “hospitalizations” were probably
intended to prove to foreign diplomats – who, as we have seen, launched appeals to the
vali and their respective embassies – that the authorities were making allowances for the
problems of the weakest. These humanitarian considerations did not, however, deter the
Young Turks from pursuing their initial goal of the systematic destruction of the Armenians.
The person bearing the main responsibility for the murders committed in this hospital was
incontestably Mehmed Ali, who was simultaneously the chief customs officer, president of
the local Red Crescent, director of the hospital, and one of the leaders of the Ittihad in
Trebizond.44 The second protagonist was Dr. Ali Saib, an inspector in the health service and
a member of the deportation committee. Also involved was Dr. Yunüz Vasfi Bey, the director
of the Health Department.45
At the fourth session of the Trebizond trial, held on 3 April 1919, Abdülkadir, a soldier
and native of Trebizond who managed the supplies department of the Red Crescent hos-
pital, told the presiding judge “Many Armenians were brought to the hospital and then
transferred elsewhere ... I know that examinations were carried out and prescriptions deliv-
ered by Dr. Avni and Dr. Ali Saib. There were fatal cases.”46 But when the presiding judge
remarked that “certain Armenians were poisoned at the hospital,” Abdülkadir answered,
“I did not see anything; I do not know anything.” He agreed, however, that the staff obeyed
the hospital’s director, Mehmed Ali, “who received his own orders from the vali.”47
Sofia Makhokhian, a member of the richest Armenian family in Trebizond, testified at
the third session of the trial that she had stayed in the hospital before being “adopted” by
Mehmed Ali. There she witnessed how people “who were often old” were ejected from the
hospital and sent “to Deyirmen Dere, where they were all massacred, without exception,”
noting, however, that others “were poisoned.” When the presiding judge asked her what
allowed her to “affirm that they had been poisoned,” she answered:
Because all of them exhibited the same symptoms before dying. The bodies of all of
them turned black. Dr. Ali Saib gave the orders that they be poisoned; the nurses

refused to carry out his orders, and it was someone named Şatizâde Kenan who took on
the task of making them drink the potion proposed to them.
When Dr. Saib protested his innocence, Makhokhian added that, “[t]here were four
year-old and five-year-old children in the hospital who had been poisoned.” Saib then asked
her how many patients there had been in the hospital. The young woman answered that
“there were twenty women in my ward, but the terrace was full of patients whom Saib had
given orders to deport.” Saib confirmed what she said, but pointed out that it was the vali
who had ordered him “to examine the people who had been hospitalized in order to separate
those who were not ill from the others. I considered some of them to be in a condition to
be transported and informed the vali of this.” This face-off continued in the same tone; it
brought to light that “the bodies of those who had been poisoned,” such as those of Araksi
and Hranush Yesayan, “were thrown into the sea” (Araksi Yesayan was pregnant at the
time), and that 15 boys had also been “put aboard a barge and drowned in the sea by Inceli
Mehmend.”48
At this stage of the trial, another person under indictment, Niyazi Effendi, an inn-
keeper, made his apparition. His main task had been to transport Armenian property by
sea,49 but he had also been responsible for taking groups of Armenians out to sea. During
his examination at the fourth session of the trial on 3 April 1919, Niyazi, like the rest of
the accused, denied the charges leveled against him and even affirmed that if asked, the
Department of the Navy could establish that he “had not been at Trebizond when these
events occurred.” But this defense strategy did not hold up for long: the official report of
the Department of the Navy confirmed that Niyazi had indeed been present in Trebizond
when the acts in question were committed.50 The evidence given by Satenig, a native
of Gümüşhane, at the 1 April 1919 session of the trial, confirmed that she had been put
aboard a barge with other young women “under Niyazi’s orders,” and that she had been
saved only because the person at the wheel of the boat in which she found herself was Ali
Bey from Surmene, a friend of her father’s.51 The examination of Dr. Avni, a health service
inspector, provided further, crucially important details. Avni, an army doctor who had
been responsible for quarantining the infected, revealed that he had not witnessed “depor-
tations by sea” because “the Armenians were not put aboard the barges in the port.” In
other words, care was taken to board them in a more secluded spot so that there would be
no witnesses. When the presiding judge asked Avni if Niyazi Bey had conducted the depor-
tations by sea, he answered: “I think that these deportations were carried out by the men
of the Special Organization.” Without denying the role played by the innkeeper Niyazi, the
doctor thus put blame for the drowning of these groups at sea on the organization that had
been charged with liquidating them. When the judge asked Avni about his failure to react
to these “painful events,” the doctor observed: “That was impossible. The Committee for
Union and Progress was running the city and I was not on good terms with its [members]. I
interceded with Nail Bey and asked him to save certain women. He refused.”52 Dr. Ali Saib
interrupted the proceedings at this point and asked if it was true that Dr. Avni, who lived
in an Armenian household, had found “certain documents” there. When the presiding
judge insisted that he answer, the doctor confirmed that he had found certain documents
signed by Nail Bey and “a few other people,” which ordered: “allot such-and-such a person
so many girls.”53
Imamzâde Mustafa, who managed the Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa’s armory, was examined on 1
April 1919, at the third session of the trial.54 His evidence, too, contained a number of
revelations. After denying that he had participated in any way in the “business of the depor-
tations,” the Agent Mustaf, who as everyone knew was an intimate of the vali’s, admitted
that he had seen barges with 50 to 60 Armenians on board leaving for Samsun. However,

when the presiding judge told him that “those who were drowned were not the victims of
an accident, but were deliberately killed,” Mustafa said that he “did not know.”55 Father
Laurent, who had been in Trebizond during the deportations, was examined on 8 April
1919. He stated that he had seen how “many women and children were put aboard barges
that then headed for the open sea.” He testified that he had learned these boats “returned
to port empty.”56
Mehmed Ali, the president of the local Red Crescent and director of its hospital in
Trebizond, was also one of the key figures in the Ittihad. At the fourth session of the trial,
when the innkeeper Niyazi was at the bar, it was revealed that he had said to the Armenian
women who had found refuge in the hospital, “We do not want to transform the city into a
graveyard; you are going to leave,” thus giving them “to understand that they would not be
killed in the city, but outside it.”57 All indications are that he quite simply saw to the liqui-
dation of the Armenians who had been admitted to his hospital by poisoning or drowning
them. This is suggested in particular by a question from the presiding judge, who asked him
at the same session of the trial: “Why did you have the hospital evacuated? Was it not in con-
nection with giving the Armenians refuge?” To which Mehmed Ali answered, “We evacu-
ated only the lower ward”58 – that is, the ward where pregnant women were concentrated.
When, at the tenth session of the trial, General Mustafa Nâzım asked Ali about the massacre
of the deportees and the harshness of the orders that had been issued, the director of the
hospital declared that if he had not “obeyed, he would immediately have been murdered.”59
Coming from one of the main criminals of Trebizond, this reaction gives some idea of the
pressure that threatened even eminent members of the Ittihad.
The Singular Case of Dr. Ali Saib, a “Persecuted” Official

Dr. Saib was then questioned by the presiding judge,60 who asked him, in his capacity as “a
member of the deportation committee,” what had become of the children after the depor-
tation. The inspector answered, “At first ... I distributed them in [Muslim] villages. Later,
certain Muslims took girls into their homes. I adopted a girl, Satenig Giulian. There were no
more homeless Armenians in the city. The girls were married and the children were placed
in shelters.” Asked about the fate of “the four-year-old to five-year-old children,” about whom
the magistrate observed that there was “no information at all,” Saib said: “I do not know;
I was only a health service inspector.” The presiding judge reminded him that the chil-
dren had, after all, been entrusted to the Red Crescent hospital. “Where are they now?” he
asked. He received no answer. Obviously exasperated, the military judge exclaimed: “This is
extraordinary. You inspected insignificant things; you examined questions involving two or
three piasters, yet you took no interest in innocent children who were exterminated.” How,
he went on, was “an institution that was dedicated to public service converted into a house
of death? Why didn’t you intervene?”61
At the 19 April 1919 thirteenth session of the trial, Virginie Odabashian, responsible
for caring for 30 to 40 boys between the ages of two and four who had been taken in by the
American school, testified that Dr. Saib came to look for them in person and then had them
“sent away by sea.”62 The investigative reports drawn up by the inspector Ziya Fuad Bey and
Adnan Bey, Director General of the Health Department, which had been read before the
court at the third session, further incriminated Saib, who reacted by asking why the name
of his successor, Dr. Sadreddin Bey, had not been mentioned. Is it, he asked, “because he is,
even today, the secretary of the Teceddüt Party63 in Trebizond?”64 In other words, the doctor
expressed his surprise that he was being asked to account for acts committed on CUP orders,
whereas one of his colleagues had been left alone because he still belonged to the Ittihadist
movement. Saib also asked that the former military commander of Trebizond, Avni Pasha,

who had become one of the sultan’s aides-de-camp, and Dr. Yunüz Vasfi Bey, the director of
the Health Department, be heard in his defense; they “could testify that all the atrocities
inflicted on the Armenians resulted from decisions made by the Central Committee of the
Party of Union and Progress and were executed by the government.”65 Saib complained,
moreover, “My whole life, I have never been able to live in peace anywhere for six months
with this government.” He even affirmed that he had been persecuted by the committee since
1908, in particular because he had been the publisher of the newspaper Hukuki Ümümieh.66
His line of defense throws the CUP’s role in these crimes into relief. It also reveals the state
of mind of the executioners and the sentiment prevailing among them that they had acted
legitimately because their acts had been decided by the party.
This “persecution,” however, does not seem to have prevented the doctor from profiting
from his position in order to improve his lot in life. The presiding judge, General Mustafa
Nâzım Pasha, was well aware of this when he asked Saib if he had taken in “the late Dr. Leo
Arslanian’s wife.” Saib denied that he had. The evidence given by others of his peers, how-
ever, throws a harsh light on the methods that many of these cadres employed in order to get
their hands on a woman or enrich themselves without effort. Only rarely do we have reliable
documentation of the sort that enables us to observe the methods that these predators used
to divest one of their victims of his property or, perhaps, lay their hands on a member of his
family. However, from the well-furnished court file in the trial of the criminals of Trebizond,
we learn in detail how doggedly Ali Saib and Imamzâde Mustafa, a member of the Teşkilât-ı
Mahsusa, pursued both Dr. Arslanian, despite being a municipal physician well-known for
having organized a number of Red Crescent hospitals,67 and – even more – his wife, who
obviously constituted a highly coveted prize.
At the sixth session of the trial of Trebizond, Louis Vidal, a French citizen who worked for
the Singer Company, revealed that his brother-in-law Arslanian, who was married and the
father of two children – a boy of ten and a girl of seven – was quite affluent, and that his wife,
too, possessed a heritage of 1,200 pounds gold. Nicknamed “la belle dame,” Mrs. Arslanian
was, in Vidal’s words, “a victim of her beauty.”68
Vidal also reported that Arslanian had been appointed to a post as military physician
in Erzerum, despite having already contracted typhus. Despite his poor health, Dr. Avni,
an inspector in the army’s health service, “had given him two weeks” to pack his bags.
This ostensible transfer had led straight to the void: the doctor had been “deported and
killed on the road,” most probably on instructions from his superiors in Trebizond. Since
this news was not official, Vidal had been surprised to learn that Mrs. Arslanian had been
arrested, since the wife of an officer on active duty was, at least in theory, exempt from
deportation. But he was still more stunned when he went to the police station, “where he
was told that Dr. Arslanian was in Sıvas and that his wife and children would be joining
him there.” The lie seemed still cruder because Arslanian’s wife would have taken the road
running along the Black Sea coast, not the road to Sıvas. Vidal concluded that “now his
wife’s turn had come.” Hence he decided “to save his two children when he learned that
they were alive.” To that end, he sent a request to the vali, who answered: “The mother
who cares for them has been massacred; what point is there in leaving the two children
alive?”69 But the case of “la belle dame” involves a good deal more. The examinations of
the main actors in this drama, which took place at the fifth trial session on 5 April 1919,
afford us a glimpse of the role played by each one in this woman’s ordeal. The Agent
Mustafa almost invariably met the presiding judge’s questions with an “I do not know.” In
particular, he denied that Mrs. Arslanian had asked him to help her “by going to get a sum
of money that she kept in her home and giving it to her.” The most he would admit was
that he knew that “she had been exiled” and that he “never saw her again.” The presiding
judge pointed out to him that “Some people say that Mrs. Arslanian, her son, and you

yourself set out on a boat for the open sea ... You and Ali Saib Bey exiled this woman with a
secret purpose in mind.” Mustafa denied this. But subsequent examinations of the witness
revealed that “Mrs. Arslanian was in the Agent Mustafa’s household.” Saib, questioned in
turn, said that he did not know whether that was true, but added: “I have, however heard
that a man was willing to pay 300 or 400 piasters to marry her and thus get control of her
heritage.” He admitted that he had then consulted Nuri Bey, the police lieutenant, who
had told him that the man in question was a relative of Mustafa’s by the name of Ruşdi,
but that the vali had got wind of the affair and given orders to “expel Mrs. Arslanian from
Mustafa’s house.” Saib nevertheless believed that Mrs. Arslanian had “seven hundred or
eight hundred Turkish pounds” at her disposal. Given the accused man’s disinclination to
talk, the presiding judge finally exclaimed: “Some people say that you tried to marry the
beautiful lady, and that she turned you down. Mustafa had his eye on her heritage. Then
the two of you decided to exile Mrs. Arslanian.”70
The next day, the man thus incriminated, Abdüllah Ruşdi, a 65-year-old native of
Daghestan, was examined by the court. The examination revealed that Mrs. Arslanian
had been deported twice. The first time, she had “returned to the city with her son, hold-
ing a letter from Nail Bey” – that is, the Ittihad’s delegate had personally stepped in to save
her, probably at Mustafa’s or Saib’s request. It may also be presumed that Mustafa placed
this woman in a relative’s house in order to save her from the other predators interested
by her fortune or good looks. Ruşdi revealed that gendarmes came looking for her while
she was gone and asked him to go with them to see the vali, “who wanted to talk to him.”
He further revealed that, “on the vali’s orders, sailors took her out to sea and threw her
overboard.”71 Spilling secret after secret, Ruşdi also said that he knew “that she had inher-
ited,” because in her household there was “a nine-year-old boy whose mother had been a
domestic in the house of the health service inspector.” In veiled terms, the witness thus
informed the court that Saib was familiar with Mrs. Arslanian’s financial situation and was
not enamored of her charms alone.72 A few days later, one final witness, Major Edhem Bey,
“who was the president of the deportation committee and organized departures toward the
interior of the country,” confessed “that he had heard Mrs. Arslanian shouting on the boat
that was heading for the open sea; she was crying for help.”73 From all these elements, it
transpires that the vali and his collaborators were in sharp competition for control over
the property of a widow such as Mrs. Arslanian. She had certainly been brought back
from deportation, with the accord of the CUP delegate Nail, so that what she possessed
might be extorted from her, but the personal ambitions of Mustafa and Saib were curbed
by Cemal Azmi, who had “la belle dame” executed, perhaps after getting her to give him
her property.
The Roles of the Government and the Teşkilât-ı

Mahsusa in Liquidating the Armenians
According to the evidence given to the Istanbul court-martial on 3 April 1919 by Colonel
Vasfi, the commander of the Seventeenth Battalion who was stationed in Trebizond in June
1915, “the Trebizond Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa was under the command of Bahaeddin Şakir,” who
“got in the way of [the armed forces’] military operations. Initially, all the valis were under
his authority, along with the squadrons of the Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa that found themselves in his
jurisdiction. We opposed this process, but did not fully succeed [in putting an end to it].”74
Dr. Avni, the health service inspector, added that these “gangs ... set out with the Armenian
deportees. People everywhere were talking about the massacre of the Armenian deportees
on the highway, and of the fact that they had been attacked and looted.”75 The American
consul Oscar Heizer also had an opinion on the question: “ The real authority here seems to

be in the hands of a committee of which Nail Bey is the head and he apparently receives his
orders from Constantinople and not from the vali.”76
The Special Organization and the CUP’s delegate in Trebizond obviously played a crucial
role in the anti-Armenian persecutions, taking their orders from the capital. Arif Bey, the
kaymakam of Kirason, maintained, however, that it was Cemal Azmi who gave him “the
order to deport the Armenians toward Mosul by way of the Black Sea” – that is, to drown
them.77 Kenan Bey, a court inspector in the region, stated that he was well acquainted with
Cemal Azmi, who had earlier been the mutesarif of Lazistan, and that the vali “was respon-
sible for the deportations and massacres of Armenians.” He also remarked that the reports
that local magistrates sent to the Justice Ministry had produced no “results” and that the
vali “did exactly as he pleased; he could bring anyone he cared to before the court-martial.”
He added that “the kaymakam of Bafra, who had tried to intercede on the deportees’ behalf,
was killed.”78
Yusuf Rıza Bey, a member of the Ittihadist Central Committee and for a time the head
of the Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa in Trebizond, faced judgment in the trial of the Unionists. In tes-
timony he gave at the first session of the trial of Trebizond, he declared that the decision to
deport the Armenians had not been adopted by the Party’s Central Committee, but rather
that “it was the government that made it.” He was, moreover, not in Trebizond when the
deportations took place – “Nail represented the Committee in the area.”79 If we follow his
reasoning, the Ittihad had nothing to do with this business and he was not even its repre-
sentative in Trebizond, Nail was; the implication is that Nail was responsible for the mass
violence. After Nail, Talât Bey, an inspector in the gendarmerie, denied all involvement
in the events,80 even though it was he who had been entrusted with the mission of seeing
to the security of the convoys of deportees. Talât had difficulty responding when he was
asked whether “the separation of the men and women and the confiscation of the deportees’
property had not been carried out in line with the government’s orders.” “That is beyond my
remit,” he answered; “I do not know.”81
Already impugned as a pliable tool in the vali’s hands, the Agent Mustafa contended that
he had “never had anything to do with the deportations.” On the contrary, he said, he “had
tried to save all [his] friends, but unsuccessfully ... I worked for the Armenians.” He said that
his friends “Ibranosian and the Kamburian brothers” could testify in his behalf; they had
“named him to safeguard their property,”82 pending, no doubt, their improbable return from
exile. Examined again at the fourth session of the trial, Yusuf Rıza, albeit a member of the
Unionist Central Committee, merely “thought” that he had been appointed CUP responsi-
ble secretary in Trebizond by Haci Adıl Bey, “on the orders of the congress and orally.” He
claimed to have been “involved in the opening of schools and the ‘intellectual advancement
of the population,’ ” and said that he had collected “sizeable sums of money” to create “a foun-
dation for the schools.” The presiding judge, obviously not convinced by these arguments,
thereupon asked him if there was a record of his activities and, if so, who had made it. Rıza
stated that it was Tali, the treasurer, and later, “Nail Bey and others,” who had recorded these
operations.83 He was not to say anything more about this.
The president of the military recruitment office, Necmeddin Bey, stated, at the fifth ses-
sion of the trial, that “[t]he army commanders received an order not to interfere with the
deportations.” When the presiding judge asked if he had “authorized searches for Armenian
soldiers who had deserted,” Necmeddin Bey confirmed that he had, while adding that
“[t]he gendarmes came back empty-handed.” The judge asked why, and whether he had been
alarmed by the fact, doubtless in order to make him confess that the gendarmes had killed
the deserters they found. But Necmeddin Bey contented himself by answering: “I learned
that they had been exiled.” This brought a stinging response from Mustafa Nâzım: “The
Armenians were massacred and looted. Did you never hear anything about that?” Without

losing his composure, the officer answered: “I knew that the Armenians had been deported
by land or by sea. I did not see that with my own eyes, but many rumors about the sub-
ject were making the rounds.” The military judge was the more surprised by this ignorance
because there had existed a court-martial in Trebizond, presided over by the vali in person,
to which Necmeddin Bey had been, on his own witness, a member. He did, however, seem
to recall that one of the leading members of the “evacuation committee” (that is, the depor-
tation committee) was the police chief Nuri Bey, and that he had “given accounts” to his
superior, the military commander of Trebizond, Avni Pasha, who had “told him what he had
written” on this subject.84 Thus, information about the mass crimes committed in the region
had trickled through only in veiled terms.
In his concluding statement, the prosecutor, Feridun Bey, recapitulated the proceedings.
He noted:
The Young Turk government made the decision to deport the Armenians. The men
were deported first, followed by the women and children. Most of the men were mas-
sacred in the spot known as Deyirmen Dere. Some women and children were taken
out to sea on barges and drowned; other children were turned over to the Red Crescent
hospital and poisoned there. The jewels and other property belonging to the Armenian
deportees were pillaged. Some of those guilty of these crimes are fugitives. Cemal Azmi
and Nail Bey are considered to be the main culprits: they organized the squadrons of
çetes and recruited accomplices in order to put their criminal plans into effect.85
The pleas of the defense lawyers, made at the eighteenth session of the trial, consisted,
in sum, of blanket denials of the charges, accompanied by expressions of regret over “the
atrocities committed.”86 The verdict, handed down on Thursday, 22 May 1919, pointed out
that the two main culprits in the dock had issued “secret orders to liquidate the Armenians”
and proceeded to form squadrons of çetes.87 At the sixth session of the trial of the Ittihadist
leaders on 17 May 1919, Yusuf Rıza, who was judged in his capacity as a former member of
the Young Turk Central Committee and also as someone who had organized and headed the
squadrons of the Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa in Trebizond, did not deny that the organization that
he directed had “operated independently” of the organization of the same name engaged in
carrying out sabotage behind the enemy lines.88 Ultimately, it appears that the local admin-
istration and the Young Turk network (be it the local Ittihad club or the Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa),
their frequent conflicts of interest notwithstanding, divided up the work between them, as it
were. The task of coordinating operations fell to the vali Cemal Azmi; the task of executing
them devolved upon the CUP delegate, Yenibahçeli Nail Bey – who, during the trial, was in
Baku with Nuri, Enver’s younger brother.
Among the state officials, Mehmed Ali, the chief customs officer and president of the Red
Crescent, who was condemned to ten years of hard labor, had a political role and participated
directly in the decision-making process; Dr. Ali Saib, health service inspector and member
of the deportation committee, was both a decision-maker and an executor, who probably had
children poisoned on the orders of the deportation committee; Dr. Yunüz Vasfi, the director
of the Health Department, only carried out orders; Dr. Sadreddin, Saib’s successor, probably
had no part in this business because he was appointed to his post late in the day.89 Among
the military men and police officers, Avni Bey, the military commander of the region – he
was the Sultan’s aide-de-camp when the trial was held – does not seem to have had a hand in
the mass violence, but was careful not to denounce it. Sentenced to one year in prison, Nuri
Bey, the police chief, who was responsible for arresting the notables of Trebizond, probably
helped compile lists of those to be liquidated and assisted the commission responsible for
“abandoned property” in confiscating Armenian assets. He declared at the seventh session

of the trial that he had “never had anything to do with the deportation.” The defterdar Lutfi
Bey, however, contradicted him, contending that “he played a major role ... He was on good
terms with the vali and [was] one of his intimate associates.”90 Major Talât Bey, the com-
mander of the gendarmerie, was acquitted; yet he had a crucial role in organizing the depor-
tation of men to Gümüşhane and massacring them with the help of Major İbrahim Bey, the
chief of the supply dump. Rublis Esad Bey, the commander of an amele taburi, was directly
responsible for the liquidation of the Armenian worker-soldiers under his orders.
Among the local civilians implicated in the massacres perpetrated by the Teşkilât-ı
Mahsusa, the best known were Pirizâde Şevki, Mustafa (who was deported to Malta), Kirşlaye
Arif, Abdüllah Bey, Mehmed Ali Bey, Hakkı Haci Ali Hafızâde, Kahiya Reys, Zekeria, Arslan
Fayikci, İnce Mehmed Tahir, İzzet Çavuş, Tekkeli Neşad, Keresteci Hafız Cemal, Şekerci
Mustafa, Kel Mustafa, who was charged with drowning children, Keçecizâde Ahmed, Esad
Bey, Abdülkerim, İsmail Effendi, and Mirza Effendi.91
Dealing with “Abandoned Property”

The takeover of Armenian property, the economic dimension of the plan to eliminate the
Armenians, had its armed branch, the commission responsible for “abandoned property,”
one of whose presidents in Trebizond was Lutfi Bey, who was also the vilayet’s defterdar.
As the president of this commission, Lutfi too was questioned before the court-martial, at
the eighth session of the trial of Trebizond. He revealed, at the outset, that the deportation
committee “collected the abandoned property.” In other words, his own commission was a
sort of specialized branch of the local Young Turk leadership that managed the commission
at the political level. Lutfi also pointed out that the “abandoned property” collected by the
commission was stored in “special warehouses; the goods were piled up in the Armenian
church.” He added that no “detailed inventory” of these goods had been made since their
orders did not call for that. He also noted that it was “the police that was [sic] responsible for
the warehouses” and for “guarding” them until another commission responsible for liquidat-
ing (tasfiye) them proceeded to auction them off. Lutfi denied ever having received the least
sum “of money confiscated from the deportees.” The police chief Nuri Bey, who was also a
member of the commission, understood that his role was being called into question at the
trial. Indignant, he “energetically rejected these accusations,” taking care to underscore as he
did so that “the population of Trebizond is honorable, virtuous, and honest. It never seized
Armenian goods.” He pointed out, however, that, “during the deportation of the Armenians,
the goods that were transferred to the warehouses were stockpiled in very disorderly fash-
ion; it was therefore impossible to register these goods in their owners’ names,” despite the
fact that “guards” were stationed “before the doors” of Armenian homes. Lutfi concluded by
observing that “the orders we had were favorable to the Armenians, but it proved impos-
sible to carry them out.”92 The presiding judge then asked him whether the police were held
responsible “when a household was looted if the family to which it belonged had to leave,
abandoning it.” Nuri’s answer, which accentuated the fact that Trebizond had “thousands
of households, twenty thousand homes,” implied that despite what he had declared at the
outset, he had been unable to prevent these homes from being looted with the forces at his
command. Lutfi intervened at this point to say that “[c]ertain Armenians took fright and fled
to the mountains ... Certain policemen in civilian clothing took advantage of the circum-
stances” – in other words, helped themselves to whatever they wished. He also confirmed
that the population did not “participate in the looting of Armenian property,” but that it was
“in particular, members of the deportation committee, government officials, policemen, and
a few privileged people who looted.” As proof of what he said, Lutfi read one of the telegrams
that he had sent to the finance minister, “denouncing, day after day, the financial abuses and

the other illegal activities of the vali and his accomplices.”93 The examination, at the fif-
teenth session of the trial, of Nâzım Bey, the former president of the commission responsible
for “abandoned property” in Trebizond, proved disappointing. That of his successor, Hilmi
Bey, was richer in information. Hilmi stated that he had not been able to “offer resistance”
because the vali controlled the court-martial, so that he would have “risked” his life if he
had. He also admitted to “confiscating, in the American school,” Armenian property, but
could not recall having established “an inventory.” He nevertheless assessed the value of
“these jewels” at “between four thousand and five thousand pounds gold.” General Mustafa
Nâzım then pointed out to him that jewels “worth one thousand, seven hundred pounds gold
were transferred to Constantinople.” “What,” he asked, “became of the rest?” His words were
followed by a heavy silence.94 Here we see a classic case of the division of the spoils between
the local actors and the CUP, which demanded its share of the loot, generally assessed at
one-third its real value.
The other testimony given at the various sessions of the trial of Trebizond yielded further
information about the methods used to “sell” the confiscated goods. According to the inn-
keeper Niyazi, whose particular task had been to organize the transport of Armenian mer-
chandise by ship and drown the deportees out at sea, it was the policeman Ali Effendi who
“supervised” the auctions “on orders from the military commander”: “The abandoned goods
were sold without a list. They put them in the storehouse; the merchants suggested a price
and bought them.”95 It would seem, then, that besides being supervised by the deportation
committee, the commission responsible for “abandoned property” was assisted by the police,
and that it had also received orders from the army when it sold this property off. It is hard
to explain why the military commander, Avni, played this role, unless we assume that the
military too was interested in the results of these sales.
Significant quantities of goods stemming from the pillage of Armenian merchants’
warehouses were, according to information obtained in the course of the trial, exported to
Samsun or Istanbul under Niyazi’s supervision, especially after the capture of Trebizond by
the Russians had become inevitable. Yet, Niyazi said that he did not know whether “the vali
had transferred forty-two barges loaded with goods before the city was occupied.”96 Lutfi,
however, confirmed that Niyazi “had secretly organized the transportation of goods ... he
traveled back and forth between the cities on the Black Sea coast ... He was particularly
close to the vali ... He played a role in everything.”97 The examination of Nuri also revealed
that the innkeeper had amassed a personal fortune worth several thousand pounds gold by
acquiring “on the vali’s orders” some of the Tahmazian store’s stock of “textiles worth five
thousand to six thousand pounds gold” for only “two hundred pounds gold.”98 Nuri him-
self, we read, had “personally appropriated [goods] worth three thousand pounds, as well as
eighty jewels.”99 At the ninth session it was also revealed that the Agent Mustafa, who was
the commander of the port,100 had “taken the vali a box belonging to Vartivar Muradian,”
and had received “five hundred pounds gold and jewels” from Cemal Azmi in exchange.101
Nuri said that the box in question had first been opened at the police station on orders from
the vali; he did not remember very well if he had informed the commission responsible for
abandoned property about this.102 The vali clearly seems to have benefited personally from
this gift from one of his subordinates. Arusiag Kilijian, an 18-year-old orphan “taken in” by
Azmi who had traveled with Azmi’s family from Trebizond to Istanbul, reported that the
vali’s house was full of “stolen goods, rugs, and so on,” part of which he took with him to
the capital.103
Finally, Avni, the health service inspector, was accused of having demanded 500 pounds
gold from the Makhokhian family in exchange for saving it, as well as of being among those
who looted the Makhokhian’s stockhouses. He denied having participated in this pillage
in any way, although the president of the commission responsible for abandoned property

affirmed that the stocks of the Makhokhians’ firms had never been turned over to him for
safekeeping. The ensuing discussion further revealed that the Makhokhian’s daughter had
excited people’s lusts. She had been provisionally put in the Red Crescent hospital and then
Islamicized before being “adopted” by the director of the hospital, Mehmed Ali.104 At the
eleventh and twelfth sessions of the trial, witness after witness took the stand in order to
state that they, or certain other indicted individuals, had not been in Trebizond when the
deportations took place.105
The Kazas of Trebizond, Surmene, and Akçabat

According to the report of the American consul, Oscar Heizer, the first convoy of depor-
tees was put on the road on 1 July 1915. On that day, troops surrounded certain Armenian
neighborhoods of Trebizond and proceeded to expel 2,000 inhabitants of the city, who then
were taken in small groups to a place known as Deyirmen Dere, located ten minutes outside
the city, and from there led off in the direction of Gümüşhane. A total of 6,000 people left
the city between 1 July and 3 July; approximately 4,000 more left the surrounding villages.106
Initially, the authorities had declared that Catholics and Protestants, as well as incapacitated
old people, children, and pregnant women, would be “maintained.” In the end, however, no
exceptions were made, and these “exempted” individuals were dispatched with the last con-
voy that set out on 5 July.107
Besides the 5,539 Armenians of the city of Trebizond, these measures were applied to the
17,779 Armenians of the rural areas of the vilayet. Involved were, first, 20 villages located east
of Trebizond, not far from the city in an area between Deyirmen Dere and the Yanbol River,
centered on the little port of Drona (pop. 184) in the foothills of the Pontic Mountains: Zifanus
(pop. 951), Komra (pop. 147), Shana (pop. 600), Kalafka (pop. 400), Surmene (pop. 1,210),
Sifter and Abion (Church of St. Gregory). These villages claimed a total Armenian population
of more than 6,500, of whom 323 lived in three other villages of the kaza of Surmene.108
The deportation measures were also applied to 16 localities located south and west of
Trebizond, with an Armenian population of around 7,000, 3,517 of which lived in the kaza of
Akçabat.109 In contrast to what happened in Trebizond, however, the men here were appar-
ently killed in their villages by bands of çetes belonging to the Special Organization, as in
Tots.110
According to Louis Vidal, a Frenchman allowed to remain in Trebizond and who testified
before the Istanbul court-martial on 7 April 1919, approximately 15,000 Armenians were
deported from Trebizond and the vicinity: “Not a single man survived, [but] a number of
orphans [were] in the villages, in Muslim households, because the sailors sometimes brought
them to shore and took them into their homes.”111 Tahsin Bey, the vali of Erzerum, who
testified at the third session of the trial of Trebizond, said he believed that the Armenians
deported from Trebizond had been attacked on the road to Gümüşhane.112
According to survivors’ reports, the 15,000 deportees from the region of Trebizond were
dispatched in three convoys comprising 4,000 to 6,000 people. These convoys were formed at
the exit from Trebizond in Deyirmen Dere, where all the convoys were assembled.113
On the testimony of the 42-year-old Nvart Makhokhian of Trebizond, 500 men were
taken from her convoy of 5,000 near Gümüşhane – this was apparently the first convoy – and
killed a half-hour’s march away while the caravan was looted by çetes. After Fırıncilar, in the
Kanlı Dere Gorge, where the Kurdish chieftains of the Reşvan tribe Zeynel Bey and Haci
Bedri Ağa were in charge of affairs,114 the 1,500 men still in the convoy were separated from
the others by Zeynel Bey and his squadron of Kurdish çetes and massacred in plain sight of
their families. After four months on the road, after losing hundreds of people on the way and
being repeatedly pillaged, Nvart Makhokhian and her companions reached Aleppo.115

Philomene Nurian left Trebizond with the third convoy of 6,000 people, all of them
Armenian Catholics, guarded by gendarmes under the command of İsmail Effendi from
Platana. According to her, the men preceded the women, girls, and children at some eight-
to-ten hours’ distance. At Gümüşhane, İsmail turned the males over to a band of çetes com-
manded by Mirza Effendi, who massacred them in the vicinity.116
The third caravan from Trebizond reached the entrance to Kemah Gorge on 22 July,
where it was systematically pillaged and then sent on to Harput. American missionaries
and the American consul note that it was in the place called “Four Fountains,” at the exit
from Mezreh; they say that the deportees were in a pitiful state.117 Philomene Nurian also
observes that after a three-day trek the boys were separated from the others and killed before
their mothers’ eyes. The next morning, the Catholics were separated from the Apostolic
Armenians. Nurian said she knew “nothing of what became of them.” She does not say
where these events occurred, but there is good reason to believe that it was in the vicinity of
Lake Göljük, where, according to reports, deportees from Trebizond arrived and were mas-
sacred at this time.118 Nurian reports that the Catholic deportees, whose escort was under
the command of Lieutenant Harputlu Hasan Effendi, were ordered to strip, “so that a more
systematic search could be made for the money that we had managed to hide until then
[Hasan] then turned us over to a Kurd by the name of İsmail Bey, who had been waiting for
us with his band of çetes ... It was then that we understood that our last hour had come: they
attacked, and the massacre began.”119
Nurian’s mother and younger brother were killed with iron bars in front of her. She herself
was repeatedly stabbed, but was saved along with her younger sister by İsmail Bey. On the
way, the gendarme Şefik Bey, “who knew [her],” took her back from the Kurds and turned
her over to his mother, with whom she went to Arğana Maden, where she remained for a
year, abandoning her religion (“I was called Nacieh”) and repeatedly changed masters “so as
to maintain [her] moral integrity.” In early March 1916, she fell into the hands of Mehmed
Nusret Bey from Janina, who had become the mutesarif of Arğana Maden,120 “an inhuman
creature representative of his masters.” Nusret Bey had also taken her sister, now called
Nayime, “on the pretext that he had to send her to Aleppo ... I never saw [her] again.” Later,
Philomene Nurian managed to find refuge in Kütahya, where she survived by giving piano
lessons; she arrived in Constantinople in October 1918, “without anyone’s help.”121
So far, we have only rarely had occasion to observe the behavior of the gendarmes who
guarded the convoys or that of the squadrons of çetes except through survivors’ reports. The
investigative file assembled for the court-martial of the Twenty-Ninth Division, based in
Erzincan, in July-August-September 1915, affords us a glimpse of the conditions in which a
convoy from Trebizond was looted and some of its members killed. It might seem surprising
that such an investigation was conducted immediately after the deportations, unless we bear
in mind that a certain legal order still subsisted in the Ottoman Empire. In fact, provincial
courts martial were extremely active during the First World War and significant numbers
of people were brought before them. However, as is indicated by the few documents we are
aware of, it was not mass crimes that were judged by these military courts but “abuses” – that
is to say, the seizure of Armenian goods to the detriment of either local Ittihadist leaders or
the CUP itself. All indications are that instructions came down from the highest echelons
to mete out severe punishment to economic criminals. At all events, the affair of the escorts
from Trebizond enables us to observe, cases of personal enrichment aside, how the deportees
in a convoy from Trebizond were treated and, incidentally, to also grasp the role assigned
the squadrons of çetes based in Gümüşhane, whose mission was to liquidate the men in the
gorges near Maderınkil, near Teke.122
The object of the investigation conducted by the Erzincan court-martial was the group of
gendarmes who escorted the first convoy to leave Trebizond, mentioned above. This convoy

left the city guarded by an escort under the orders of Captain Agah Bey, the commander
of the second company of the first battalion of the regiment of the mounted gendarme-
rie of Trebizond.123 Officially, the presiding judge of the court-martial of the Twenty-Ninth
Division, Lieutenant-Colonel Fehmi, opened proceedings against the men who had “pillaged
the caravan.” Some of those indicted were arrested in Erzincan, but Fehmi Bey demanded
that the vali of Trebizond send him two other suspects “immediately and without fail,” and
inform him as to whether çetes had been employed in his region.124 Cemal Azmi answered:
“We have confirmed that, to the present day, no çetes have been employed in the capital or
any of the districts of the vilayet and that there has been no looting.”125 A few days later,
he informed his correspondent that the gendarmes he had requested had left Trebizond on
19 July.126 These brief exchanges create the impression that Azmi was somewhat discom-
fited, probably because of the rigor with which the judge presiding over the court-martial
of Erzincan was carrying out his investigation. Here we can also glimpse the possibility of
a manipulation by the CUP and its network, which had officially given the army the right
to “displace civilian populations” – the better to cover up the extermination undertaken by
the Special Organization. It is in any case noteworthy that Captain Agah, whose role in the
liquidation of the men near Gümüşhane was pointed out by those under indictment, was
never deranged by the army’s courts. The highest-ranking soldier among the accused was
Osmanoğlu Mehmed Faik, a 24-year-old unmarried junior lieutenant in the second company
of the first battalion of the regiment of mounted gendarmes in Trebizond. His examination
revealed that approximately 2,000 pounds gold were extorted from the deportees; that, half
an hour from Gümüşhane, they were “plundered” by the gendarmes; and that, the next day
the men were separated from the women. “In Gümüşhane,” Faik said,
there were two bands charged with killing the Armenian men. One was from Trebizond;
the other was made up of a Kurdish band under the orders of Mikho [Mirza] Bey. They
looted the Armenians who passed by. The chief of the band from Trebizond had a con-
versation with the commander of the company. The commander then told me to leave
and collect the money during the next stage. We were supposed to keep one-third of
it; the second third was to go to the bands, and some would go to the community ... It
was also stated that the government did not want any of their money; it only wanted
to throw them into the Euphrates.127
The examination of the junior officer Faik thus reveals that there was clearly collaboration
between the gendarmerie and the leaders of the çetes. Another witness, Osman, a gendarme,
pointed out that a çete named Rizeli İsmail, a member “of Murad Bey’s band,” who “had been
added to our group by the authorities,” also took part in slaying the men in the convoy.128
Faik noted that the commander of his company had, after “a conversation with the mutesarif
of Gümüşhane and Mirza Bey,” ordered “the men be put on one side and the women on the
other,” although the oldest men were left with the women. “The band from Trebizond [that
of Murad Bey, with Rizeli İsmail]” then proceeded, in the Maderenkil valley, “to kill the men
and take their money.” In a sentence uttered in passing, Faik revealed that the number of
men killed in this secluded spot by these two çete bands “exceeded three thousand.”129 Thus,
we see the outlines of the system for liquidating the men established by the “authorities” of
Gümüşhane. There is every reason to believe that the Trebizond deportation committee
opted for the solution of eliminating the men outside the city to avoid the accusations that
foreign witnesses would inevitably have leveled had the vali had followed the example of
Mezreh/Harput.
Significantly, the indications about what happened to the men that were given in passing
by those facing court-martial came in the course of interrogations focused on the pillaging

of the deportees. A certain antagonism between the çetes and the gendarmes can also be
observed: the gendarmes were, so to speak, frustrated by the fact that only the çetes bene-
fited from the property extorted from the deportees. Ayub Sabri, a gendarme, pointed out
that he and his comrades protested to their superiors, asking why “these çetes are taking
this money that we should be getting for [ourselves].” Faik answered, according to Sabri,
“that this money was not destined for them, but would go to the government, the fleet, and
the national relief organization,” although he gave “one pound to every gendarme.”130 The
balance of Sabri’s examination shows that this gendarme was not satisfied with his one
pound gold because, when he was arrested, there was discovered on his person “fifty-three
Ottoman pounds, a check for one hundred pounds, eleven and a half Russian pounds, three
and a half pounds sterling, a gold watch, earrings, and other gold ornaments.”131 As for the
technique used to extort property from the deportees in the convoy from Trebizond, Osman,
a gendarme, pointed out that Rizeli İsmail and Faik Effendi “searched the Armenians and
took their money and valuables ... telling them that he was acting on government orders;
that each of them should keep no more than sixty piasters and give them the rest of their
money and valuables, and that the government would make arrangements to feed them in
their place of destination.”132 As will have been remarked, this discourse was often used in
other regions as well in order to justify the seizure of the deportees’ property and make them
increasingly dependent on their executioners. Osman confirms, moreover, that “most of the
money was taken by the çetes; the rest remained in Faik Effendi’s hands.”133 Hafız Seyfeddin,
a gendarme, also indicated that Rizeli İsmail and Faik threatened those deportees who were
slow to obey orders, telling them that “those who did not hand [their money] over would be
shot.”134
Osman reveals another interesting detail: of the 50 gendarmes who left Trebizond in
the escort, 23 accompanied the caravan as far as Erzincan; “the others remained with the
Armenian men who had been segregated in Gümüşhane.”135 In other words, the “other”
gendarmes very certainly took part in the liquidation of the men, along with the two bands
of çetes stationed in Gümüşhane.
Finally, the examination of Junior Lieutenant Mehmed Faik provides a graphic illustration
of a rarely appreciated aspect of the abduction of young women by their executioners. Thus
Faik reported that on the way he met “a young woman from the Arabian family; I found her
attractive; I wanted to marry her, by the grace of God. The girl’s mother and father con-
sented.” Faik also said that “her father was killed at Gümüşhane and, as she was too little, she
cried and did not want to leave her sister.” Preoccupied by his professional duties, the Junior
Lieutenant entrusted “the two girls to a gendarme in the guard, asking him to take them
to the house of the photographer Kadus Bey [in Erzincan] and leave them there,” while he
escorted the convoy to Kemah. He also “considered giving” his future wife’s sister “to a doctor”
or “a lieutenant.”136
After accomplishing his mission in Kemah, Faik lost no time rejoining the Arabians’
daughter, who was being held in Kadus Effendi’s house. He was there when the gendarmes
came to arrest him. Before the court-martial, Faik justified his actions as follows: “As for the
girls, I can assure you that they can be found in every house, all along the route. For my part,
I have read no government order [on this subject] and I did what the whole population did:
I kept this little girl whom I had known even before [these events].”137
The Kaza of Ordu

The Armenians of the kaza of Ordu, most of whom had roots in Hamşin and whose ances-
tors had settled relatively late in this area, numbered around 13,565. Three thousand of
the kaza’s Armenians resided in the principal town, also known as Ordu; the others lived

scattered about 29 villages. The development of the seat of the kaza dates from the second
half of the nineteenth century, when Armenians who had come from Tamzara and Kirason
settled in the quarter known as Boztepe. It was these Armenians who introduced the cultiva-
tion of hazelnuts to the region, founded the city’s weekly market, and developed limestone,
silver, and manganese mining and export. As for the 29 villages in the hinterland (located
at least one hour and at most ten hours from Ordu), they were organized in six rural clusters
to the south, southwest, and west of Ordu, notably in the valleys of the Melet Irmak and its
tributaries: Ak Punar (pop. 109), Kulcoren (pop. 476), Kara Tipi (pop. 263), Kara Kiraz (pop.
93), Kesacık (pop. 219), Kızılen (pop. 680), Kadencık (pop. 240), Kran (pop. 105), Kolaca
(pop. 96), Kater Köy (pop. 156), Tepe Köy (pop. 753), Taşoluk (pop. 762), Hocoğlı and Yazık
(pop. 303), Güğören (pop. 271), Musakılıc (pop. 584), Şeyiler (pop. 116), Uzunmusa (pop. 66),
Uzunmahmud (pop. 388), Çavuşlar (pop. 727), Çatalı (pop. 114), Bultan (pop. 55), Bazarsu
(pop. 354), Sayaca (pop. 581), Seraycık (pop. 236), Darıkca (pop. 182), Oprama (pop. 224),
Kiraz Dere (pop. 327), and Hacoğlu (28 households).138
According to a report by E.B. Andreasian, Ordu was gradually isolated from the rest of
the country in the first months of the war. The first arrests there took place around mid-June
1915. Five hundred regular soldiers took control of the Armenian neighborhoods and pro-
ceeded to arrest a number of men, who were then interned in the barracks jail. This opera-
tion lasted some six days; only after it was over was the decree ordering the deportation of the
Armenian population toward Mosul made public. The first to leave were the men, who were
tied together in groups of four and led off in convoys of 80 to 100 people each. According to
our witness, it was learned only much later that these men had had their throats slit in the
woody valleys in the vicinity.139
Certain prisoners succeeded, however, in gaining their release by means of bribes and thus
were able to leave Ordu with their families in the convoys that were put on the road a few
days later. The first caravan contained the families of the men who had been arrested and
massacred. All these groups set out on the road that led by way of Mesudiye to Suşehir, which
lay 30 kilometers to the west of Şabinkarahisar. Near Suşehir, in the nahie of Elbedir, many
of these deportees were massacred and large numbers of girls and women were abducted.140
A small group managed to continue its journey. Reverend Hans Bauernfeind encountered
this group near Kangal, south of Sıvas, on 14 August 1915, together with the deportees from
Trebizond.141
The old, the sick, and the infirm, who had been briefly admitted to the hospital of Ordu
or other institutions, were shortly thereafter officially sent by boat to Samsun. In fact, they
were drowned out at sea in conditions similar to those we observed in Trebizond.142 A group
of women and, especially, children of both sexes between the ages of three and 12, went into
hiding in the homes of Greek, Georgian, or Turkish friends; these people remained in Ordu
after the convoys left. But the authorities’ threats apparently convinced their friends to get
rid of them. In some cases, the authorities distributed these children to families in Kirason
and in others took them out to sea and killed them. At the fourteenth session of the trial of
the criminals of Trebizond on 26 April 1919, Hüseyin Effendi, a merchant from Ordu, certi-
fied that Faik Bey, Ordu’s kaymakam, dispatched two barges loaded with Armenian women
and children toward Samsun, which “came back empty two hours later.”143 These boats could
not have made the journey to Samsun and back in so short a lapse of time; their passengers
were, in other words, “lost at sea.” A few dozen adolescents nevertheless managed to flee to
the nearby Pontic Mountains, where they survived for three years.144
The following government officials bear the brunt of the responsibility for the anti-
Armenian persecutions: Ali Faik Bey, who was the kaymakam of Ordu from 29 January 1913
to 5 July 1915; Postuzâde Yusuf, the mayor; Rahmi Effendi, a court clerk; Rüstem Effendi, an
investigating magistrate; Mustafa Bey, head of the supplies department; Osman Effendi, the

director of the Tobacco Régie; Salim Effendi Başizâde; and Çapanoğlu Küçük Hüseyin and
Gurci Murad Effendi, tax collectors. Among the notables enrolled in the Special Organization,
the following played distinctive roles: Mustafaağazâde Ruşdi Bey; Mustafaağazâde Mehmed
Bey; Hacikodazâde Haci Bekir Effendi; Hacikodazâde Küçük Mehmed; Akağzâde Abdüllah;
Körahmedzâde Mustafa; Atta Bey; Haci Teza Bey; Kâtibzâde Tevfik; Rafikzâde Tevfikoğlu;
Avundukzâde Hüseyin Bey; Mumcizâde Ali; Mollah Veli Zâde; İzzet Bey, the head of the
Emvalı metruke; Celazâde Haci Kadir Bey; Sabaheddinağazâde Alaeddin; Mahmudbeyzâde
Bekir; and Neçatzâde Mustafa. Among the leaders of the çetes, those most deeply involved in
the massacres were Fotuzâde Haci Haron; Fotuzâde Haci Ali Osman; Boyraszâde İzzet Ağa;
Alaybeyzâde Mehmed Ağa; Alaybeyzâde Sadik Ağa; and Bozulizâde Haydar Ağa.145
It should finally be noted that after the Russians captured Trebizond, the innkeeper Niyazi
was dispatched by Cemal Azmi to Ordu with the mission of deporting the Greeks and selling
off their property “at ridiculously low prices.”146
The Kazas of Kirason, Tireboli, and Gorele

As in many other Black Sea ports, the Armenian colony of Kirason developed after 1850 with
the arrival of Armenians from Tamzara and Şabinkarahisar. The Armenians numbered 2,075
on the eve of the First World War, plus 40 families in a peripheral village, Bulancak, where
they worked in trade, hazelnut and cherry production, and anchovy fishing. The Armenian
communities of the kazas of Tireboli and Gorele were even more insignificant: there were 312
Armenians in Elu, the seat of the kaza of Gorele, and 250 in the village of Elev. Eight hundred
sixty-five Armenians lived in Tireboli, where they were very active in commerce.147
At the fourteenth session of the trial of the criminals of Trebizond on 26 April 1919, Arif
Bey, the kaymakam of Kirason, confirmed that he had received an order from the vali, Cemal
Azmi, to deport the Armenians of his region toward Mosul “by way of the Black Sea.”148
The shortcut suggested by his hierarchical superior should not, however, lead us to believe
that the kaymakam simply carried out the vali’s orders. Surrounded by convinced Young
Turks such as Sarı Mahmudzâde Hasan, the president of the local Ittihad club, or Eşref Sarı
Mahmud and Tarğınzâde Hakkı, influential members of the club, as well as by government
officials who were every bit as zealous – among them Sıdkı Bey, the chief customs officer;
Husni Bey, the müdir of İkisu; Salih Çavuş, the müdir of Kulakkaya; Hayri Bey, the imperial
prosecutor; Hoca İbrahimzâde Ziya, the general secretary of the sub-prefecture; and Mehmed
Bey, the imperial vice-prosecutor – Arif Bey engineered the liquidation of the Armenians
of his kaza.149
The procedure used to eliminate the Armenian population here was classic. In the second
half of June 1915, the police searched Armenian houses in Kirason, officially looking for
arms and deserters. Males between 16 and 50 were arrested and confined in the courtyard of
the town hall. One hundred fifty to 160 notables were murdered the next night outside the
city; the other men were set free. Only after these operations had been completed was the
deportation order made public.150
The caravan in which our main witness found herself – the fourth and last – was guarded
by gendarmes under the orders of Hasan Sabri. It comprised 1,200 people, 500 of them males.
The males were separated from the others near İki Su, halfway to Şabinkarahisar, and mas-
sacred by 82 “gendarmes” near Eyriboli. The convoy then took the road to Tamzara and was
pillaged in a Kurdish village in the environs of Şabinkarahisar, where girls and women were
also abducted. In Kavaklık, near Ezbider, the convoy was attacked by çetes from Kirason
who were led by Sari Mahmudzâde Eşref and his brother Hasan, Kâtib Ahmed, the com-
mander of the gendarmerie Kemal Bey, Major Faik, and an officer named Osman. They
burned the last eight men in the convoy alive. After a 28-day trek, when our witness reached

Kuruçay, between Şabinkarahisar and Divrig, there were only 500 deportees left in the cara-
van; they were natives of Kirason and the kazas of Tireboli and Gorele. According to Mariam
Kokmazian, they were attacked again, on the kaymakam’s orders, by Kurdish villagers; the 40
survivors in the caravan then set out for Demir Mağara, located somewhat south of Divrig, a
place that had been given the name “Slaughterhouse of the Armenians” by the local popula-
tion because several thousand Armenians had had their throats cut there. On the 36 day
these survivors reached Agn/Eğın. Our witness was placed in the city’s Turkish orphanage,
where 500 Armenian children were living in appalling conditions. When, somewhat later,
these children were poisoned and thrown into the Euphrates, Mariam succeeded in escaping.
At first she survived by working for a tailor in the city and later made her way to Sıvas dressed
as a Turk before moving on to Konya and, finally, Istanbul.151
In addition to the Young Turks mentioned above, several officers in the army and gendar-
merie played important roles in eliminating the Armenians of Kirason and the surrounding
kazas: Faik Bey, the commander of the gendarmerie; Kemal Bey, a lieutenant in the gendar-
merie; Arap Mustaf Bey, a major in the gendarmerie; and Nihad Bey, the head of the recruit-
ment office. Among the notables in the city, Haci Ali Ağazâde Kiağifi played a leading role
in looting Armenian property in his capacity as president of the Emvalı metruke. The leaders
of squadrons of çetes who were the most deeply involved in the massacres or drownings at sea
were Topal Osman and Ishak Çavuş. They were assisted by Kızılcioğlu Buni Hasan Hüseyin;
Harputlu Paşa Reis; Eğinli Hüseyin; Eşref Çelebi; Kolci Yusufzâde Yusuf; Bulanoğlu Şaban;
and Pehlivan İsmail.152
Massacres and Deportations in the Sancak of Gümüşhane

An enclave in the Pontus mountains, the sancak of Gümüşhane, which had enjoyed a long
period of prosperity thanks to its silver mines, had been largely emptied of its Armenian
population after the Russo-Turkish War of 1828. In 1914, 1,817 Armenians were still living in
the town of Gümüşhane. There were another 450 in Şeyran, the seat of the kaza of the same
name, and 482 in Kelkit, the southernmost district in the sancak.153
As we have seen, the mutesarif of Gümüşhane, Abdülkadir Bey, who held his post from
June 1915 to 16 January 1917, played a decisive role in the liquidation of the men deported
from Trebizond154 and, naturally, the Armenians of his own district. He was seconded by
Nazmi Bey and Refik Pasha, who were backed up in turn by two squadrons of çetes stationed
there under the command of Mirza Bey and Murad Bey.155
The Sancak of Rize, a Haven for a Few Armenian Fugitives

According to the Ottoman census of 1914, there were only 35 Armenians in the whole san-
cak of Rize.156 This statistic, however, masks a much more complex reality: the mountainous
region of Hamşin was home to an Armenian-speaking population that was converted by
force to Islam between 1680 and 1710, and was distinguished by conspicuous cultural traits.
Despite the activity of the mutesarif, Süleyman Sâmi Bey (who held his post from 16 July 1914
to 16 July 1915), this population unhesitatingly took in a number of Armenians from the
regions of Kiskim, Bayburt, and Erzerum, which made these mountains a locus of resistance
to the government forces that set off in pursuit of the Armenian fugitives.157
Massacres and Deportations in the Sancak of Canik/Samsun

According to the statistics of the Patriarchate and the 1914 Ottoman census, there were
35,907 Armenians in the sancak of Canik. They lived both in the towns – Samsun, Bafra,

Çarşamba, Uniye, and Fatsa – and in the countryside in ten villages around Uniye, four in
the vicinity of Terme, and 20 in the Çarşamba district; refugees from Hamşin had founded
almost all of these early in the eighteenth century. The sancak boasted, in 1914, 49 churches
and 74 schools.
The development of the port of Samsun in the latter half of the nineteenth century owed a
great deal to the opening of a road that could be traveled by wagon between Samsun and the
interior of the country. In 1914, the Armenian population here numbered 5,315. It was settled
in the Armenian quarter located in the northwestern part of the city, near the shore. Solidly
anchored in its hinterland, the city exported notably tobacco, cotton, pearls, and lumber.158
The few known sources on the deportation of the Armenians of Samsun are, above all,
German,159 hence the importance of the abundant correspondence, in French, due to the
American consulate in Samsun, William Peter.160 It is all the more important in that most
of the American consular documents were destroyed at the request of the State Department
when the United States entered the war in 1917. As the American consul in Aleppo, J. B.
Jackson, said:
There was no alternative, however, for I had had the terrible example of the failure
of the French Consul-General at Beirut, Syria, to do likewise, as a result of which his
archives had been seized by the Turks and more than sixty estimable men of Syria were
exposed and hanged, and some 5,000 more were deported and all had their property
confiscated by the Turkish Government. With this before me I did not intend that any
act of omission of mine should be the cause of a like catastrophe.161
Peter, a Swiss citizen, took up his duties as a consular agent in Samsun in spring 1915.162
As the representative of a neutral country, he also found himself charged with representing
the interests of the English, French, Russians, Italians, and so on. Already very busy defend-
ing the commercial interests and property of those countries in the Samsun area, Peters was
in late June 1915 suddenly confronted with, in his own words, an “Armenian question.” The
consul was at first puzzled by the “measures of displacement to the interior” of the Armenian
population. Certain signs, however, indicated that an operation by the Turkish authori-
ties was imminent. An 11 May 1915 letter from the American consul in Trebizond, Oscar
Heiner, informed Peter that “upon instructions from the Embassy I enclose herewith copy
of a Note Verbal from the Sublime Porte dated 18 April requesting that American Consular
Officers refrain from making trips into regions in which the Imperial Ottoman armies are
operating.”163 The tone of this “circular verbal note” from the Sublime Porte, dated 18 April
1915, was revealing:
Pursuant to a communication from the vice-commander of the Imperial Army, the

minister of foreign affairs respectfully requests that the embassy of the United States
of America be so good as to send all necessary instructions to the American consuls so
that they refrain from making journeys to the zone[s] in which the Ottoman Imperial
Armies are engaged in carrying out operations with a particular purpose.164
What were these “operations [carried out] with a particular purpose”? The answer
came on 26 June 1915, when Peter wired the American ambassador Henry Morgenthau:
“Authorities demand internment Armenians, women, children. Because measure too seri-
ous, request intervention with government to preserve freedom innocent people.”165 Two
days earlier, Peter had already sent this cable: “Authorities demand internment Armenians
[under] American protection, stop. Moreover, authorit[ie]s demand delivery keys monastery,
Latin church, advise. Peter.”166 In other words, Peter had been asked to abandon the idea of

protecting American citizens of Armenian origin and to turn over property belonging to
enemy countries.
The American consul in Samsun, although he was the representative of a neutral coun-
try, was put under ever-tighter surveillance, while his communications with the embassy in
Istanbul were impeded. In August 1915, there were even frictions between Peter and the
mutesarif of Samsun, who, Peter claimed
Must have received instruction from Sıvas no longer to accept my sealed letters ... I
would have communicated this to you by telegraph, but my dispatch would certainly
not have arrived. My two trips to Merzifun have given the Turks the idea that I went
there for the Armenians alone, in order to persuade myself of the reality of the mat-
ter on the spot. Indeed, the kaymakam of Merzifun said this to one of my Turkish
friends.167
It is no less interesting to observe how a consul who initially did not have a global vision of
the events in progress gradually modified the vocabulary he used to describe the liquidation
of the Armenians. Convinced, at first, of the truthfulness of the declarations of the local
authorities by the spectacle they staged – Armenian deportees leaving the city on ox-drawn
carts – he wrote in his report of 27 June 1915:
On orders from Constantinople, the mutesarif decreed on Thursday evening, the 24th
of this month, that the population, regardless of social position, religious sect [sic], or
foreign protection, had, within five days, to leave the city and prepare for exile. This
spontaneous order, composed in extremely severe fashion, not only stunned all the
Armenians and plunged them into a state of anguish, but also deeply touched the
humanitarian feelings of all the other Christians and a good part of the Muslims who
still possess upright judgment – which is unfortunately not the case with all of them.
The consul found especially cruel the “expulsion, on pack wagons, [of] women, children,
and old people, accompanied by a prohibition to sell in order to acquire the financial means
needed to survive during the journey, the length and destination of which are unknown.”168
By 10 July, already using more categorical language, he announced:
They have formed groups of Armenian males and have had all of them massacred by
peasants. They are certainly going to take the kind of measures against women and
children that will have these creatures dying of hunger or despair, a horrible massacre
reminiscent of the period in which they rid Constantinople of its dogs and left them
all on an island to die!169
The information contained in his report of 26 August is more precise. The deportees of
Samsun, Amasia, Merzifun have all arrived in Amasia. Then, the men separated, tied
up, some clubbed to death between Amasia, Turchal, Tokat. Everyone that arrived in
Tokat was sent from Tokat to Chiflik or Gishgisha and butchered. The women and
children transported by oxcart as far as Scharkysschla [Şarkışla, near Sıvas] and then
send on foot to Malatia by detours, then thrown in the Kırk Göz or the Euphrates.170
In the same document, abandoning the generally reserved tone he used when writing to
the ambassador, Peter gave vent to his indignation in these terms: “If Turkey is, in general,
not up to scratch in matters of organization and talent, this time, when it was a question of

massacres, theft, and so on, it showed nicely coordinated, nicely accelerated savoir-faire in
swiftly expediting hundreds of thousands of creatures to the next world.”171
Thus, in the space of two months, Peter seems to have taken the measure of the event.
His correspondence provides valuable information about the methods the authorities used
to disguise their crimes. Initially, it was a question of temporarily expelling the Armenian
population and sending it on oxcarts “to the interior,” as far as Amasia, so as to buttress the
conviction of foreign observers that nothing more was involved here than preventive secu-
rity measures that were undoubtedly painful, but not inhumane. Armenian Catholics and
Protestants, whose fate interested certain Western consulates in particular, were not spared
in this first phase, but the authorities sustained doubts as to whether they would be down to
the last minute. Only those “who wish to convert to Islam can remain here; this government
decision has no other purpose than to efface the name Armenian.”172 It was necessary to wait
no more than two weeks to learn that
even converts, according to what the mutesarif says, cannot remain here, but have to
go to Trebizond, Kerasund, Merzifun, Bafra, etc., etc. The Turks are working hard to
convert people. A great many of the people who have left would very much like to
[follow] the example of the one hundred fifty families that have converted, but it seems
that it is already too late and that they are not being allowed to return here even if
they embrace Islam.173
As for “American subjects [sic] [of] former Armenian origin, [they] will probably be expelled,”
Peter wrote in a 4 July 1915 telegram to Morgenthau.174
The longer second phase now began. The aim of it was to finish the job – that is, to deport
those who had been spared so far or had managed to elude the roundups. This phase is particu-
larly revelatory of the authorities’ determination to finish what they had started by relentlessly
tracking down the handful of individuals who had benefited from some sort of protection.
The letters exchanged with Constantinople in the archives of the Samsun consulate about
one threatened “protégé” or another are past counting. To illustrate the fierce determination
and cynicism of the Turkish authorities, it is enough to present the case of a single man, the
dragoman of the Russian consul in Trebizond, G. Tokatlian. Initially, on the insistence of
the American embassy (which had been charged with defending Russian interests as well),
Tokatlian had been placed under house arrest in Kayseri. His two sons, Hrachia and Michel,
were living with Mr. T[okatlian]’s sister ... When the Armenian deportation began,
the mutesarif had promised to let these two children remain here, but, later, he sud-
denly wanted to dispatch them to Urfa, and it was only with great difficulty that Peter
secured permission for them to stay in Samsun. While Peter was away in Merzifun, the
mutesarif had them deported after all; today, we do not know where his sister and two
children are.175
It was now December 1915 and Tokatlian was still alive. A few months later, in October
1916, Peter informed the American ambassador that he had until then been sending Tokatlian
“his usual salary via the Banque impériale ottomane in Sıvas, that is, to the end of June. But
the money for July was returned to me, and the bank wrote to me to say that Tokatlian had
left Cesarea two months earlier and had sent no news.”176 Tokatlian had indeed “left” Cesarea,
accompanied by his guards, in July. Abram Elkus even confirmed this in a letter to Peter:
In reply to your enquiry relative to Messrs Simeonidès and Tokatlian, formerly drago-
mans of the Russian consulate at Samsun, I have to inform you that the Embassy has

received a report stating that about July 9th last they were sent in chains from Cesarea
to Bunian. From there they started under guard towards Azizie. Nothing more has
been heard from them except that it is commonly reported that they were killed at
a place near Burian [Bunyan]. There are strong reasons to suppose that this was the
case, although the local Government states that they were to have been deported to
Der Zor.177
Like Leslie Davis in Mezreh, the American consul in Samsun answered requests for infor-
mation sent to the embassies by relatives of Armenians living in Samsun. The files in the
archives in Washington, D.C. are replete with letters of this kind, the responses to which
are, as a rule, identical: “Please inform M. Gregoire Kherian, the head of the International
Transportation Company in your city, that Murad Kherian’s family has been sent to the
interior together with a goodly number of other Armenian families.”178 Or again, in response
to a request for information from the American Diplomatic Agency in Cairo:
I would respectfully like to inform you that Mrs. Filomenish G. Hekimian, with her
daughter, as well as Mrs. Antoinette M. Hekimian, whose maiden name was Misir, are
in Aleppo, where they are living with Mr. Nurian. Two of Mrs. Antoinette Hekimian’s
children died on the way there. Nothing is known about the fate of the men, Onig,
Mygerditch [that is, Mgrdich], and [H]agop, and it is supposed that they took the path
that so many others have had to tread.179
In a few rare cases, the consul managed to save someone by pulling the wool over the
authorities’ eyes. Thus, he succeeded in dispatching Koharig Kamberian, the sister of a
Romanian subject, to Romania; otherwise “she, too, would have been deported, or would
have lost her life in the interior ... It was to save a human life that we had to resort to these
means; it would be convenient if this person had a passport in hand.”180
One of the major questions that the American consulates had to handle is connected with
the economic consequences of the war, in particular the debts due the Armenians. Economic
life in Samsun, still vibrant despite the war, seems to have come to a sudden halt at the end
of June 1915. We possess letters on this subject that are not without a certain piquancy. The
headquarters of the Bank of Salonika, located in Constantinople, drew the consequences
of the deportation of the Armenians, informing its correspondents as early as 6 July that
“Mr. J. Zekian, formerly a teller at our branch in Samsun, has quit our establishment of his
own accord; thus his signature is no longer valid.”181 Of course, not all the Armenians had
the good grace to leave their post “of their own accord” – most of them even went off without
leaving a forwarding address. This spawned curious epistolary exchanges, involving notably
an American company in Richmond that harassed Consul Peter because some 50 families of
the Armenian upper crust in Samsun had rented pianos from it but had stopped paying their
monthly bill as of July 1915. The managers in Richmond, no doubt poorly informed about
the course of the war in this part of the world, accordingly demanded that their property be
returned to them as soon as possible. It is easy to guess the tenor of Peter’s response, which
confirmed that these people had been deported and were probably dead, and also that “the
private homes of the Armenians, as well as their stores and warehouses, have been sealed by
the government, but a start has already been made on settling emigrants in a good number of
these homes, which are being stripped by these people.”182 These remarks illustrate another
stake of the genocide – the acquisition of Armenian property by the central or local authori-
ties and private persons.
The documents of the American consulate in Samsun address another ticklish subject,
the question of the life insurance policies that Armenians had taken out with companies

in various countries: Britain (The Star and The Equitable183 in London), the United States
(the New York Life Insurance Company),184 Hungary, and so on. In most cases, Peter’s
demands that these companies pay indemnities received the same response: “We would
request that would consider that the above-mentioned insurance policy has lapsed because
the premium has gone unpaid.” Peter unfailingly pointed out that the sole survivor of one
family or another was currently living in the greatest imaginable poverty in some corner
of the Syrian desert and that in paying out an indemnity the companies “would in any
case be doing a good deed.”185 This question was even the subject of a 29 December 1915
circular that the Ottoman minister of commerce sent to all the insurance companies doing
business in Turkey, bearing on the accounts of the Armenians “who had been transported
elsewhere.” The aim was to flesh out the arrangements already in effect in order to put the
crowning touch on the seizure of Armenian property: “As per instructions from the minister
of the interior, you are under obligation to submit us a list showing all deposits, credits, and
indemnities of Armenians with your company involving the provinces of Rodosto, Adana,
Jebelbereket, Kozan, and Samsun.”186
The memoirs of a survivor, Payladzou Captanian,187 show how the convoys of deportees
who left Samsun were treated on their journey through Tokat, Sıvas, and Malatia/Fırıncilar.
Many different accounts indicate that the convoys of deportees from Samsun traveled through
Kangal,188 south of Sıvas, Alacahan,189 Hasançelebi,190 Kırk Göz,191 and Fırıncilar.192 They
show that the men of Sasun were, after passing through Tokat, liquidated in Çiftlik, near
Tonuz; that the old men and adolescents were killed in Hasançelebi; and that a few dozen
survivors managed to reach their provisional destination, Aleppo.193
Vehib Pasha declared, after the armistice, that the mutesarif of Canik, Süleyman Necmi
Bey, “thanks to his intelligence, sense of justice, and good will, succeeded in escorting all the
caravans of Armenians to the borders of his jurisdiction safe and sound.”194 He did, however,
observe that “the civilian population was put in the hands of irresponsible vagabonds, who
had no consideration for either the honor or dignity of the state.”195
What the American consul did not know is that the mutesarif Süleyman Necmi Bey and
the president of the local Ittidhad club, Sıdkı, coordinated operations for the whole sancak
of Canik. In Samsun, the police chief, Sabri Bey, oversaw the departure of the convoys with
the Armenian primate Hamazasp Vartabed, who left with the first convoy at their head, fol-
lowed by Father Mgrdich Meghmuni, the Catholic exarch. Many of the men were slain south
of Tokat, near the village of Çiftlik, the point of arrival of the caravans from Samsun, Bafra,
Çarşamba, Merzifun, Amasia, and the countryside.196
In October 1915, there remained, in Samsun, only eleven Islamicized families, two
Armenian families whose members were Persian subjects, the families of two doctors working
on the front, Dr. Kasabian and Dr. Ajemian, and about 100 children from three to six years
of age who were first taken in by Greek families then taken from them by the authorities and
handed over to Turkish families.197
The Kaza of Bafra

In this westernmost kaza on the Black Sea coast, only one locality was inhabited by
Armenians in 1914: it was Bafra, a city lying at the mouth of the Kızıl İrmak,198 which had
an Armenian community 2,000 strong. These Armenians were deported at the same time
as those of Samsun. According to testimony given at the trial of the criminals of Trebizond
by Kenan Bey, a court inspector in the region, Bafra’s kaymakam was murdered after he tried
to intercede on behalf of the Armenians deported from his kaza.199 A handful of adoles-
cents nevertheless managed to flee into the Pontic Mountains, where they formed with other
young men from the region a group of resistance fighters.200

The Kaza of Çarsamba

Çarsamba, the former seat of the government of the sancak of Canik, was founded by
Armenian peasants from Hamşin, who colonized the regions from 1710 on. Located four hours
from the Black Sea on the banks of the Yeşil İrmak, Çarsamba had in 1914 an Armenian
population of 1,800, which was settled in the western part of the town. But this district also
boasted 20 Armenian villages, also founded by people from Hamşin, with a total popula-
tion of 13,316 and 21 churches and 33 schools: Gurşunlu (pop. 2,800), Khapak, Ortaoymak,
Erinçak, Kıyıkli, Martel, Tekvari, Takhtalık, Odiybel, Konaklık, Kapalak, Ağlac, Kabacniz,
Eyridere, Olunpar, Kökceköy, Ağcagöne, Çeşmesu, Daşcığıç; and Kıstani Kıriş.201
The entire population of Çarsamba was deported, with the exception of a few hundred
people who took refugee in the mountains under the lead of Father Kalenjian, Khachig
Tulumjian, Abraham Khachadurian, and Hagopos Kehiayan.202
The Kazas of Terme and Uniye

Of the 3,427 Armenians in this kaza in 1914, only some 100 people lived in the principal
town in the kaza, Terne. Most of the Armenian population was concentrated in four villages
lying nearby: Kocaman (1,965 Armenians), located on a height half an hour from the sea,
Alemdaz (pop. 560), Suluca (200), and Hoyla.203 We know nothing about what became of
these villagers.
In 1914, there were 7,700 Armenians in the kaza of Uniye. A scant 700 lived in the seat
of the kaza, the port of Uniye. The Armenian population was to be found, above all, in
ten villages of the hinterland that were inhabited by stonecutters, weavers, and peasants
who cultivated tobacco and hazelnuts: Ozanı, Yamurcan, Eyrubeylı, Tekedamı, Düztarlan,
Khachdur, Yusuflar/Köklük, Seylen, Gözderen, and Manasdere.204 Thanks to an account by
two adolescents aged 15 and 16 at the time, Serop Karakehiayan and Kalust Kosian,205 we
have a few indications about the conditions under which the Armenians of this district were
deported. In the absence of the men, who had been mobilized, it seems that the authorities
had no trouble whatsoever removing these villagers from their homes.
Even before the deportation order was published, 25 notables from both the seat of the kaza
and the villages were summoned to appear before the kaymakam, who had them imprisoned
and then shot in Alaçami. A survivor from this group, Zakar Tumanian, provides an account
of what happened.206 The Armenians were deported in four caravans, with the exception of
the inhabitants of the village of Köklük, who were murdered there, and some old people who
were allowed to remain in their homes. Approximately 150 people withdrew to the moun-
tains under the leadership of Avedis Chakrian, Garabed Tahmazian, Kevork Koseyan, and
Dikran Zeytunjian; they succeeded in saving a few deportees.207 For several years, this group
survived in the Pontic hinterland, carrying out occasional operations in Turkish villages to
seize food, and sometimes confronting the forces of the state. One of these skirmishes, which
took place near Köz Tepe in late September 1915, is quite revealing. A squadron of çetes
commanded by someone named Gürci Torunoğlu Süleyman took the Armenian fugitives by
surprise. Its mission had been precisely to hunt down fugitive Armenians. In the course of
the fighting, Süleyman was shot down by Dikran Zeytunjian.208 On other occasions, these
groups freed girls or children being held in the villages and executed men whom they held
responsible for the violence inflicted on their people.209 It would be an understatement to
say that these young men were filled with a powerful spirit of revenge. The most serious inci-
dent occurred on 23 and 24 February 1916, on the heights of Köz Tepe, in the hinterland of
Uniye: around 150 men confronted several brigades of the regular army that had been sent
from Sıvas. The unexpected arrival of two hundred Armenian resistance fighters from the

neighboring regions of Fatsa, Çarsamba, and Bafra enabled the group from Uniye to resist.
Several years later, under the Kemalist regime, these Armenians would be forced to leave the
region for Abkhazia.210
The Kaza of Fatsa

The 3,330 Armenians of the kaza of Fatsa lived in the principal town of the kaza, Fatsa, and
the villages of Çubukluk and Kaya Ardi.211 It seems that part of the population agreed to
convert to Islam in order to avoid being deported, but that these people were finally deported
to the south somewhat later, with the exception of a miller.212 As in the kazas of Bafra,
Çarsamba, and Uniye, so here, too, between 100 and 200 people took to the maquis under
the command of Yaghjian, Minasian, and Hamalian. The handful of survivors discovered
after the war came from this group.213

Chapter 10

the Vilayet of Angora
T
he sprawling, densely populated vilayet of Angora had, in 1914, an Armenian popu-
lation of 105,169. They lived in 88 towns and villages, and had 105 churches, 11
monasteries, and 126 schools with a total enrollment of 21,298. Although there had
long been an Armenian population in the sancak of Angora, it was now concentrated in a
few urban centers – in Angora, of course, but also in Kalecik, Stanoz, Nallihan, Muhalic,
and Sivrihisar. The sancaks of Yozgat and Kayseri, in contrast, had a non-negligible rural
Armenian population that went back to the Middle Ages.
In the sancak of Angora, there were, in 1914, 20,858 Armenians, more than half of whom
lived in the city of Angora, where the vali had his residence. Here they engaged in trading
manufactured good, cottage industry, rug-making, and so on. Angora’s Armenian population
comprises a case apart due to the size of its Catholic community, which represented 70 per
cent of the 11,246 Armenians living in the city in 1914, having been converted by French
missionaries early in the eighteenth century. The Red Monastery, dedicated to the Holy
Mother of God, had served as the Armenian Apostolic bishopric since the fourteenth cen-
tury. This prosperous community maintained schools with an enrolment of two thousand on
the eve of the First World War.1
In many respects, an examination of the destruction of this population is of particular
interest because of its location at the heart of Anatolia and its Catholic majority. These two
features might have enabled the Armenians of the vilayet to escape “displacement to the
interior,” the more so as these Turkish-speaking Armenians, who wrote Turkish with the
Armenian alphabet, were by common consent not highly politicized and enjoyed the protec-
tion of both Austria-Hungary and the papal nuncio. Hence this community was not deeply
marked by the tensions that we have observed in the eastern vilayets. Only the settlement
of 10,000 Muslim muhacirs late in the day – that is, after the Balkan Wars – created tensions
having to do with land distribution.2
Here, perhaps more than elsewhere, the discourse that sought to paint the Armenians
as a seditious group remained most unconvincing. The vali, Hasan Mazhar Bey, who had
been appointed to his post on 18 June 1914, was, moreover, so little persuaded of it that he
resisted the Interior Minister’s deportation orders. Istanbul’s response was no less firm. Early
in July 1915, the Young Turk Central Committee sent one of its most eminent members,
Atıf Bey [Kamçil], whose role within the political leadership of the Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa we
have already seen, to Angora as a delegate.3 This choice speaks volumes about intentions in
the capital. Like Bahaeddin Şakir in Erzerum or Yusuf Rıza in Trebizond, the leaders of the
Special Organization did not hesitate to travel to a locality in person in order to translate
their program into action. But what is even more interesting in the case of Angora is that,
as a result of direct intervention by a member of the Young Turk Central Committee, the

çorum
•
Kalecik
• Nallihan •
ANGORA •
Sungurlu
•
Mihaliççik •
Stanoz
• •
Yozgat
•Sivrihisar • •
Boğazlian
Kirşehir
•
•
Kayseri
•
Everek
interior minister immediately relieved Vali Mazhar of his duties on 8 July 1915, naming the
CUP’s delegate to the region, Atıf Bey, interim vali.4 Atıf, who held his post from 14 July to
3 October 1915, accomplished nothing more nor less than the mission entrusted to him by
the Ittihad – that is, the extirpation of the Armenian population from the vilayet of Angora.
According to Mehmed Necib Bey, an official of the Tobacco Régie then posted to Angora,
“the atrocities committed by this vali are unforgettable ... Atıf Bey, Angora’s interim vali,
demonstrated incomparable mastery.”5
Even Armenian observers were surprised to see this 27-year-old arrive in Angora in early
July, accompanied by “another child, twenty-five years old, animated by the same hatred
for Christians and greed for what they owned.” This was someone named Bahaeddin Bey,
whom the CUP had delegated to take the reins of the vilayet’s police force.6 It seems that
Şemseddin, a member of the local Ittihad club and the vilayet’s general council, and Necati
Bey, the CUP’s responsible secretary in Angora,7 had not succeeded in modifying Mazhar’s
position. It was said that this compelled the party to send people in positions of authority to
the region.
The two representatives of the committee had not, however, remained completely inac-
tive. They oversaw the liberation of 249 felons from Angora’s central prison on 3 March 1915
by a commission made up of Mahmud Cellaleddin Bey, the director of Angora’s health serv-
ices; Captain Fehmi Bey; Colonel Mehmed Vasıf Bey, the commander of the gendarmerie in
Angora; and Ali Haydar Bey, a judge on the appeals court. These criminals, recruited as çetes
of the Special Organization, were sent to Çorum; we will see later the mission entrusted to

Deportations and Massacres: Angora 497
them there. According to a report signed by the members of the commission, the prisoners
agreed to join the “army.” They were given “a medical examination, and a list of their names,
the nature of their crimes, and the sentences they had been given was compiled.”8 This
commission was still functioning in spring 1915; on 15 May of that year, it freed another 65
murderers for the same purpose.9 The interim mutesarif of Yozgat, Kemal Bey, later confirmed
that the responsible secretary of the Party of Union and Progress in Angora, Necati Bey, had
intervened directly in this matter. Questioned by Hasan Mazhar on 16 December 1918, he
did not deny that Necati had gone to Yozgat “before the deportation of the Armenians, orally
communicated secret orders and instructions about the deportation of the Armenians, and
held a meeting in Yozgat with the members of the Party of Union and Progress, the heads of
Union and Progress and of the Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa.”10
It seems that the Young Turk leaders and the local and central authorities opted for a strat-
egy calculated to first liquidate the Armenian populations of the sancaks of Kayseri and Yozgat
in order to deal with the Armenians of the sancak of Angora afterwards. Probably informed
as early of May 1915 of the exactions committed in the border regions, the Armenians of
Angora briefly succeeded in convincing themselves that they would be spared thanks to the
protection of Mazhar and certain foreign diplomats. But when, a few days after assuming office
in mid-July 1915, Atıf Bey had the non-Catholic Armenian notables of Angora arrested, the
Catholics no doubt suddenly understood that they were vulnerable. According to a foreign
witness, 500 men were arrested in the space of a few days by the police and gendarmerie,
notably the director of the Banque impériale ottomane, Shnorhokian, under the supervision
of the new police chief, Bahaeddin Bey, and the CUP’s responsible secretary, Necati Bey,
assisted by the mufti of Kirşehir, Nuffid Hoca, Şamseddin, and Çingene Hakkı.11 In the next
few days, the list of those interned grew longer, eventually coming to include around 200
men.12 We also know that on 14 August, CUP volunteers left the city in a car, carrying shov-
els and picks and that toward midnight on the same day, several hundred Armenians were
led from the city by an escort of police and gendarmes, tied together in pairs. At dawn, their
guards turned them over to çetes who had been waiting for them in a secluded spot.13 These
recruits of the Special Organization were, according to another source, butchers and tanners
from Angora, “given special pay” for executing these Armenians with the help of villagers
in the vicinity. In five or six days, they massacred around 1,200 Armenians.14 Armenian wit-
nesses affirmed that, after these atrocities had been committed, Osman Bey, the commander
of the gendarmerie, immediately tendered his resignation, while the recruits of the Special
Organization came back to the city bearing their trophies, notably their victims’ shoes and
pants. Rumors about the deportation of Catholics were also beginning to make the rounds.15
Bishop Gregoire Bahabanian and a few Catholic notables went to see Atıf Bey, suggesting
that he intervene in Istanbul. The vali was reassuring: he promised that the authorities
had no complaints about them and for that reason there was no point in taking steps in
Constantinople.16
Yet, on Friday, 27 August, gendarmes and policemen invested the Armenian neighbor-
hoods and summer residences where many families were staying at the time. The same day,
approximately 1,500 Catholic males, including the bishop and 17 priests, were arrested and
grouped in the city.17 After being invited to convert, in vain, these men were stripped of their
belongings and on 29 August set on the road, tied together in pairs. They had walked for 18
hours and were in the village of Karagedik when “an officer arrived at full speed and commu-
nicated the government’s counter-order to [them]: he told [them] that the order for a general
massacre had been rescinded in [their] favor and that [their lives] were no longer in danger.”18
It seems that these men’s fate had been sealed, but that the intervention of Angelo Maria
Dolci, the papal nuncio, had made it possible to save them19 – that is, to deport them to the
deserts of Syria rather than liquidate them. The German embassy was rapidly apprised of

the deportation of these Catholics,20 as was the ambassador of Austria-Hungary, Pallavicini,

who informed his minister that he had asked Talât “to spare the Armenian Catholics and
Protestants, and that Talât had promised to write to the prefects and sub-prefects of the
province ... about this matter.”21 Thus, it is probable that the convoy of 1,500 Catholics from
Angora was momentarily spared on an order issued by Talât in order to give satisfaction to
Pallavicini and Dolci, so that it was able to continue on its journey via Kirşehir, Kayseri, and
Biğa as far as the gates of Cilicia, in Bozanti.22 According to survivors from this caravan, the
men took nearly one month to reach Tarsus and then Katma, a village near Aleppo. Most
were then sent on by Hakkı Bey, “the inspector of the deportees to Syria,” to Ras ul-Ayn or
Der Zor. Four of the priests and some 30 of the laymen among them survived in Meskene,
managing to reach Aleppo after Hakkı had been replaced.23
In early September, the Armenian women, children, and old people of Angora, Catholics
and Protestants alike, were expelled from their homes, which were sealed by the police. These
thousands of people were then concentrated in the railroad station near the exit from the
city, where they remained for no less than 25 days, the time required to extort their property
from them and convince the most attractive women to convert and marry Muslims. Those
who accepted this offer were authorized to return to the city; the others were ultimately sent
to Eskişehir and Konya, where they were put on the deportation route leading to Syria. A
few hundred families were, however, allowed to remain in Angora “as the families of mili-
tary men,” although the men in question had been “massacred or deported.”24 It is probable
that these exceptions were made to deceive foreign diplomats and ward off possible protests
from them. Essentially, the procedures employed in the sancak of Angora can be interpreted
as local adaptations that did not fundamentally alter the determination of the authorities
to extirpate the Armenian population of Angora. Locally less radical, the measures taken
merely put off the elimination of the Armenians in time and space.
The method used to get hold of Armenian property scarcely differed from that observed
elsewhere. Moveable assets and real estate were systematically seized. Moreover, the most
richly appointed Armenian homes were allotted to civilian and military authorities. The fire
that raged in the Armenian neighborhoods almost eight months after the deportations was
no accident. It took no less than four days to realize the plan, the objective of which was,
without a doubt, to hide the extent of the looting that had gone on for the personal ben-
efit of certain individuals.25 Some witnesses noted that the record books of the Registry of
Abandoned Property were indeed opportunely consumed by the flames. During the exami-
nation of the former justice minister, İbrahim Bey, on 10 November 1918, the members of
the Fifth Commission of the Ottoman Parliament, who had been charged with investigat-
ing certain crimes committed during the war, went so far as to ask the minister why those
responsible for this blaze, the aim of which was to “lay hands on their assets,” had not been
arrested.26
Among the Young Turks implicated in the deportations and massacres, in addition to
Şemseddin Bey and Necati Bey, whose role we have already mentioned, the principal instiga-
tors were Kara Mehmed; Mufid Hoca, the mufti of Kirşehir; Tabib Effendi, a deputy in the
Ottoman Parliament; Çingane Hakkı Bey; Şefket Bey, a municipal pharmacist; and Ahmed
Neşed, the director of forestry.27 Among the government officials, apart from Atıf Bey, who
was at once interim vali, a member of the political bureau of the Special Organization, and
a special CUP delegate, the main organizers of the deportations and massacres were Topcu
Ziya, the head of the committee responsible for settling Muslim immigrants; Rasim Bey,
the president of the municipality; Bahaeddin Bey, delegated by the CUP to assume leader-
ship of the vilayet’s police force after the “resignation” of his predecessor; Mustafa Turhan
Bey and Rahim İbrahim Bey, police lieutenants; İbrahim Bey, the director of prisons; Kara
Böbrek Hasan Effendi, the assistant director of the Banque Ottomane; and Çerkez Kahmi,

a captain in the gendarmerie. The members of the emval-ı metruke who oversaw the pillage
of the Armenians’ assets were Karabekir Hasan Bey; Fincancizâde Mehmed Şemseddin Bey;
and Nasreddin Bey, a parliamentary deputy from Sıvas who resigned his post as kaymakam
of Çorum in order to assume the presidency of the committee responsible for “abandoned
property” in Angora. The main organizers of the local squadrons of çetes and the massacres
were Kütükcuoğlu Ziya Bey, a pharmacist from Sivrihisar; İsmail Bey; Tufenkci Ali Bey; and
Eczacizâde Şevket.28
The Kazas of Angora

The Kaza of Stanoz/Zyr
Lying 30 kilometers west of Angora, Stanoz was, on the eve of the First World War, an exclu-
sively Armenian village with a population of 3,142 Armenian-speakers. Established late, at
the end of the fourteenth century, this prosperous village had three churches, one of them
Protestant, and two schools with an enrollment of 500. Stanoz had since the seventeenth
century been mainly known for its sofe, a kind of cloth made from the fur of Angora goats,
and also for rug-making, embroidery, dying, and leather-working.29
As early as August 1914, much of Stanoz’s economically active population was mobilized
and incorporated into the Third Army.30 Thanks to its proximity to the Sincanköy railroad
station, the village was rather well informed of the course of the war and even had news of
the 120 to 150 members of the Istanbul Armenian elite who had been imprisoned some 15
kilometers to the west in Ayaş. Father Khoren Avakian, the stationmaster, had been on hand
when they arrived and had even been able to inform Dr. N. Daghavarian’s family of their
arrival.31 It was the Armenians of Stanoz who provided the prisoners in Ayaş with food and
other necessities until they set out for an unknown destination. In May, house searches were
carried out in Stanoz. Father Khoren was one of the first to be arrested. Late in the month,
15 notables from Stanoz, including Giragos Kabzemalian, Arsen Turkmenian, and Harutiun
Avakian, were arrested and interned in the Zencirli Ğuyu barracks.32
Not until around 15 August, however, were the males over 15 – around 700 people –
summoned to present themselves in the konak’s courtyard, where they were arrested and
transferred to Angora under guard. A few days later, after the Protestant Armenians had
been released, these men were led off to the Çayaş Bahcesi valley and massacred there. The
Protestant males were invited to convert to Islam. When they refused, they were taken to
Seyirce, in the vicinity of their village, and their throats were cut.33
Many of the women and children of Stanoz owed their lives to the müdir, İbrahim Şah. Şah
succeeded in keeping the families of the conscripts in the village and in finding homes for
the rest of the population in the Turkish villages of the nahie.34 Unlike the Armenian popu-
lation of many other kazas in the sancak, that of Stanoz was, ultimately, partially spared.
The Kazas of Nallıhan and Mihalıççık

In 1914, there were only two small Armenian colonies in the kazas of Nallıhan and
Mihalıççık, which lay northwest of the sancak of Angora. The colony in Nallıhan had an
Armenian population of 1,030; the Armenian population of Mihalıççık was 272.35
According to a survivor from Nallıhan, rumors were making the rounds among the Turks
as early as April, while certain local notables had gone so far as to claim this or that house
for themselves in advance.36 But it was not until 2/15 August that a colonel who had been
appointed sevkiyat memuri [director of the deportations] arrived in Nallıhan. Shortly there-
after, the church bells began pealing and all the Armenians were assembled in the church,

where the colonel informed them that the families of soldiers would be allowed to remain in
the town and that, with the exception of males fourteen and older, all could freely choose to
stay or go. According to our witness, the Turkish notables immediately laid common plans
to establish check points at the different entrances to the city in order to keep outsiders from
coming to take part in the auctions of Armenian property, so that they could obtain it at
low prices themselves. In the space of three days, all the Armenians’ assets had passed into
Turkish hands, at the instigation of Beyzâde Ahmed Bey. It should also be pointed out that
the Turkish notables had initially proposed to “buy” the Armenians’ real estate before it was
put up for auction.37
On 6 August, all males fourteen and over were arrested and put on the road the evening
of the same day, with around three hundred women and children; they were guarded by a
squadron under the orders of Abdül Selim Tevfik. Ten hours from town, in Yardib, Kör Haci
Seyid Köpecli and the Turkish villagers in the environs began methodically looting the
goods that the Armenians had taken with them. The convoy was then allowed to continue
on its way.38 According to M. Manugian, who was in this convoy, it took them no less than
thirteen days to reach Angora, where they were interned in a granary. The Turkish officers
and notables of the city lost no time coming to the granary in order to suggest to the most
attractive girls and women to convert to Islam and leave with them.39 Two hundred sixty
men were separated from the group, led off to the konak, and then locked up in the central
prison, where seven “individuals” methodically searched them and took all they had: money,
watches, and so on. On 23 August, the men were removed from the prison, tied together
in pairs, and set marching in the direction of Kirşehir. Five of them perished the first day,
including two Catholics from Angora, clubbed to death by their escort, which was made up
of a police lieutenant, three more policemen, and twenty gendarmes.40 When they reached
Kirşehir, the surviving men were confined in the military warehouse, before continuing their
journey through Kayseri, Incesu, Eydeli, Bozanti, and, finally, Tarsus, where they remained
for one month, before being dispatched to Hama or Meskene, in the Syrian deserts.41 There
are no reports on what became of the women and children left behind in Angora. It seems
reasonable to suppose that some were “integrated” into Muslim families, while others were
put on the road to Syria in a bigger convoy. We do know, however, that the people allowed
to remain in Nallıhan – basically the families of recruits – were rapidly parceled out to the
Turkish villages in the vicinity.42 The main beneficiary of the pillage of Armenian property
seem to have been a certain Said, who “took the Manugians’ farm for himself, as well as the
flocks of sheep and goats and the herds of cows” belonging to the Nallıhan Armenians.43
The Kaza of Sivrihisar

Located in the middle of a vast plateau in the southwestern part of the sancak, Sivrihisar
nestles in a loop of the Sakaria. The Armenian community of Sivrihisar, like the rest of the
Armenian population in these western regions of the vilayet of Angora, did not begin to
solidify until the early seventeenth century, when Armenians from Kantsag/Genje and from
Karabagh settled here. In 1914, this colony boasted a population of 4,265. The Armenians of
Sivrihisar were reputed to be prosperous; some earned a living farming land on the outskirts
of the town.44
According to the memoirs of Father Hovhannes Kizirian, the situation remained rela-
tively calm until late July. There were frequent and, apparently, cordial meetings between
the Armenian notables of the city and the kaymakam Ali Rıza Bey, the military commander
Besim Bey, and the commander of the gendarmerie Cemal Bey.45 On 12 August, the deporta-
tion order was published. On Saturday, 14 August, Kizirian was received with all the honors at
the konak, where the vali, Ali Rıza, informed him that the Armenian population had a week

to make preparations to leave. The clergyman tried in vain to obtain an exemption for the
families of conscripts. He himself left with the last convoy on 19 August. In the meantime,
he witnessed the looting of Armenian homes.46 All the caravans were directed toward the
railroad station in Eskişehir, where thousands of deportees from the west were camped out
under precarious conditions. At this point, there arrived an order to the effect that the fami-
lies of conscripts should be dispersed in the surrounding villages.47 Thereafter, the fate of the
Armenians of Sivrihisar was indistinguishable from that of those deported either by rail – in
two-tiered stockcars originally meant for sheep – or on foot to Bozanti, the gateway to Cilicia.
According to survivors’ reports, the deportees from Sivrihisar were dispatched toward Rakka
and Der Zor. The overwhelming majority of them died on the way when they were not killed
before setting out, victims of the final massacres perpetrated in fall 1916.48
Beside the kaymakam and the commanders of the gendarmerie and army, several govern-
ment officials played concrete roles in the deportations to various degrees: Yakup Çavuş
and Besim Çavuş, officers in the gendarmerie; Şakir Effendi, a civil servant employed in the
Régie; Dr. Hasan Tahsin, a municipal physician; and Potizâde Ahmed Effendi, an Evkaf offi-
cial.49 Among the Young Turk notables who took part in the deportation of the Armenians,
the most active were Nişanzâde Mehmed Effendi, the secretary of the local Ittihad club, and
the following members of the club: Nişanzâde Ali Effendi, Haci Çakir Kâtibi, Mehmed Ali
Effendi, Ali Kânli Effendi, Zâde Haci Bekir, Amasialızâde Sabit Ali Effendi, Çarpikzâde Ali
Effendi, Zafer Hamid Harieli Edhem Ağa, Arif Effendi, and Nevzat Effendi.50 The seizures
of Armenian property were supervised by the emval-ı metruke, headed by Ahmed Husni
Effendi, with the assistance of Nureddin Effendi, a land registry official; Mehmed Ali Effendi,
a mufti; Amasializâde Talât Effendi, a secretary in the Tobacco Régie; Fuadzâde Mustafa
Effendi; Sarı Paşazâde Abdüllah Effendi; Canzâde Ali Effendi, a tax collector; and Canzâde
Tahir Effendi.51
Balahisar, a village southwest of Sivrihisar, had, in 1914, 300 Armenian households. On
orders from the kaymakam, Kâmil Bey, the men of the village were arrested and massacred
near Köprüköy in August 1915 with the complicity of Faik Bey, a civil servant employed in
the Registry Office, and Mehmed Bey, an official in the Land Registry Office.52
The Kaza of Kalecik

In the kaza of Kalecik, lying to the north of Angora, there were only 830 Armenians on the
eve of the war. All of them lived in Kalecik, on the banks of a tributary of the Kızıl Irmak.
Nothing is known about what became of them.53
Massacres and Deportations in the Sancak of Yozgat

At an altitude of around 1,500 meters and furrowed by valleys, the sancak of Yozgat was
famous for the fertility of its land. Its Armenian population, much more rural than elsewhere
in the vilayet, lived in nearly 50 villages concentrated in the kazas in the southern part of the
sancak, around Yozgat, Boğazlian, and the environs. This cluster of villages was simply the
northern continuation of the Armenian-inhabited areas in Cappadocia. Armenians were
also scattered, however, in the principal towns of certain other kazas, including Çorum,
Süngürlü, and Akdağmaden. The total Armenian population of the sancak, according to
local Armenian sources, was 58,611 in 1914, whereas the Ottoman census of the same year
put the figure at only 36,652.54
The principal town of the sancak, also called Yozgat, was founded in the first decades of
the eighteenth century by Armenian artisans. In 1914, the 9,520 Armenians residing in the
town represented 40 per cent of its population. Near Yozgat, there were three Armenian

villages: Incirli (pop. 1,000), Daneşman (pop. 250), and Köhne (pop. 2,000). There were also
a few small Armenian communities scattered throughout the kaza.55
It should be noted at the outset that the extirpation of the Armenian population of this
sancak gave rise to the first trial conducted by the Istanbul court-martial, the proceedings of
which ran from 5 February to 8 April 1919. The government commission of inquiry headed
by Hasan Mazhar was able to complete its pretrial investigation in short order, gathering ini-
tial proof and testimony from civilian and military officials as well as surviving victims and
transmitting them to the court-martial. As often happened in the case of secondary trials, the
court record of the 18 sessions of the Yozgat trial was not published in the Takvim-ı Vakayi;
only the verdict handed down by the court-martial on 8 April 1919 appeared there.56 Istanbul
newspapers, however, published, either wholly or in part, the exhibits and documents pre-
sented before the court.57 Thus, we have a quite exceptional corpus of material for the events
that occurred in this region. As in Angora as well, the mutesarif Cemal Bey, appointed on
27 May 1915, refused to liquidate the men and was dismissed on 5 August by the interim vali
Atıf Bey. On the very same day, he was replaced by the kaymakam of Boğazlian, Kemal Bey,58
who had already begun zealously to apply the orders in his kaza. In the case of Yozgat, we
possess documents that offer insight into the circumstances under which the local Ittihadists
managed to obtain the dismissal of the mutesarif. According to evidence given by Azniv
Ibranosian, the wife of the director of the Ibranosian Brothers’ firm in Yozgat, at the fifteenth
session of the trial of those who perpetrated the massacres in Yozgat on 28 March 1919, Vehbi
Bey, the Chief of the Treasury, organized a secret meeting at his house at which the local
Young Turks agreed to oversee the operation.59 Involved were Ali Münîf, Necati Bey’s Yozgat
correspondent; Yeşil İmamoğlu Kadi; Hüseyin İmamoğlu Kadi; Ömer Lufti, a teacher in the
Turkish lycée; Akıf Pasha; Kitabci Asim; Çerkez Sarı Ahmed; Rıza; Şeyh Ahmed; Divanlızâde
Ahmed; Mehmed Effendi, the director of Yozgat’s Turkish orphanages; Ceridzâde Husni; Uzun
Ahmed, the secretary general of the municipality; and Uzun Rahcet.60 It appears, however,
that the mutesarif Cemal Bey and the secretary general of the prefecture, Mustafa Bey, refused
to carry out this decision. According to the director of the Turkish orphanage, Şevki Bey, it
was an open secret that Cemal had been dismissed because he had balked at implementing
the orders of “the government and the Committee.”61 There is, moreover, every reason to
believe that the local Young Turks referred the question to their superior in Angora, for on
Thursday, 5 August, Necati Bey had arrived and organized a secret meeting with them, as was
confirmed by the interim mutesarif Kemal Bey, who added that Necati then communicated
oral instructions to “the leaders of Union and Progress and the Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa.”62 Vehbi is
supposed to have said of Cemal Bey, according to what the secretary general of the prefecture
“confidentially reported” to Ibranosian: “This mutesarif isn’t Turkish. He must be driven from
Yozgat.”63 Another official mentioned a conversation between Necati and Cemal was held the
same day, in which the Ittihadist allegedly declared: “Although the government’s orders seem
to call for exiling the Armenians, the true objective of the Central Committee of the Party of
Union and Progress and the interior minister is to extirpate the Armenians and thus render
a service to our country.”64
Most likely, it was these informal instructions that the mutesarif refused to follow, forcing
Atıv and Necat to dismiss him from his post that very evening so that Yozgat’s Ittihadists
would have their hands free.
The statement made by the military commander of Yozgat, General Salim Mehmed, like-
wise provides much information about the way the Ittihadists interfered in local affairs while
also showing just how plainly the “temporary deportation law” was a legal cover for crime.65
The general began by noting that Articles 1 and 2 of the “deportation law” transmitted to
him by Şahabeddin, the commander of the Fifteenth Division, based in Kayseri, authorized
commanders “to employ military force immediately” against all those acting “counter to the

interests of, or endangering the security of, the country,” It also authorized them to deport
groups of the population “if they were suspected of spying or treason.” Mehmed observed that
telegram no. 193, dated 18 July 1915, had stipulated, “Government officials do not have the
right to interfere in matters involving public order and discipline. Entire responsibility for
these questions should be entrusted to the military administration.” Nevertheless, “people
who proudly affirmed that they were members of the Party of Union and Progress interfered
in these matters and, without the least hesitation, made illicit gains and disturbed law and
order in the sancak.” The general also stated that these people sought to “compromise the
Armenians” and have them “accused of subversive activities.” To that end, they “sent fic-
titious, official or semi-official reports to the government, stating reasons that sufficed to
have the provisions of the aforementioned law applied to the Armenians.” Mehmed further
observed that the inquiries conducted by the police and gendarmerie “in response to ques-
tions that had been repeatedly raised” showed that
the Armenians of Yozgat did not have ties to the Dashnak or Hnchak committees. Yet,
by way of Necati Bey, the same people addressed denunciations to the commanders of
the army corps and the division, exposing [the existence] of an imaginary Armenian
committee that the authorities treated as real. They ordered that a search for arms
be carried out, but the only arms found were those that had been ‘planted’ by the
people conducting the searches. Ultimately, they obtained an order to deport the
Armenians.66
While the “temporary deportation law” could be rather easily applied in the eastern prov-
inces, it was much harder to evoke it to justify the deportation of civilian populations living
in the heart of Asia Minor. The intervention of local CUP representatives was therefore all
the more imperative there, especially when it became necessary to manufacture a file capable
of legitimizing the deportation order. These difficulties help explain why genocidal measures
were carried out late in a vilayet such as Angora.
The position taken by the mutesarif, Cemal, gives one indication as to the limits that
certain state officials were disinclined to transgress. Thus, Cemal, from the moment he took
office in May 1915, imposed restrictions on the circulation between villages and enforced
the prohibition on taking herds out to graze. It was likewise under his authority that from
late May on the Armenian villages in the sancak were methodically invested by çetes of the
Special Organization. To the questions that Bishop Nerses Tanielian, the Armenian prelate
of the diocese of Yozgat, asked about the presence of these irregulars in the countryside, the
mutesarif responded that they were there “to protect [the Armenians] from their Turkish
neighbors.”67 But when the local Young Turks, led by the commander of the gendarmerie
Mehmed Tevfik Bey, set out to deal with the 12,000 Armenian conscripts from the sancak
of Yozgat who were assigned at the time to the amele taburis attached to the Fifth Army,68
Cemal blocked the attempt. On 1 July 1915, according to General Salim Mehmed, the
Ittihadists submitted to him “a report in which they recommended that the Armenian
soldiers of the Ninth Labor Battalion be transferred to the Second and Fourth Brigades of
the same battalion in Kirşehir. Otherwise, they could instigate disorders that might disturb
the peace in the sancak.”69 The same witness affirmed that, notwithstanding the mutesarif’s
orders that Major Tevfik “act within the limits of the instructions he had received,” Tevfik
“ignored him, turning to Muammer Bey, the vali of Sıvas, to whom he complained about the
mutesarif, requesting instructions.”70 These indications thus seem to suggest that Muammer,
in his capacity as the head of the Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa in the region, had played a direct
role in the destruction of the Armenian worker-soldiers from Yozgat. Sâmi Mehmed points
out, moreover, that Tevfik “overstepped the limits” by executing 13 Armenians “during the

incidents of the farm of Sarı Hamza” and then massacring 72 others “on Muammer Bey’s
orders.”71 In other words, the hierarchy established by the CUP overrode the administrative
chain of command and the local authorities whenever it was deemed necessary. Obviously,
the fact that Hasan Mazhar was replaced in Angora also made it possible to get rid of Cemal
Bey in Yozgat.
The choice of Kemal Bey as interim mutesarif due to Atıf Bey leaves little doubt as to the
CUP’s determination to impose its own men when a government official refused to carry out
the party’s extermination orders, while also confirming that it had the power to intervene in
local affairs. Kemal Bey, who was the kaymakam of Boğazlian, had been in charge of the kaza
with the largest number of Armenians, who were, moreover, peasants. From mid-May to late
July, the sancak’s 48 villages, with around 40,000 Armenian inhabitants, were first emptied
of their male population, then followed by women and children, under Kemal Bey’s direct
supervision.72 General Mehmed notes that Tevfik Bey, commander of the gendarmerie in
Yozgat, had himself made a tour of these Armenian villages and ordered a number of people
killed “with no reason whatsoever, on the pretext that they were Committee members.”73
In contrast to other regions, however, virtually no one was deported from these villages:
Kemal organized a vast slaughterhouse in the vicinity of the village of Keller, where tens of
thousands of Armenians of all ages and both sexes were slain with knives, sabers, and axes.
Thus it can be seen that Atıf and Necati here appealed to a state official whom they deemed
“exemplary,” although he had not even resorted to the usual administrative formalism to veil
his crimes. After liquidating the Armenians in the countryside, Kemal and his men com-
pleted their task by extirpating the Armenians of Yozgat.
Massacres and Deportations in the Kaza of Boğazlian

In 1914, the kaza of Boğazlian boasted 32 localities inhabited by 35,825 Armenians, all of
them Armenian speaking. The recently founded village in which the prefect resided, also
named Boğazlian, lay in the middle of an immense plain. Two thousand Armenians with
roots in Sıvas and Hungary lived in the “upper quarter” of Boğazlian. Two adjacent Armenian
villages lay to the south: Beyloren (pop. 750) and Gurden (pop. 1,000). To the northeast was
the village of Rumdigin: the 2,000 Armenians who lived here represented two-thirds of the
population. Kiurkci (pop. 200) was still further north.
Thirty kilometers east of Boğazlian, in Iydeli, there lived around 1,500 Armenians, most
of them wine makers. Karahalı, a stone’s throw away, had a population of 2,000, Uzunlu,
3,000, and Gövenci, 550. The biggest Armenian villages in the rest of the kaza were Çakmak
(pop. 1,000), Çokradan (pop. 1,000), Fakralı (pop. 800), Melez (pop. 350), Brunkışla (pop.
2,000), Keller (pop. 1,500), Eylence (pop. 600), Kümküyü (pop. 900), Kediler (pop. 500), Şatlı
(pop. 500), Saçli (pop. 600), Magaroğlu (pop. 450), Karabüyük (pop. 800), Pöhrenk (pop.
800), Çat (pop. 3,500), Terzilli (pop. 2,000), Bebek (pop. 1,300), Karayağub (pop. 900), Sarı
Hamza (pop. 1,250), Daşlıgetçit (pop. 250), Menteşe (pop. 1,100), Urnec (pop. 1,200), and
Çatak (pop. 1,025).74
According to a witness from Pöhrenk, Enver visited Yozgat in the first half of April 1915,
when the witness himself happened to be in the city. Shortly thereafter, soldiers and gen-
darmes invested the Armenian villages “to collect weapons.” These operations, the witness
reports, were accompanied by extreme violence, notably the rape of young women, and also
looting. Their other objective is supposed to have been to mobilize males under 20 and over 45
and, according to this account, to make it impossible to travel from one village to another.75
The same witness also affirms that Turkish friends told him: “Finally, they are going to mas-
sacre you, but they are going to confide the task to the başibozük, so that the government will
later have a way to justify itself.” The revelations made at the fifteenth session of the trial of

Yozgat on 28 March 1919 do indeed indicate that one of the first operations carried out in
the kaza of Boğazlian took place on 19 April 1915. On that day, the kaymakam Kemal, the
commander of the gendarmerie in Yozgat, Tevfik, and the müdir of Şayir Şeyhli, accompan-
ied by 200 gendarmes, searched homes in the village of Çat. Officially, they were looking for
weapons and bandits. When they came away empty-handed, they proceeded to arrest part of
the male population and committed “every imaginable outrage.”76
A report by Major Tevfik, read out at the fifteenth session of the trial on 28 March
1919, referred to a rebellion by “bandits” from Çat and suggested deporting the Armenians
of this village and replacing them with Muslims. But Cemal Bey, the former mutesarif of
Yozgat, had pointed out to Tevfik that “[t]he people whom you are today calling bandits
were Armenian deserters and deportees.”77 Questioned about this “rebellion” at the eighth
session of the trial of Yozgat on 21 February 1919, Colonel Şahabeddin, commander of the
Fifteenth Division, based in Kayseri, admitted that Major Tevfik had asked him “to dis-
patch soldiers to put down a rebellion,” and that he had sent 200 men to Boğazlian. When
a defense lawyer, Levon Remzi, asked him “how many Armenians took part in the revolt,”
the Colonel asked permission to leave the court “for a breath of fresh air,” answering only
after coming back into the room that “the number of Armenian insurgents was five or six;
these people had taken refuge in the mountains.”78 This episode, revolving around a hand-
ful of fugitive deserters, shows that Major Tevfik had “concocted” a story of rebellion to
justify in advance the exactions carried out first in Çat, and then in the other Armenian
villages.
The operation aimed at eliminating males from the rural areas did not in fact begin until
28 June 1915, when Tevfik and a battalion of “gendarmes” returned to Çat and the neighbor-
ing village of Terzilli. A town crier, Hasan Çokradan, demanded that all Armenian males
between ages 15 and 65 agree to join the army. One thousand one hundred fifty people com-
plied. They were immediately tied together in pairs and then divided into two groups. The
first, conducted by Sergeant Kemal, was sent toward Kemal Goğazi, where çetes massacred the
men. The second was personally escorted by Tevfik Bey to the village of Eşikli, where they had
their throats cut, after which their bodies were dumped into a mass grave.79
Two weeks later, the authorities came back and promised the women that they would
be spared if they handed over between ten and 50 Turkish pounds. The kaymakam Kemal,
who had recently returned to Boğazlian with an escort of 15 gendarmes, now arrived in
Çat. There he singled out 995 women and children to be put to death in the Akdere
gorge.80
According to evidence that the Indian Colonel Mehmed – a British subject and prisoner-
of-war – gave during the fifteenth session of the Yozgat trial on 28 March 1915, the town crier
had demanded that the Armenians of Boğazlian enter their names in a register, after which
they were taken prisoner and then led from the village in small groups. A few days later, the
Indian colonel learned that “all the prisoners were led up into the mountains and massa-
cred.” Naturally curious, Colonel Mehmed had followed a group of men “who were massacred
in a valley nearby.” He also said that Turkish travelers from the surrounding villages who
arrived in Boğazlian had reported that the corpses of Armenians could be found throughout
the area and that it had been unbearable to travel through it because of the stench filling
the atmosphere.”81 Asked by the presiding judge to provide further details, Mehmed affirmed
that on the day in question, 50 to 60 people had been massacred; that the following day,
women and children had been murdered in the same spot; and that the murderers, who had
been wearing military uniforms, had been under the command of İhsan Çavuş. This testi-
mony was contradicted by Kemal, who affirmed that the Indian prisoner-of-war “could not
have left the city” and thus not have followed a convoy. The colonel retorted, “I was perfectly
free and could come and go as I pleased in Boğazlian.” To prove that what he had said about

these crimes was true, he declared that he could take anyone to the place where they had
been committed: “The Armenians’ bones are visible there even today.”82
A Turkish notable from Yozgat also pointed out that Major Tevfik had ordered the vil-
lage of Kümküyü burned down in the middle of the night while the inhabitants were asleep.
Six hundred people died.83 It was without a doubt that after this testimony was given, on
4 February 1919, the court-martial sent the mutesarif of Yozgat a letter, asking for detailed
information about Tevfik’s accomplices. The major, they wrote, “had scattered inflammable
material around the Armenian village of Kümküyü ... burned it down ... hacked the surviving
children to pieces in their cradles and ordered others to do the same.”84
Another source says that the inhabitants of 23 villages in the kaza of Boğazlian were mas-
sacred from 5 July on.85 From still another source, we learn that the worker-soldiers recruited
to transport the wheat harvest to Angora were murdered on their way back,86 and also that
a squadron of çetes invested the villages of Sarıhamza, Daşlıgetçit, and Pöhrenk to “recruit
soldiers” – that is, to arrest all the males and liquidate them in a secluded valley.87 According
to Movses Papazian, a native of the village of Pöhrenk, around 1,000 çetes, accompanied by
gendarmes, took part in these operations to purge the villages of their Armenian popula-
tion.88 Major Tevfik, interrogated during the pretrial interrogation conducted by the Istanbul
court-martial, implied that he had been the “president of the Organization’s Bureau” – which
is to say, the local head of the Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa – and had had the commanding officers
of several squadrons of çetes under his orders: Sükrü, Ceridzâde Hasan, and İbrahim.89 But
it is probable that Tevfik deliberately hid the identities of his accomplices, who are known
from other sources as the leader of the Unionists in the kaza Aya Bey, as well as Major Şükrü
Bey and the assistant to the imperial prosecutor Refik Bey, both of whom helped Kemal
Bey organize the massacre of the Armenian population of the kaza. They were assisted by
the following çete chiefs: İzzetbeyoğlu İbrahim; Zekioğlu Ormanci Hasan; Kadioğlu Haydar
Bey; Mehmedoğlu Ibrahim Bey; Mehmedoğlu Said; Hasan Bey; Tevfik Bey; Ali Bey; Fahri
Bey; Kâtibi Ahmed Damadi; Hoca Abedinzâde Tevfik; Mazhar Bey, a judge; Şevket Bey, a
former commander of the gendarmerie; Nizami Ali Bey; Kara Sabri Bey; Abdüllah Effendi;
Selimli Yusuf; Bakırcizâde Mahmud; Tevfikzâde Abdüllah; Ahmedzâde Abdüllah; Arapoğlu
Abdurrahman; Çapanlardan Derviş Bey; Şevket Bey; Avadalluoğlu Mehmed; Şükrü Çavuş;
Yemenici Ahmed Usta; Çerkez Kelçeçe; Kürt Hüseyin; and Zeyn Ağa Ahmed, who were
considered to bear the main responsibility for the massacre of around 30,000 people in the
kaza of Boğazlian.90
According to an Armenian witness, every day, in methodical fashion, the çetes dealt
with five villages. The proceeded to arrest both the men who were exempt from military
service and also the notables, who were all tied up and put to death outside the villages,
after which their bodies were stripped and thrown into mass graves. The çetes then rounded
up the males over 12, who were led off to a “slaughter-house for adolescents” located in
Hacılar, halfway between Akrak Maden and Boğazlian.91 Thereafter, the rest of the popula-
tion – women and girls of all ages, old men, and boys 12 and under – was assembled in a
field near the village. Here the children were separated from their mothers; the women who
tried to interfere with these abductions were killed on the spot. Kızılbaş and Çerkez villag-
ers from the vicinity were thereupon invited to come loot the abandoned villages. With the
help of pack animals, they took all the available goods from the villages and then helped
massacre the survivors and burn the bodies.92 A number of children of both sexes up to the
age of 11 were taken off to the city and placed in “orphanages.”93 Dr. M. Kechyan dates the
end of operations in the rural areas of the sancak to 7 August, estimating the number of
victims at 40,000.94
The military authorities seem to have taken a special interest in the fate of the men
apprehended in the villages. Telegrams exchanged within the Fifth Army show that its chief

commanding officer personally inquired into the destination of the smallest group of these
men and also into the number of men slain, so that he could provide his minister with an
account. In other words, the army was at least implicated in the liquidation of the men,
conscripts or not. The military commander of Boşazlian, for example, informed his superior
in a 27 July 1915 telegram that the kaymakam had publicly announced the massacre of 1,500
Armenians, whose names were recorded in a register that the military authorities twice asked
Kemal Bey to hand over to them, unsuccessfully.95 Another document mentions the arrest of
14 “suspects” in Boğazlian and its environs; the men, we read, were “dispatched to their place
of exile tonight.”96 The interim commander-in-chief of the Fifth Army, Halil Recayi, plainly
found this response unsatisfactory; he insisted that a subordinate of his inform him as soon
as possible in what direction “the individuals in question had been sent off.”97 His 5 August
wire to the interim commander of the Fifteenth Division in Kayseri, Colonel Şehabeddin,
reveals that the military commander of Boğazlian, Mustafa Bey, had informed him that
these Armenians had been murdered by a gendarme, Hüseyin Avni, “because they were
dangerous.”98 Examined at the seventh session of the trial of Yozgat on 18 February 1919,
Halil Recayi Bey acknowledged that the [government] commission of inquiry had questioned
him “about the telegrams connected with the massacre of the Armenians in Boğazlian,”
especially a message that he had received from Colonel Şehabeddin in which Şehabeddin
informed him that 130 Armenians from Yozgat who had been dispatched to Boğazlian had
been massacred by gendarmes near Cevizli Han.99 An 8 February 1919 exchange between
the court-martial and the new mutesarif of Yozgat further indicates that certified copies of
16 telegrams between Şehabeddin Bey and the kaymakam of Boğazlian had been forwarded
to the court. But they seem not to have been made public.100 They were at most mentioned
at the sixteenth session of the trial on 29 March 1919 in the state prosecutor’s indictment.
The magistrate described these telegrams as “proofs still more terrible than the testimony
that has been heard.” Despite this damning evidence, Colonel Şehabeddin denied, at the
eighth trial session on 21 February 1919, of “having received an official deportation order for
the Armenians of Yozgat or having had contacts with the authorities” of that city. At the
seventh session on 18 February 1919, the interim commander of the Fifth Army, Halil Recayi
Bey, declared that he had informed his superiors of the crimes committed in the Boğazlian
area, probably in an attempt to protect himself from being accused of anything. As he told
it, his superiors had instructed him “not to interfere in matters connected with the deport-
ation,” because that was “the task of the civilian authorities.”
In light of this handful of documents, we can put forward the hypothesis that the army,
in coordination with the local structures of the Special Organization, had been involved in
particular in eliminating the men of the vilayet, while leaving the chore of liquidating the
women and children in the Teşkilât-ii Mahsusa’s hands.
As for the role of the civilian administration, the complicity of the kaymakam Kemal Bey
in the massacres of Boğazlian has been attested to by many witnesses. At the fifteenth session
of his trial on 28 March 1919, Kemal attempted to deny that “such an event” had taken place,
but was confronted with testimony from his “colleagues” that established that “a majority of
the Armenian deportees from Boğazlian were liquidated.” When the presiding judge asked
him if he had “received instructions from a department” of the government in this connec-
tion, Kemal responded that he had not received any such instructions; to the contrary, the
central government had told him to transfer the money once the deportees had been settled
in the localities earmarked for them. “We deported the Armenians for military reasons,” he
declared.
The parliamentary deputy from Yozgat, Şakir Bey, questioned at the fourth session of the
11 February 1919 trial of Yozgat, stated that he had “sent a protest to Atıf Bey, the vali of
Angora,” but that Atıf had not taken it “into account,” like the protest that he had sent to

Talât, who “had not given it any account,” and had asked him: “Are you the protector of the
weak?” As far as the çetes were concerned, he did not deny that “criminals had been released
from prison,” but said he had been “persuaded that they were sent to the front.”
The only known case of resistance by victims occurred in Kümküyü, in the Akdağmaden
area, where a few young men managed to escape when their village was burned down and
took to the maquis. As we have seen, this incident was “blown up” by Tevfik Bey to justify
the intervention of the army reinforced by çetes.101 A witness who also took an active part
in these events, Movses Papazian, states that their group soon included some 30 people. He
adds that on 25 November 1915, they were attacked by 150 gendarmes in the Akdağ area,
and were then attacked again on 10 December 1915 in the Maden area by four battalions of
regular troops under the orders of the military commander of Yozgat. Each time they suc-
ceeded in escaping.102 Certain members of the group even tried to free, by violent means,
relatives of theirs being held in villages of the region.103 Over the next few months, worker-
soldiers who had deserted their labor battalions in the Kayseri area swelled their ranks until
they constituted a sizeable fighting force.104 On 15 June 1916, the military commander of
Kayseri arrived in the Maden region at the head of a considerable force with the intention of
liquidating the Armenian resistance group. This time, a number of young men were unable
to escape their pursuers.105 A dozen of those who did then decided to head for Samsun. On
1 July 1916, they left the region by way of Zile, wearing gendarme’s uniforms. Five days later,
they crossed the Amasia Bridge without hindrance; procuring food and basic necessities in
the Turkish-speaking Greek villages they encountered along the way. Finally, after a 13-day
trek, they joined the resistance groups in Samsun, Ordu, and Sinop.106
Massacres in the Kaza of Yozgat

The 5 August 1915 appointment of Kemal Bey as mutesarif of Yozgat coincided, as we have
said, with the end of operations in the rural areas of the kaza of Boğazlian. With that, the
fate of more than 9,000 Armenians of Yozgat and the surrounding localities seem to have
been sealed. On 8 August, Bishop Tanielian and 471 notables from the city were arrested
and “deported.”107 According to Azniv Ibranosian, the gendarmes told the Armenians to
report to Vehbi Bey, the Director of the Treasury, and then arrested them in Yozgat’s mar-
ketplace.108 For his part, an Armenian who served in the army on Captain Husni Bey’s staff
in Yozgat observes that he crossed paths with Uzun Ahmed, the secretary general of the
municipality, at the head of a group of çetes who shouted “our mothers brought us into the
world for this day” as they arrested Armenians in their homes.109 In addition to the interim
mutesarif Kemal and the commander of the gendarmerie Tevfik, a third individual, Feyaz Ali
Bey, an official in the Evkaf (Land Registry Office), seems to have played a major role in the
liquidation of the city’s Armenians. According to a 4 February 1919 letter sent by the presid-
ing judge at the Istanbul court-martial to the mutesarif of Yozgat, during the deportations
Feyaz Bey was the head of a committee “that met and worked in the Armenian church.” This
committee alone was empowered to issue a vesikat or a “suitable for deportation.”110 We have
other information that allows us to give an exact description of the procedure that culmi-
nated in the arrest and execution of the men. According to Major Tevfik, “the Armenians to
be deported were first registered.” At the fourteenth session of the Yozgat trial on 26 March,
Kemal even stated that it was a lieutenant in the gendarmerie, Hulusi Bey, who “drew up
the registers with the lists of deportees.”111 Tevfik added that he then informed “the high
authorities of the number of Armenians who had been deported toward Der Zor” and that
he also gave “instructions to the müdirs of the nahies, who, in turn, transmitted “orders and
instructions to the officers in their respective branches of the gendarmerie,” with the help
of “registers prepared in advance.”112 Thus, we see the machinery maintained by the civilian

and military authorities, rounded out by the parallel structures of the Special Organization,
which for its part was concerned with the illegal dimension of the process.
At the same trial session, the prosecutor presented a document written by the interim
mutesarif of Yozgat contained in an envelope bearing three red stripes. The following was
written between the stripes: “When you arrive in the village of Battal, this letter should
be remitted to the Effendis Bakırcizâde Mahmud, Abdüllah, and Mehmed. The envelope
should be opened after the date, hour, and seal have been recorded.” The sealed envelope
contained two letters: one, addressed to Şükrü, the commander of the gendarmerie, ordered
him to obey the three people just named; the other said that “women and girls should be
divested of their possessions, which should be transferred to the city of Yozgat.” The prosecu-
tor pointed out the contradiction in this order: “The possessions of these women and girls
were already available in the city from which they had been deported. Consequently, when
he says that their possessions should be transported to Yozgat, he simply means that these
women and girls should be killed, and that their possessions should be collected and sent on
to the city.”113 To the best of our knowledge, this is the only document of this sort currently
available. Composed in a style characteristic of the Young Turks, it strikes an administrative
tone to express criminal intent. Kemal Bey was not in error when he declared, in the face
of all the evidence, that the seal in question was not his and that the handwritten note on
the envelope was not in his writing. He went even further, affirming that he had not “issued
these instructions,” since his “orders had been to protect the Armenians.”114 It is, moreover,
noteworthy that one of the three men whom he said should be obeyed, Bakırcizâde Mahmud,
was the head of a squadron of çetes,115 whom he had probably orally entrusted with the task
of liquidating the Armenians in the village involved. It is precisely in this case that we can
observe firsthand the collusion between the administration and the paramilitary groups of
the Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa. The main governmental actors here were Tatar Mehmed Said Bey,
the police chief; his assistant Numan Bey; Nuhlis Bey and Hulusi, lieutenants in the gendar-
merie; Haci Abedinzâde Tevfi, a secretary at the courthouse in Yozgat; Mazhar, a şeri [bailiff];
and Dağistanlı İsmail, the head of the deportations office.116 Shortly after the departure of
the first convoy of men, a second group made up of 300 men was sent to Dere Mumlu, a
four-hour march from the city, where all those in it were massacred with the exception of
a handful of survivors, such as our witness.117 According to the same source, 600 prison-
ers from Yozgat were still confined in the town jail, along with 42 people from Istanbul,118
who were probably among the elite of the capital who had been deported on 24 April 1915.
Another witness indicates that Kemal Bey was present at the departure of one of these con-
voys, which was expedited to a secluded valley near the village of Keller. The men were there
tied together and escorted by gendarmes with bayonets fixed to the barrels of their rifles.119
In February 1919, the judge presiding at the Istanbul court-martial discovered that a register
containing the name of more than 1,500 Armenians killed in the vicinity of Boğazlian was
to be found in Yozgat, in the possession of the military commander. However, despite insist-
ent, repeated demands, the judge was unable to obtain it.120
Concerning the role of the gendarmerie, in particular that of its commander, Tevfik, the
non-Turkish witnesses indicate that Tevfik had with his men escorted most of the convoys
to Taş Punar and Keller, where the deportees were massacred with knives and axes.121 One
of the survivors of these death caravans, Simon, states that in Yozgat people did not use the
word tehcir (deportation) to describe the Armenians’ fate, but, rather, kasim (massacre).122
Azniv Ibranossian sums up the role of the mutesarif’s two collaborators this way: “Tevfik took
charge of killing them and Feyaz, of looting them.”123 The detailed interrogation to which
Major Tevfik was subjected at the thirteenth session of the trial did not reveal anything
new. He contented himself with the statement that he had received the order to deport the
Armenians and that he had carried it out and that a committee had been created to “collect

the deportees’ money in order to shield it against possible acts of pillage and, later, restore
it to its owners.” He declared that he had “in no way been responsible for the deportation
carried out when Kemal was mutesarif of Yozgat” and that he had “carried out deportations
when Cemal Bey was mutesarif.” Tevfik added that he had only done his “duty.” When he
was criticized for leaving these deportees without any of the basic necessities, he retorted
that he had not received “any instructions to distribute food to the deportees,” but supposed
that “the population came to their aid in Anatolia.”124 His contradictory remarks were obvi-
ously intended to exonerate him of the blame for the massacres committed under Kemal’s
authority, despite the evidence that had accumulated against him, the leader of the Teşkilat-ı
Mahsusa in the sancak of Yozgat.
Thanks to the trial of the criminals of Yozgat, we also have a broad range of information
about the activities of the committee responsible for “abandoned property,” headed by the
leader of the city’s Young Turk club, Feyaz Bey, who was assisted by several local notables:
Kara Salih, Çarşi Ağasi Şevket, Kambur Kalfa Nuri, Savfet, Nazıf and Nizanin Ali Kara
Fabri.125 We know that the committee supervised by Feyaz established its headquarters in the
Armenian church,126 where goods confiscated from the massacred deportees were stocked.127
Examined at the thirteenth session of the Yozgat trial, Feyaz denied that he had been a mem-
ber of the CUP or played a “role in the deportations.” When the presiding judge asked him
how he happened to possess “the episcopal ring of Yozgat’s Armenian primate,” he declared
that he had bought “a ring from the liquidation committee,” not “taken it from the primate’s
finger.”128 The inquiries carried out after the armistice also show that Feyaz had appropri-
ated, on the farm of Ellin in the village of Eşekciler, near Keller, “the money and valuables of
certain convoys of Armenian deportees who had perished or been slain” with the complicity
of the tinsmith Mahmud, Major Tevfik, and his assistants Haydar and Hüseyin, as well as the
gendarmes Adıl, Abdüllah, Nuri, Hakkı, Mustafa, Hasan, İmamzâde Şakir, Başı Kel Ahmed,
and Kara Ali.129
On the testimony of Dr. Mgrdich Kecheyan, it was only on 20 August – that is, after
the men had been liquidated – that the Armenians of Yozgat were informed of the order
to deport them, except for families of conscripts. Once the news had been made known,
the women sold their moveable assets at low prices and the committee immediately had
their houses sealed.130 The first convoy from Yozgat, comprising approximately 2,000 women
and children, left the city on 22 August by the road leading south.131 Waiting for it on the
highway at Armağan, an hour’s distance from Yozgat, was a colleague of Feyaz’s, Vehbi Bey
(we have already noted Vehbi’s part in the dismissal of the mutesarif Cemal Bey, as well
as his influence in the local Ittihadist club).132 The head of the committee responsible for
“abandoned property,” Vehbi was charge with relieving the deportees of their cash and valu-
ables. As we have seen elsewhere, he and his assistant Etam, who were well informed about
the worth of each family, suggested that the Armenians entrust their possessions to them
in order to avoid being looted on the road. Observing the exiles’ reluctance, they ordered
a dozen brigades to subject them to a methodical search.133 It took the malefactors no less
than five days to divest the deportees of most of what they possessed. Thereafter, the convoy
was sent on to Incirli. On 27 August, these women and children were surrounded somewhat
further south in Karahacılı by Turkish and Çerkez villagers of both sexes, who proceeded to
stage a slaughter survived by only a few girls and children abducted in order to be sold.134
The second convoy from Yozgat left on 27 August; it comprised around 1,700 women
and children. In Armağan, it was subjected to the same treatment as the first caravan and
then sent in the direction of Keller, a village lying a few kilometers off the main road not
far from Boğazlian. Emptied of its Armenian population more than a month earlier, the
village was serving as a camping ground for several squadrons of Çerkez recruited by the
Special Organization and commanded by someone named İliyas. Around 1,000 deportees

were methodically massacred there. Spared were a few young women and children to be
later sold to the Turks of Boğazlian at around eight and ten mecid (Turkish silver money)
each. The only remarkable incident to occur during this carnage involved a young man
by the name of Dikran who had slipped into the convoy disguised as a woman. He had
decided to defend himself, leading a number of the women to fight back as well, by throw-
ing stones or biting their executioners.135
A peasant in Eşekciler, Stepan, who was deported to Keller, reports that Kemal had a
trumpet that he used to issue the order to begin a massacre.136 In other words, the mutesarif
personally made the journey to supervise the liquidation of the deportees. Eugenie Varvarian
of Yozgat also testified before the court-martial that Kemal, whom the local populace had
nicknamed Kasab Kaymakam [the butcher kaymakam], had organized massacres with Major
Tevfik.137 There ensued a rather sharp exchange between the young survivor and the state
official, who met these accusations with a blanket denial. He protested that he had “never
left Yozgat during the deportations and that the girl was a liar who didn’t know what she
was talking about.” The young woman responded: “Kemal is lying when he says that he
didn’t massacre Armenians. Did all the Armenians commit suicide? Where are most of them
now?” She conceded, however, that he did not kill these Armenians “personally,” but added
that she had heard him shout: “Kill them, kill them; if you don’t, I’ll kill you.”138 After this
butchery, Kemal proceeded to deal with Armenian families who had converted. According
to depositions made by Yakub Hoca from the village of Paşa and other witnesses such as the
barber Misak from the village of Incirli, and transmitted in an 8 February 1919 report by the
presiding judge of the local court-martial, Faik Bey, to the mutesarif of Yozgat, Kemal had 70
Protestant families from Incirli massacred before turning his attention to the 250 Armenian
families from the village of Karabüyük whom Yakub Hoca had converted to Islam. Kemal
met the protests of the Muslim clergyman, who declared that this was not in accordance
with the precepts of Islam, with the remark that “you convert the Armenians in accordance
with Islamic law and I liquidate them in accordance with my policy.”139 The inspector Nedim
Bey, in conclusion to the inquiry he conducted in the locality in December 1918, declared:
“Before my conscience, beyond a doubt ... the Armenians had been eliminated in groups and
that the person who committed the crime was the kaymakam, Kemal Bey. Specifically, it was
Kemal Bey who issued the secret orders and informed the commanders of the gendarmerie,
who were constantly called on to carry out the crimes.”140
According to official figures cited before the court-martial during the Yozgat trial, around
33,000 Armenians from the sancak of Yozgat were deported, and a majority of them were
massacred in Boğazkemin, lying in a valley near Keller, where the çetes also engaged in rap-
ing little girls and killing babies.141 Captain Şükrü, who served in Yozgat’s gendarmerie, says
in his “confessions” that the massacres were carried out on the orders of the interior minister
and that the traces of these massacres “were wiped out in late October, when huge mass
graves were dug in which the bodies were thrown and then burned, but that the winter rains
exposed rotting corpses and bones.” Şükrü affirms that, with the exception of the first convoy
from Çorum deported in early July 1915, very few of the deportees escaped death:
It is a secret for no one that 62,000 Armenians were massacred in our sancak. This
surprised even us, because the government itself did not know how many Armenians
there had been in the province of Angora. A few thousand of them came from other
provinces; the necessary steps were taken to ensure that they would pass our way,
because we wanted to slaughter them. We received the orders to exile the Armenians,
or, to employ the precise formulation, to conduct the Armenians from the towns and
villages and then to massacre them, from the headquarters of the committee of the
Ittihad or the minister of the interior.142

Şükrü also observes that after the news of the massacres of Angora had made its way to
Constantinople: The German embassy protested and the government sent a commission
of inquiry to Angora, but we knew perfectly well that the real motivation for this commis-
sion was simply to show that the government had not in any way taken part in the massa-
cres.” Thereafter, he adds, “instructions were issued by Constantinople to take the measures
required to prevent Europeans and, especially, American missionaries, from being given
information about the massacres perpetrated in the interior of Anatolia.”143
The commission of inquiry that was dispatched to Yozgat late in 1915 concluded that “illicit
gains” had been made there “at the cost of the committee responsible for abandoned prop-
erty” and judged Kemal and his accomplices for these acts. However, it never accused them
of homicide.144 Kemal, after admitting in his initial deposition that he had only been tried for
“illicit gain,” retracted his statement and incessantly affirmed that he had already been tried
for homicide and thus did not understand why he was being tried again for a matter that had
already been judged before the courts. Asked about this by the Istanbul court-martial, the
investigating magistrate in the Yozgat trial, Nedim Bey, responded that “[n]o murder investiga-
tion was conducted or could have been, because the higher orders that [he] had received bore
only on an investigation of illicit gain.” Nedim further stated that Kemal had appeared before
the court as an “accused party in liberty”; it is inconceivable that he would not have been
in detention if he had been indicted for homicide.145 As we have pointed out elsewhere, the
1916 proceedings against Kemal confirm that the court-martial had instructions to judge state
officials for “illicit gain” while ignoring the mass crimes that they had committed.
While the pillage of Armenian property in Yozgat took place under basically the same
conditions as had obtained elsewhere,146 it is noteworthy that in this sancak the mutesarif
was personally implicated in the plunder. Questioned at the fifteenth session of the trial of
those who had organized the Yozgat massacres on 28 March 1919, Vehbi Bey, the president of
the committee responsible for “abandoned property,” maintained that Kemal Bey “remitted
the lists of Armenian deportees, and it was only after receiving them that [he] collected the
superfluous moneys [sic] in the possession of the Armenian deportees and recorded them in
a special registry.”147 He also admitted at the next session that he had sought out Armenians
who had refused to put their “trust” in him – that is, to entrust their assets to him – but he
only mumbled a few unintelligible words when asked if these acts were lawful.
Among those who made “illicit gains,” Major Tevfik was charged with having collected
five Turkish pounds from thousands of recruits or deserters of all confessions in exchange
for keeping them from being sent to the front.148 A well-informed witness also evoked the
gifts that Tevfik gave his brothers, the goods that he sent to Constantinople and Eskişehir,
the rugs and kilims that he sent to Çorum, and the real estate that he sold off, such as the
Apkarian farm in Yozgat that he sold for 5,000 Turkish pounds. Mufteri Rifât observes that,
with Necati’s consent, Tevfik laid hands on many other Armenians’ goods and property,
which he registered in his brother Hosrov Bey’s name.149 At the seventh trial session on 18
February 1919, it was also revealed that this simple major in a gendarmerie had acquired a
farm worth from 30,000 to 40,000 Turkish pounds.150 Another member of the committee
responsible for “abandoned property,” Nazif Bey, was accused of “accumulating enormous
wealth” and sending 36,000 pounds to Constantinople.151
In the face of these multiple accusations of illicit gain and mass murder, Kemal adopted
a line of defense that was particularly symptomatic of the climate of the period. At the six-
teenth trial session on 29 March 1919, he justified his acts as follows: “The Armenians were
domestic foes of the Turkish people and the Muslim religion; the members of the Armenian
political parties were separatists.” Repeating Young Turk discourse for the occasion, he no
longer denied the acts of which he was accused, but gave his listeners to understand that he
had simply implemented government policy. The defense strategy adopted by Major Tevfik’s

lawyer, Hami Bey, was in the same vein. He began by legitimating the seizure of Armenian
assets on the grounds that the government’s concern had been to prevent the deportees from
being pillaged on the road. Above all, he accused the Armenians of being responsible for
the massacres by virtue of their provocative revolutionary activities. He also contended that
“[t]he Armenians massacred one million Muslims, whereas the Turks massacred only two
hundred thousand [Armenians].” The Istanbul press with Ittihadist sympathies published
more or less the same sort of discourse in its newspapers.
At a banquet organized to celebrate the end of the operations, it was revealed that Kemal
Bey, Major Tevfik, and Feyaz Bey had made a toast to “the Armenians’ health.”152
Several sources indicate that a second operation was carried out in February 1916 by
Kemal’s successor, Agah Bey, also a Unionist, against 1,300 to 1,500 women and children
working as slaves in Turkish households in the region. These survivors, arrested on the new
mutesarif’s initiative, were massacred locally.153
The Kazas of Süngürlü, Çorum, and Akdağmaden

The main Armenian community in Süngürlü, 1,000 strong, was to be found in the principal
town in the kaza, located at its southernmost tip. There were a few other small, dispersed
groups in the kaza, bringing the total Armenian population to 1,936.154 All were liquidated
in the kaza itself in the course of July 1915.155
The 3,520 Armenians in the kaza of Çorum lived in five localities: 1,020 in Çorum, 1,500
in Ekrek, and the rest in Bozok, Hüseyinabad, and Alaca (pop. 400).156 With the exception
of the first convoy from Çorum, which set out early in July for the Syrian deserts by way of
Boğazlian and Bozanti,157 the groups of deportees were liquidated by çetes from Angora under
the supervision of the kaymakam Nureddin Bey, who held his post from 22 November 1913
to 27 March 1916.158 The 3,361 Armenians from the kaza of Akdağmaden lived mainly in
Akdağ, the seat of the kaza (pop. 1,300), Delihamza (pop. 250), and Karaçayer (pop. 300).159
Major Ahmed, the military commander in Akdağmaden, informed the mutesarif, Cemal, in
a cable dated 11/12 July 1915, that “public order” had in no way been perturbed in his kaza,
that there had never been an attack by an “Armenian band,” and that it was only after the
looting of the village of Terzilli by gendarmes that the villagers fled into the mountain-
ous areas of his district.160 Despite these denials, Major Tevfik arrived with a band of çetes,
burned down the Armenians’ houses in Akdağmaden, and slaughtered the population.161
Massacres and Deportations in the Sancak of Kayseri

Since ancient times Armenians had peopled the outlying sancak of Kayseri in the southwest-
ern part of the vilayet of Angora, which covered part of the area of the ancient province of
Cappadocia. In this respect, Kayseri differed from the other districts in the province. The
presence of an Armenian population here is attested since the third and fourth centuries of
our epoch. It increased over time: after the Arabs conquered part of Asia Minor, Armenian
colonists were settled here by the Byzantines in order to strengthen the military marches of
the Taurus. On the eve of the First World War, there were still 31 towns and villages inhab-
ited by more than 52,000 Armenians in this sancak. These possessed 40 churches, seven
monasteries, and 56 schools with an overall enrolment of 7,119.162
In the city of Kayseri, located in the central kaza, the 18,907 Armenians were concen-
trated in 28 of the city’s 114 neighborhoods in 1914, representing approximately 35 per cent
of the total population. Cesarea’s economic importance hardly needs to be demonstrated. By
this time, the city’s international trade had declined sharply, but this regression was partially
compensated by Anatolian commerce. Gold-working, leather-tanning, and rug-making were

especially thriving crafts. Five kilometers southwest of Cesarea, the village of Talas, albeit
on the decline in the early twentieth century, still had an Armenian population of 1,894,
representing 42 per cent of its total population. In the upper quarter, where the most afflu-
ent social strata resided, were magnificent homes, located on streets that bore the names of
the most prestigious families: the Gulbenkians, Turabians, Selians, and so on. The village of
Derevank (310 Armenians), just northeast of Talas, dominated the entry to a valley in which
there lay a string of Armenian villages: Tavlusun (pop. 115), Germir (pop. 365), Balages
(pop. 923) – on the outskirts of which lay the immense monastery of St. Daniel, established
in the mid-eleventh century and demolished a few days after all the inhabitants of Balages
were deported – Mancesen (pop. 386), Nirze and the adjoining village of Darsiak (pop. 835),
with the monastery of St. Gregory, founded in 1206, a quarter of an hour away. The villages
of Muncusun (pop. 1,669) and Evkere/Gasi (pop. 2,154) closed off the northern extremity of
the valley that began above Talas, with the famous monastery of St. Garabed, the region’s
most important spiritual and educational center and also the seat of the diocese’s archbishop
since the twelfth century. The last of these villages, Erkelet (pop. 300), lay in the northern
part of the kaza.163 Thus, there was a non-negligible rural Armenian population, particularly
in the kaza of Kayseri.
As in many other regions of the Anatolian east, a simmering hostility toward the
Armenian population sprang up when the reform plan was signed in February 1914. It found
expression notably in the economic boycott launched by local Young Turk circles. More
than the ban on buying products in Armenian shops, marked with red crosses painted on
the storefronts, it was the barely veiled threats that reminded the Armenians just how much
their fate depended on the milletı hakime [ruling nation]. Curiously, in the same period, the
Ittihad agreed to promote the election of the teacher Garabed Tumanyan to the Ottoman
parliament as the deputy for Kayseri, and he was elected in 20 March 1914.164 In the weeks
following the general mobilization, the Armenian population noticed more obvious signs of
discrimination. The requisitions made in the name of the war effort resembled, according to
Armenian witness, outright pillage, and the treatment of conscripts, who were mishandled
and left without food, was tantamount to a call to desert. In contrast to the regions in the
northern part of the vilayet, there were in the sancak of Kayseri well-organized networks
of Hnchak and Dashnak activists who construed the attitude of the local authorities as a
provocation calculated to exasperate the Armenians. A mixed committee made up of the
Hnchaks M. Minasian, G. Chidemian, H. Kazazian, and E. Sutjian and the Dashnaks K.
Vishabian, G. Khayerlian, and K. Bosdanian was formed in order to apply the instructions
these activists had received from the leaderships of their respective parties – to avoid “a revolt
and meet the government’s demands.”165
It would appear that, during the mobilization, the Armenians of draftable age left for the
army without protest and that no particular incident troubled order in the region. However,
it is noteworthy that Armenian civil servants were dismissed in April.166 By all accounts,
an incident that occurred in Everek in February touched off an extremely violent repres-
sive campaign. A young man who had recently returned from the United States, Kevork
Defjian, blew himself up while manipulating a handmade explosive device. Immediately,
the kaymakam of the kaza of Develu was dismissed and replaced by Salih Zeki Bey, who
was charged with carrying out an inquiry that was given extraordinary public notice.167 It is
probable that Zeki had instructions to exploit the incident to put the party activists under
pressure. In the first half of March, he had a number of Armenian homes in Everek searched
and arrested a certain number of politicians and notables, who were interned in the konak’s
jail. According to several witnesses, gendarmes beat prisoners to death every evening in the
courtyard of the konak under the eyes of local Young Turks and the kaymakam Zeki, who,
glass of cognac in hand, seemed to find the spectacle entertaining. Hovhannes Barsamian

and Hovagim Chilingirian died under torture; Hagop Bozakian was quartered; Asadur
Minasian’s chest was covered with live coals on which the executioners made coffee; Hagop
Madaghjiyan had horseshoes nailed to his feet and tried to commit suicide to put an end to
his ordeal.168 The official objective was to make these men confess where they had hidden
their weapons. On 30 March 1915, Zeki Bey ordered the arrests of a few notables in the sur-
rounding villages, especially Çomaklu/Chomakhlu and Incesu. He ordered a second round
of arrests on 14 May, imprisoning all those taken into custody in Everek, where they were
tortured to make them reveal where they had concealed their arms.169 Several incidents
illustrate the local authorities’ determination to whip the Muslim population up against
the Armenians. For example, a sort of infernal “machine” was exhibited in the courtyard of
the konak, and the multitudes were invited to come inspect it. It was in fact a machine for
making sugar imported from Europe. Zeki, however, told one and all that the machine was
used to send wireless telegrams and “make thousands of rifles daily.” The machine’s owner,
who had been arrested, was urged to confess this.170 A second example testifies to the spirit
reigning at the time and the way the public’s naivety was exploited: the village of Tashkhan
was attacked and the authorities announced that a “cannon” had been seized there – what
was involved was in fact a salt cauldron. The upshot was the condemnation of 42 men by
Kayseri’s court-martial.171
These events were obviously not without consequence in Kayseri, where the mutesarif,
Ahmed Midhat, deftly exploited the effect that they produced in order to attack the city’s
Armenian elite. The first to be arrested was a leading public activist, Garabed Jamjian, the
president of the diocesan assembly and the local branch of the Armenian General Benevolent
Union. This respected businessman was arrested on Thursday, 29 April in his home in Kayseri
and paraded through the Muslim neighborhoods of the city in chains as a dangerous separa-
tist, under a hail of insults from the crowd.172 It was probably no accident that the authorities’
choice had alighted on Jamjian, who was deeply involved in civic affairs, but not at all in the
local Armenian political clubs. There is good reason to think that by neutralizing someone
capable of presenting the authorities with a credible point of view, Midhat wanted to deal
the community a severe blow at the outset and show that even someone regarded as respect-
able was implicated in the Armenian “separatist” movement. The announcement that the
Hnchak leaders had been indicted in Istanbul on 28 April 1915 – the day before Jamjian
was arrested – for “disturbing public order and rebellion”173 marked the beginning of an
operation aimed at neutralizing the Armenian elites in the provinces. The arrests of Kayseri’s
Dashnak leader, Kevork Vishabian, and his Hnchak counterpart, Minas Minasian,174 clearly
reflected the authorities’ concern to act with a semblance of legality so as not to drive the
Armenian population into despair and precipitate the revolt of which “the” Armenians
had been accused in advance. Without a doubt, it was this maneuver that convinced other
Armenian leaders that the only targets of these operations were a handful of ranking politi-
cians and that, consequently, they had an interest in remaining circumspect and complying
with the authorities in order to safeguard the security of the population. According to an
unconfirmed source, the order to turn in weapons was immediately made public. Between
20 and 25 May, a general meeting of Armenian leaders was held in Kayseri and a majority
of those present came out in favor of obeying the order by handing over all weapons. A wit-
ness, Vahan Elmayan, reports that all the weapons were delivered up “regardless of the fact
that we could then no longer count on help from anyone.”175 According to the American
missionary Clara C. Richmond, who had been working in Talas and Kayseri for several years,
the Armenians had indeed acquired large numbers of weapons after the 1909 massacres in
Cilicia in order to defend themselves should the need have arisen.176 It is probable that the
authorities were aware of this and sought to bring this arsenal under control before revealing
their true objectives.

In the process of bringing the Armenians under suspicion, a campaign that had been
fabricated out of thin air against the primate, Bishop Khosrov Behrigian, the details of which
we have already noted,177 doubtless also played an important role. Accused in mid-June of
collusion with the enemy, and also “of complicity ... with the revolutionary movements,”178
the bishop of Cesarea constituted another choice target for the authorities. For lack of con-
crete evidence, the court-martial in Kayseri finally “granted Behrigian the benefit of mitigat-
ing circumstances,”179 but official discourse continued to present him as “one of those who
had inspired the preparations for revolution and the revolutionary movement, the object of
which was to create in the future an Armenian state.”180 The accusation of separatism, lev-
eled against the Armenian population in the middle of a war, was the core of Young Turk dis-
course. Clearly, the actions of the authorities in Kayseri were designed to credit this charge.
The “discovery” of “cannons” and other supposedly lethal machines was also intended to
buttress the official propaganda campaign, which a few months later painted Behrigian as
the leader of a “movement” that aspired to “obtain the independence of Armenia.”181 The 15
June hanging of 11 members of the Armenian elite in the Kömür Bazar182 – that is, on the
day when the bishop was condemned and the 20 Hnchak leaders were executed in Istanbul
– was probably another move designed to leave a strong mark on people’s minds and credit
the thesis of an Armenian conspiracy. The political and sociological profile of the 11 men
condemned to death in Kayseri, among whom were only two local political leaders of the
ARF and SDHP, Kevork Vishabian and Minas Minasian, indicates that the authorities were
most likely seeking to implicate all the Armenian circles in their accusation of separatism
as a generalization of the phenomenon. Thus, we find four important businessmen among
the executed Armenians – Hagop Khayirlian, Avedis Zambakjian, Karnig Kuyumjian and
Garabed Jamjian; a banker, Hagop Merdinian; a footwear manufacturer, Garabed Shidemian;
a rug merchant, Hagop Sudjian; a goldsmith, Garabed Muradian; a jeweler, Hovhannes
Nevshehirlian; and a musician, Mirijan Yoghuralashian.183
From June 1915 on, when it condemned Bishop Behrigian, the court-martial in Kayseri
was uninterruptedly in session. Under, first, the presiding judge Colonel Şehabeddin,
succeeded by Lieutenant-Colonel Tevfik Bey, with Ziya Bey as chief prosecutor, Captain
Kuçuk Kâzım, the vice-president of the recruitment office and the director of deportations,
as judge, and Gübgübzâde Sureya, nicknamed Topal Lutfi, as commander of the gendar-
merie, the court-martial condemned in rapid succession the entire Armenian political and
economic elite of Kayseri, under the direct supervision of the Ittihad’s special delegate,
Cemil Bey.184
In the end, the court-martial in Kayseri condemned 54 people to death. Nine more men,
mainly from Everek, fell victim to the second round of executions – Krikor Munjihanian, a
judge; Krikor Ghachrekian; Harutiun Dayan; Asadur Minasian, a photographer; Harutiun
Keleyan, a merchant; Garabed Akhcharian; Manug Euchakjian; Hagop Chibukjian; and
the Hnchak deputy Murad (Hampartsum Boyajian) – all of whom were executed before
the citadel at three o’clock on the morning of 24 July 1915.185 Fifteen notables from Kayseri
perished in the third round of executions, which took place on 13 August: Toros Nazlian,
a physician; Krikor Kuyumjian, a rug merchant; Garabed Nevruzian, a merchant; Mardiros
Zurnajian, a carpenter; Vahan Amaduni, a teacher; Avedis Elmajian, a rug merchant;
Harutiun Yoghuralashian; Kevork Turkejian, a rug merchant; Parsegh Mutafian; Ghazar
Mayisian; Hagop Kazezian; Hovhannes Zeytuntsian; Hovhannes Tavitian; Father Ghevont
Gemjian; and Sarkis Tulumjian. The fourth round of executions took place on 2 September.
Six men were hanged: Vahan Kumjian, a teacher; Hagop Urzanjian; Hovhannes Boyajian,
a teacher; Hagop Balukjian; Garabed Uzunoghlanian; and Hagop Yesayan, a teacher. On
17 September, Dr. Suren Nshanian was hanged; on 26 September, the lawyers Garabed
Tashjian and Mardiros Kundakjian, as well as Sarkis Atmajian, a manufacturer of matchsticks,

were hanged. On 28 November, it was the turn of the teacher Hagop Berberian and Sahag
Kayserlian of Rumdigin to be executed. In the last round of executions, which took place on
16 December 1915, six Armenians from Everek perished: Mihran Kuzian, a merchant; Levon
Varzhabedian, an architect; Setrak Chechejenian, a butcher; Sarkis Karagozian, a farmer;
Misak Bahanjian, a goldsmith; and Karnig Shemshian, also a goldsmith.186
By late September, the court-martial in Kayseri had already condemned 1,095 more peo-
ple, of whom 857 were executed in the same period.187 On 21 June 1915, 24 condemned
men left by night for Dyarbekir by way of Gemerek; on 11 July, 83 prisoners left by night for
Aleppo by way of Nigde and Sıvas; on 12 July, 14 prisoners left by night for Aleppo by way of
Azizye; on 13 July, 46 men left by night for Çorum by way of Erkilet; on 17 July, six men left
by night for Dyarbekir by way of Gemerek; on 19 July, 36 adults left by night for Dyarbekir by
way of Gemerek; on 21 July, 134 condemned men left by night for Aleppo by way of Albistan;
on 22 July 54 prisoners left by night for Aleppo by way of Azizye; on 22 July, another group of
28 men left by night for Aleppo by way of Sıvas; on 23 July, 21 people left by night for Aleppo
by way of Azizye; on 26 July, 22 people left by night for Aleppo by way of Azizye; on 27
July, 73 prisoners left for Dyarbekir by way of Sıvas; on 28 July, eight people left by night for
Aleppo by way of Azizye; on 4 August, 22 men left by night for Aleppo by way of Sıvas; on 15
August, five men left by night for Dyarbekir by way of Gemerek; on 25 August, 11 men left by
night for Aleppo by way of Cevizlihan; on 26 August, eight men left by night for Aleppo by
way of Cevizlihan; on 28 August, 130 men left by night for Aleppo by way of Cevizlihan; on
4 September, 30 men left for Aleppo by way of Dyarbekir; on 7 September, four men left for
Aleppo by way of Dyarbekir; on 7 September, four men left for Aleppo by way of Dyarbekir;
on 8 September, four men left by night for Dyarbekir by way of Azizye; on 15 September, four
men left by night for Aleppo by way of Dyarbekir; on 24 September, 21 men left by night
for Aleppo by way of Nigde; and on 5 October, 620 men left by night for Aziziye by way of
Hamidiye. The last-mentioned 620 men were youths between the ages of 14 and 18, most of
them Catholic or Protestant, who had been working in an amele taburi. They were led to
Kayadipi, a valley lying between Gemerek and Şarkışla, and put to death there. This was the
same spot on which certain groups of condemned men from Kayseri were executed.188 The
German minister Hans Bauernfeind, traveling through Gemerek on 18 August, encountered
900 worker-soldiers from Kayseri who were working in an amele taburi – “most of them mer-
chants” – and 4,000 to 5,000 more “just before Cesarea ... who came from Nigde.”189 We do
not know what happened to these men, but it is probable that they too were executed on the
road to Sıvas under the supervision of Muammer, whose intermittent interventions in the
neighboring vilayet we have already noted.
According to the American missionary Theda Phelps, males over 14 began to be system-
atically arrested in the first half of July. This gave rise to nightly departures of small caravans,
which were dispatched without ado.190
Manuel Mgrian, a pharmacist from Everek, observes that 300 Armenians under indictment
were held in Kayseri’s civilian prison in May 1915, where they were subjected to the most ter-
rible forms of torture. Summoned to the military prison to care for a seriously wounded man,
he discovered the Hnchak leader Murad (Hampartsum Boyajian) there – Murad had recently
been transferred from Ayaş – as well as a number of Hnchak militants whom the authorities
were holding in a separate section of the prison.191 Gübgübzâde Sureya Bey, a captain in the
gendarmerie and the head of the çetes of Kayseri and the Special Organization, oversaw the
torture sessions with the aid of Küçük Kâzım Bey and his 165 çetes; Ali Garib Bey, a parlia-
mentary deputy from Kayseri; Kâtibzâde Nuh; and Camız Imamzâde Reşid.192 Once the elite
had been condemned and eliminated, the police chief Mehmed Zeki Bey and the mutesarif
of Kayseri Ahmed Midhat took over the court-martial’s role. Zeki compiled the lists of people
to be executed; Midhat approved them; and for his part, the military commander Colonel

Şehabeddin gave the orders required to have the condemned men deported and murdered.
To this end, he communicated with the gendarmerie and the Special Organization, both
directed by Gübgübzâde Sureya Bey.
After being held in prison and tortured for several months, the Armenian primate Khosrov
Behrigian was put on the road for Urfa on 26 August, accompanied by Bedros Gumshian,
Parsegh Tabibian, Dr. Stepan Tabibian, and Parsegh Tokatlian. All five men were murdered
together between Urfa and Aleppo a few days later. The auxiliary primate, Father Aristakes
Timarian, Panos Kuyumjian, and Hagop Balekjian were murdered around 2 September in
the vicinity of Sıvas. Most of the Armenian males of the region were liquidated, however,
at a killing field at Kanlı Dere located in the gorge that forms an extension of the plain of
Fırıncilar, south of Malatia.
That said, the dimensions of the system that the CUP set up in Kayseri would seem to
suggest that the region had been chosen very early on by the leaders in the Nuri Osmaniye as
a suitable place in which to fabricate a damning case incriminating “the” Armenians. Thus,
one notes the presence in Kayseri of a special party delegate, Yakub Cemil Bey, a former
CUP fedayi and an important military chief of the Special Organization;193 Imamzâde Ömer
Mumtaz Bey, a Unionist parliamentary deputy; and Draçzâde Nusrullah Bey, the CUP’s
responsible secretary. These three ranking Ittihadists had the support of local notables:
Gübgübzâde Rifât Bey, the president of the Ittihadist club; İbrahim Safa Bey; Çalıkoğlu Rifât
Bey, the president of the municipality and one of the organizers of the Special Organization
in Kayseri; Katibzâde Nuh; Gözüböyükzâde Sadet; Imamzâde Reşid Bey; Talaslızâde Şaban;
Akça Kayalı Rifât; Karabeyzâde Mustafa; Camız Imamzâde Reşid Bey; Dr. Feyzullal, a munic-
ipal physician; Draçzâde Sâmi; Nakıbzâde Ahmed; Taşcizâde Ömer; Taşcizâde Mehmed; and
Hacılarlı Mustafa.194
The involvement of all the ranking civilian and military officials with posts in Kayseri in
the organization of the deportations and massacres seems to indicate that the CUP’s deci-
sion to privilege the area had been a wise one. These officials included Ali Sabri Bey, the
mektubci [head of the bureau of correspondence]; Colonel Şahabeddin, the commander of
the Fifteenth Division; Colonel Şahab; Lieutenant-Colonel Tevfik, the presiding judge at the
court-martial; Captain Kuçuk Kazım, the Director of Deportations and the commander of a
squadron of 165 çetes; Major Lutfi Gübgübzâde Sureya, the commander of the gendarmerie;
Major Nureddin, who murdered many Armenian notables; Mehmed Zeki Bey, the police
chief; and Zeki’s assistants Giritli Sâmi Bey, Çerkez Ahmed Aşım Bey, Besim Bey, Yegenoğlu
Mustafa, and Elçizâde Muheddin.195
Once the elimination of the men had been secured, the governmental machine went
into motion. The general deportation order was made public in both Kayseri and Talas on 8
August 1915.196 The deportations began five days later in the city’s outlying neighborhoods
and came to an end with Taldon and the central districts. Armenian assets were confis-
cated and the Monastery of St. Garabed was converted into an orphanage for “Islamicizing
Armenian children,” while certain churches (such as St. Gregory’s) were transformed into
mosques or military depots. While Catholics and Protestants were spared, their property
was still confiscated and they were banished to the city’s outskirts.197 Approximately 20,000
people were deported from Kayseri and Talas.198 The caravans set out on the road that ran
through Incesu, Develi, Nidge, Bor and Ulukışla, under the personal supervision of the CUP
delegate Yakub Cemil Bey.199 According to the American missionary Clara Richmond, some
of the women converted to Islam on the way and were allowed to return to Kayseri and Talas;
children enrolled in the American school were removed from it by the authorities and put in
a Turkish orphanage, except for the oldest, who were transferred to a school in Adana; and
that still other schoolchildren escaped to the mountains, where they gradually formed a band
of 200 children who would later be hunted down and liquidated.200 In late August and early

September, the American missionaries managed to save a few women and children by admit-
ting them to their hospital in Kayseri. In February 1916, however, the authorities confiscated
the American buildings and summoned the last remaining Armenians to convert.201
The survivors who got as far as the Syrian frontier were for the most sent on in the direc-
tion of Hama, Damascus, Maan, Dera’a, and Kerek. Among the men, only a few physicians
were able to remain in Kayseri by converting, such as Dr. Abraham Göcheyan and Sarkis
Kaltakjian.202
The task of seizing Armenian property was entrusted to a committee responsible for
“abandoned property” headed by Nagibzâde Ahmed and Kadili Daniş Bey. Thirteen of their
collaborators – Murad Bey, an official in the Land Registry Office; Abdülaziz Bey; Taşcizâde
Mehmed; Attarzâde Kâmil; Bohcelizâde Ahmed; Imamzâde Reşid; Imamoğlu Ali; Elekcioğlu
Hüsezin; Hacılarlı Mustafa; Ibrahim Safa; Şeyh İbrahimoğlu Fuad; Kâtibzâde Nuh; and
Kürkcüzâde Ömer Hulusi – founded a corporation, the Birlik Cemiyeti, which acquired the
Armenian assets put on sale for virtually nothing. They first acquired a khan and then “pur-
chased” the manufacturing establishments of the Yazejian, Mendigian, Balian, and Jamjian
brothers.203
Massacres and Deportations in Talas and

in the Villages of the Kaza
In the neighboring village of Talas, whose population was reputed to be affluent and little
interested in politics, it seems that there were great tensions between Sabri Bey, the head
of Kayseri’s Bureau of Correspondence and a well-known Young Turk, and the müdir, Faik.
Sabri had been charged with ordering the murder of this official, who demurred at carrying
out the orders bearing on the Armenians of his district. Sabri would later be accused of being
an accomplice of Yakub Cemil’s and of having personally organized the massacres in the
villages near Kayseri. The murders of well-known entrepreneurs in Talas or Kayseri, such as
Vahan Janjian, Gabriel Kurkjian, Markar Yazejian, Vahan Kehayan, or Kevork Janjian, were
chalked up to his account.204 It is, moreover, patent that the prosperity of the Armenians of
Talas had aroused the appetites of certain village notables. Armenian sources note in par-
ticular the rapacity of Talaslı Haci Ahmed Effendi; Zâde Osman; Salih Mehmed; Seyeddin
Evladları Ali; Mehmed; Tafiloğlu Tevfik; Alizâdeoğlu Kâzım; the president of the municipal-
ity of Talas, Ali; Mahmud, a sergeant in the gendarmerie; Hekim Balıhın Hasan; and Eli
Küçük Mehmed, who were both the executioners of the Armenians of Talas and also the
main beneficiaries of their elimination.205
According to the missionary Clara Richmond, employed in the American school in
Talas, the notables, beginning with Boghos Agha, were arrested on Sunday, 13 June.206 The
American school’s Armenian teachers were arrested shortly afterwards and imprisoned in
Kayseri. They were then sent to Gemerek, where they were shot.207
In the month of July, the authorities turned their attention to the men of the village of
Derevank, located 20 minutes from Talas, and also to the men in other localities in the val-
ley. However, as was also the case in Kayseri, it was not until 8 August that the deportation
order was published. On 11 August – that is, on the eve of the departure of the first depor-
tees – Catholics and Protestants were exempted.208 An Armenian source states that, on the
intervention of Dr. Ringate, the departure of the first convoy of deportees was postponed
until 18 August and that the deportation was organized neighborhood by neighborhood in
three convoys: the most affluent families were deported on 18 August, the poorest families
(approximately 1,000 men, women, and children, guarded by gendarmes) were deported on
28 August, and the last Armenians remaining in Talas were deported on 29 August. Our
witness was spared, as were some ten other young people, because he volunteered for combat

duty. He notes that a handful of Protestant women eluded the deportation by taking employ-
ment as servants or nurses.209 Finally, it should be pointed out that until February 1916, the
administration of Talas’s American middle school for girls succeeded in protecting 150 of its
students. But when the authorities invited them to convert and marry Turks, they all refused
to submit and took poison together “to escape from their ferocious guides.”210
The Kaza of Everek/Develi

Five hours southeast of Kayseri, on the southern slope of Mt. Argus, there was still in the
early twentieth century a little cluster of 17 localities inhabited by 19,841 Armenians. The
principal town of the kaza of Everek/Develi, Everek-Fenese, was in fact an agglomeration of
two villages that had merged over the years. There were 8,305 Armenians there in 1914,
including the nearby hamlet of Ilibe. In the modern period, the neighboring village of
Develu, the seat of the kaymakam, was also incorporated into the Armenian agglomeration
around Everek. At the time, the agglomeration had four quarters: 1) Everek Ermeni (1,000
Armenian households); 2) Everek Islam or Develu (120 Turkish households); 3) Fenese (700
Armenian households); and 4) Aykostan (120 Greek households).211
On the eve of the war, the town was thriving, thanks to its production of wine and
liqueurs and also to its silkworm production, which provided the raw material for the local
silk manufactories. An American orphanage, opened in 1910 for Armenian children whose
parents had been massacred the year before in Cilicia, was closed in summer 1914 on orders
from the authorities. Çomaklu, which lay 90 minutes from Everek in the foothills of Mt.
Argus, was home to 1,679 Armenians in 1914, farmers or artisans from Cilicia. A short dis-
tance south of Çomaklu, the village of Incesu had a Turkish-speaking Armenian population
of 1,202. Only 273 Armenians lived in Gömedi, located to the southeast. Another 1,115
Turkish-speaking Armenians from Cilicia lived in Cücün.212
We have already seen that the accidental explosion of a homemade bomb in Everek
touched off a wave of persecution of the Armenians. The main organizer of this was Salih
Zeki, the new kaymakam. Zeki was assisted by local officials and a few Young Turk nota-
bles, such as Ziyali Tosun;213 Osman Bey, the mayor of Everek; and a few notables who
benefited materially from the liquidation of the Armenians: Hafız Effendi; Kantarcı Ali;
Kantarcı Mustafa; Pırınci Mehmed Usta; Hoca Abdüllah; Puruncu Ali Usta Oghlu; Mehmed
Tahrirat; and Kantarcı Osman Effendi.214 The main organizers of the massacres and deporta-
tions were, however, members of Everek’s Ittihadist club, who created a “secret committee”
for the purpose:215 Hakim Bey, the president of the club; Süleyman Vehbi, the director of
the Régie; Mufti Haci Effendi; Ankaralı Ömer; Hafız Effendi; Haci Cafar Abdüllah; Mustafa
Effendi; and Stambolu Ahmed.216
In March 1915, Salih Zeki began by arresting certain local notables, especially politi-
cal activists. He accused the notables of Incesu of “fomenting disorders” and proceeded to
arrest the village headman and the village priest, who were tortured in order to make them
“reveal” the names of the “troublemakers.” Around mid-May, Zeki went to the village in
person, accompanied by a brigade of gendarmes. The priest and his family were murdered,
followed by the occupants of the other houses. Their bodies were then loaded onto carts and
used to stage a spectacle in the vicinity: rifles and boxes of cartridges that had been ripped
open were arranged around the bodies as proof that the gendarmes had eliminated a band of
Armenian rebels. Upon returning to Everek, Salih Zeki informed his hierarchy that he had
had to put down a revolt of Armenians in Incesu, setting up a commission of inquiry and
drawing up a report.217 He then proceeded to systematically arrest the men and confiscate
weapons. Imprisoned in the konak and tortured, some of the men died, while others were
dispatched to Kayseri and “judged” before the court-martial. While some were condemned to

death and hanged with their compatriots in Kayseri, others were “deported to Dyarbekir” –
that is, slaughtered by their guards shortly after having been put on the road. Two groups of
condemned men were thus murdered on the very day they set out: Yeghia Yusufian, Garabed
Gelderian, Avedis Verdiyan, Krikor Melegian, Yeghia Chebukjian, Garabed Shaldibian,
Toros Keshishian, Hovhannes Kazajian, and Avedis Mgrdichian; and Hagop Cherkezian,
Hagop Kalayjian, Krikor Kalayjian, Garabed Gebredanian, Ohannes Oknayan, Mariam
Dzerunian, and Aghavni Dzerunian.218
In the course of July, Zeki ordered the deportation of the kaza’s rural population, arrang-
ing for the convoys to take mountainous routes so as to force them to abandon the goods that
they had taken with them on setting out. In Everek, the deportation order was not published
until early August. Twenty Protestant families were authorized to remain behind; the rest of
the population was put on the road on 18 August. According to the survivors, the convoy
reached Tarsus in 16 days. In several places, the local authorities had the deportees sign obvi-
ously “fictitious” documents attesting that they had received aid, when in fact some of them
died of disease or malnutrition and most of the others had been massacred in Der Zor.219
Of the 13,000 people deported from the kaza, approximately 600 seem to have survived in
Aleppo and another 400 in Damascus.220
A survivor observes, “We Armenians knew well that the Turks had not decided to liqui-
date us because they feared an Armenian insurrection, as they claimed.” In support of what
he says, he reports remarks that Zeki is supposed to have made when notables from Everek
came to plead with him to abandon his plans. Nothing proves that this account is true, but
the substance of it doubtless sums up the spirit then reigning among many ranking Young
Turks:
You, the Armenians, are a people who love progress; you are an industrious, hard-work-
ing people. I wish that we, the Turks, were like you. I appreciate your good qualities,
but what use are they, since they don’t correspond to our interests. Was it conceivable
that the Turk, who is master in this land, should serve you? As everywhere else, so
here, too, I see that the Armenians have beautiful houses, while the Turks have huts;
that the Armenians are well dressed, while the Turks are in rags; that the Armenians
eat well, while the Turks [content themselves] with a crust of bread. So, since we now
have the opportunity, we have decided to eliminate all of you, for the three following
reasons: 1) your civilization and culture; 2) your wealth; 3) your pro-Entente penchants.
Yes, we have taken an oath to eliminate you, but we do not want to kill you fast. There
is still time for that. First, we are going to torture you and make you suffer; one day,
when the Russian army goes on the offensive, it will be easy to wipe all of you out.221
The determination with which Zeki carried out the enterprise of extirpating the entire
Armenian population of his kaza is illustrated by the political tug-of-war in which the kay-
makam was engaged with the commander of the Fifteenth Division of Kayseri, Colonel
Şehabeddin. Şehabeddin, notwithstanding his role in the Kayseri court-martial, which we
have already mentioned, was opposed to deporting the families of soldiers and converts. Zeki
accordingly turned to Istanbul to obtain an order authorizing him to expel these Armenians
to Meskene, in the Syrian Desert, where most of those deported had died.222
In 1914, the town of Tomarza, in the easternmost part of the kaza of Everek, still con-
stituted an altogether singular case because of its social structure and autonomous mode of
functioning. Its 4,388 Armenian inhabitants lived in four neighborhoods that had been ruled
since the twelfth or thirteenth century by four hereditary “princely” families: the Dedeyans,
Kalayjians, Maghakians, and Tamuzians. There were also seven Armenian villages in the
environs of Tomarza: Söyüdlu (pop. 481); Çayrioluk (pop. 100); Tashkhan (pop. 750); Yenice

(pop. 473); Yağdıburun (pop. 227); Karacıyoren (pop. 275); Musahacılı (pop. 173); and Sazak
(pop. 400).223
Among those who bear the main responsibility for the violence visited upon Tomarza
and the environs, the müdir, Ali Effendi; the secretary general in the town hall, Büyük Emin
Haci Ömer; the corporal Kayserli Ali; the gendarmes Mehmed, Hasan, İsmail İsmet, Halil
Çavuş, Haci Bekir, Ahmed Çavuş, and Süleyman Çavuş; among others – a total of 32 peo-
ple224 – organized the searches for arms in the Armenians’ homes and arrested 200 of the
city’s notables. These people were tortured and threatened with death. Twenty were then
set free after paying bribes, and the rest were sent to the kaymakam of Everek. In the end,
70 Martini rifles were handed over to the authorities. It seems, however, that Zeki was not
satisfied with this result. The müdir, Ali, was dismissed and replaced by a certain Osman
Effendi, who undertook new house searches. In the course of this second operation, 196 men
were arrested and deported to Hacın by night. Only after liquidating nearly 400 men was the
deportation order for the rest of the population issued. On 27 August 1915, the inhabitants
of Tomarza were put on the road to Aleppo by way of Hacın, after being divested of their
possessions in Çibaraz, not far from the city, under the supervision of the 32 officials and
notables mentioned above.225 Those in villages in the vicinity such as Tashkan226 apparently
met a similar fate.
By the time the convoy arrived in Aleppo, only 300 of the deportees were still alive. They
were sent to Der Zor, Raffa, or Meskene, where most of them died.227
According to a number of survivors, the worker-soldiers who were employed in an amele taburi
charged with putting up telephone lines in the region were put to death near Tomarza.228
Of all the people implicated in the atrocities inflicted on the Armenian population of the
sancak of Kayseri, only Colonel Şakir Bey was indicted by the Istanbul court-martial in 1920.
He was ultimately acquitted.229
Massacres and Deportations in the Sancak of Kirşehir

Wedged between the districts of Angora and Kayseri, the sancak of Kirşehir had only two
localities with substantial Armenian populations – the prefecture, Kirşehir, with a popula-
tion of 7,150, and to the north, Keskin, the principal town in the kaza of Denek Maden, with
a population of 2,650.230
In June and July, Armenian homes were searched, but the authorities found no trace of
arms or “revolutionaries.” They proceeded to arrest from 15 to 17 young men nonetheless.
Guarded by Ahmed Çavuş, the men were sent to face court-martial in Angora because every
Saturday they had collected alms for the poor that were suspected of having been used for
revolutionary purposes.231 When they arrived in Gülhisar, these young men were stripped
of their belongings and slaughtered. The victims of the next stage of the operation were 14
notables from the city who were deported to Arpaçuhu, where they were slain by the head
of the recruitment office, Muncur Sadir Bey. There followed a new wave of arrests: sixty-
five adults were taken into custody and then massacred by the çetes Şakir Receb and Hasan
Çavuş. The last group to be apprehended (135 males) was taken under guard 20 minutes
outside the city to a place called Gülhisar, near Muncur, and were liquidated by çetes with
the assistance of Turkish locals from a nearby village.232
In Kirşehir, the mutesarif then had the girls and women transferred to the town barracks,
while the children were conducted an hour’s march from the city and left in the middle of
a field to starve to death. The authorities first sealed the Armenians’ houses, after which
officials and notables plundered homes and stores and divided up the booty among them-
selves, leaving objects without value to the committee responsible for liquidating “aban-
doned property.” According to survivors, the girls and women confined in the barracks

were told that they would have to convert if they wanted to escape with their lives. The
pressure was the greater in that thousands of villagers from the vicinity had come to town
to “acquire women.” But after the women and girls had pooled all their jewels and handed
them over to the local Union and Progress club, they were granted a reprieve.233 Seventeen
adolescent boys between the ages of 15 and 19 who were still in the town were rounded up
on the orders of the leaders of the Unionist club, which suggested that they also convert.
After firmly refusing, they were conducted to Çallıgedik, where they were put to death
by Şakir Receb and his çetes. By the time these operations had been terminated, the only
Armenians left in Kirşehir were five or six families of artisans who had converted and a few
other women.234
After organizing the August 1915 massacres, the members of the local Ittihadist club –
Remzi Bey, the head of the post office: Bahirzâde Ziya; Musiroğlu Süleyman; Kara Muhammer
Bey; and Osman Saib Bey, the president of the committee responsible for “abandoned prop-
erty” – appointed themselves to the emval-ı metruke with the blessing of the mutesarif, Hilmi
Bey, and seized the Armenians’ assets.235
Of the government officials implicated in these mass crimes, the most active were
Burhaneddin Rumli, the commander of the battalion of Kirşehir (he was arrested by the
inter-Allied police on 4 March 1919); Asadullah Bey, the commander of the gendarmerie;
Ali Nazmi Bey, the assistant imperial prosecutor and president of the local Ittihad club (who
was deported to Malta in 1919); Hami Bey, the police chief; Kadir Bey, the head of the office
that recruited and organized çete bands; Hilmi Bey, the mutesarif (also deported to Malta
in 1919); Ali Rıza, the assistant police chief; and Rıza’s aides Nuri, Husni Bahirzâde Ziya,
and İsmail Hakkı, also the director of the Tobacco Régie. Among the notables recruited to
lead bands of çetes, Kâzım, the school director (he was later transferred to Smyrna, where
he had been appointed principal of the Sultaniye lycée), İzzet Bey, Sarkıçirzâde Vehbi, Şakir
Receb Bey, Hasan Çavuş, Seifalioğlu Kara Ahmed, Molla Ahmed, Nurizâde Mehmed Ağa,
and Aset Ağa Kara Fakinin Muharrem were the murderers of the Armenian population of
Kirşehir.236
When Yervant Der Mardirosian, a native of Talas, and his military convoy approached
Kirşehir on the evening of 26 August 1915. They encountered a brigade of 900 worker-
soldiers whom a squadron of çetes, accompanied by Turkish adolescents, was getting ready
to liquidate. In town, Der Mardirosian observed that “all males twelve and older” were mas-
sacred, while the women and children were deported.237
In Keskin, events unfolded in much the same way. The kaymakam, Talât Bey, distributed
weapons to the Turkish villagers in the vicinity so that they would be prepared to carry
out a massacre. A member of the town council, Borzakian, who had grasped the gravity
of the situation, had a conversation with Talât Bey and gave him a sizeable sum to head
off the “danger.” One week later, Talât Bey nonetheless proceeded to make mass arrests:
four hundred eighty men were imprisoned in a han, while the local populace was invited to
pillage the Armenian quarter. The first convoy, comprising 130 men, was then put on the
road, escorted by a captain in the gendarmerie, Urfan Bey, who had them slaughtered not
far from the city. The second, third, and fourth groups were sent off under the same condi-
tions, on the basis of lists drawn up by the council under the supervision of the kaymakam.238
In addition to Talât Bey, this council comprised Irfan Bey, the police chief; Hafız Bey, the
head of the recruitment office; Baltalızâde Nuri Bey, the mayor; Sadık Effendi, a mufti; and
Şevket, the assistant police chief. The massacres themselves were perpetrated by çetes under
the orders of four men: Hacializâde Mehmed, Hacializâde Kâmil, Alişan Bey, and Ali Rıza
Bey.239 Upon his arrival in Keskin on 27 August, Der Mardirosian accordingly discovered a
town that had been emptied of its Armenian population with the exception of a few women
and children. Lodged with someone named Osman Effendi, who took him for a Turk, he

learned from his host how he had taken part in the massacre of the men and abducted the
prettiest women.240
The Fate of the Armenian Elite Incarcerated in Ayaş

Ayaş, which, as we have said, is located near the Sincanköy railroad station, 15 kilometers
from the Armenian village of Stanoz and some 50 kilometers west of Angora, was chosen as
the place of imprisonment for the Armenian political elite of Istanbul – some 120 to 150 peo-
ple. The prisoners arrived in Ayaş in several waves, after a stay – short or long, depending on
the prisoner – in Istanbul’s central prison. Vrtanes Mardikian, a survivor, arrived in Angora
by train with 40 companions on the evening of 5 May and was transferred to Ayaş by car
two days later.241 All the prisoners were confined to an immense barracks at a point opposite
the konak of the subprefecture, in cramped conditions: for lack of space, the men slept two to
a bed in beds ranged one over the next. After repeated requests, they were allowed to leave
the barracks for an hour or two a day, under the surveillance of gendarmes, to walk in the
field surrounding their prison.242 Although they were cut off from the world and lacked all
means of subsistence, Khoren Avakian, the station chief in Sincanköy, managed to transmit
information to the capital about the fate of these men. Somewhat later, the Armenians of
Stanoz, who had not yet been deported or massacred, supplied the political prisoners in Ayaş
with basic necessities.243 Very soon, however, the men obtained permission to send two of
their number to the market every morning to buy groceries.
A few details provided by Vrtanes Mardikian show that the prisoners had not lost their
sense of humor. Reveille, sounded every morning by the police chief Ali Rıza himself, gave
rise to comic scenes. The many different pseudonyms used by the political activists interned
in Ayaş made it hard to identify them, the more so as the police chief had some trouble
pronouncing their names (Marzbed, for example, became “Marizabad”). The explanations
offered every morning by people who had been arrested in someone else’s stead, because
their names sounded more or less like those of the Armenians who were supposed to have
been arrested, were also an occasion for general hilarity. Every morning, Nshan Odian, who
had been mistaken for Yervant Odian, reminded Ali Rıza, who persisted in calling him
Yervant, that he wasn’t the man in question, and was, moreover, a member of the Social-
Democratic Hnchak Party.244 Politicians of every stripe, writers, and journalists lived more
or less harmoniously side-by-side, all taking part in the chores and also the gymnastics led
by the jurist Shavarsh Krisian. Dr. Avedis Nakashian notes that the members of this elite,
who often belonged to antagonistic political currents, had by this time understood that their
fate was in no sense due to the positions they had held earlier, but solely to the fact that they
comprised the elite of the Armenian nation. “Representatives” chosen by the internees were
even invited to write to the interior minister to request that he initiate legal proceedings to
judge their acts and have them released. The atmosphere changed when the news that the
20 Hnchak activists had been hanged reached them.245 Murad (Hampartsum Boyajian), the
Hnchak leader, had been transferred to Kayseri on 11 May, as had his comrade Marzbed one
week later, in order to be “judged” before the court-martial there.246 It was, however, the 2
June departure of the six main political leaders – Rupen Zartarian, Nazareth Daghavarian,
Karekin Khajag, Aknuni (K. Malumian),247 Harutiun Jangulian, and Sarkis Minasian – that
marked the beginning of the liquidation of the Istanbul Armenian elite. Officially, these
six men were sent to Dyarbekir to face court-martial there.248 In fact, after passing through
Aleppo, where they remained for a short time, the men were murdered, on orders from
Captain Şevket, halfway between Urfa and Severek in a place called Karacur, by Haci Tellal
Hakimoğlu, known as Haci Onbaşi,249 a çete chief in the forces of the Special Organization
based in Severek.250

We know, moreover, that Parsegh Shabaz, a Dashnak leader, was brought before the court-
martial of Mezreh/Harput on 19 June and that the Armenians who had been arrested by mis-
take or who had benefited from the intercession of people in high places – such as Mardikian
or Nakashian, a non-partisan parliamentary deputy from Istanbul – were released in July.251
Mardikian confirms that the psychiatrist Boghosian, who was later sent to Aleppo as a munic-
ipal physician, was transferred to Çanğırı, adding that, when he left Ayaş there were still 53
or 54 prisoners there, the poet Siamanto among them.252 Shortly thereafter, at an unspecified
date, the authorities informed these men (none of them would survive) that they were going
to be released and transferred to Angora, where they could board trains. At some distance
from the ancient city of Ankyra, in the Elmadağrı valley, Harutiun Shahrigian, Hrach (Hayg
Tirakian), Dr. Garabed Pashayan, Nerses Zakarian, and some 30 of their companions were
tortured and then executed by a squadron of çetes of the Special Organization.253

Chapter 11

the Vilayet of Kastamonu
I
n this immense vilayet, with a surface area of 60,000 square kilometers stretching along
the Black Sea coast, there remained on the eve of the First World War some Armenian
colonies with a total population of 13,461. The prosperous Armenians of the vilayet main-
tained 17 churches and 18 schools, with a total enrollment of over 2,500 boys and girls. Most
of the vilayet’s Armenian communities had been founded by Armenians from Nakhichevan
and Yerevan early in the seventeenth century.1
The sancak of Kastamonu boasted 18 Armenian communities. They were to be found in
the principal town of the kaza (pop. 653/140 households), Kadinsaray (pop. 154/35 house-
holds), Mururig (pop. 35/6 households), Kurucik (pop. 800/130 households), Daday (pop.
208/40 households), Gerizköy (pop. 102/20 households), Karabüyük (pop. 238/45 households),
Devrekianu (pop. 183/38 households), Taşköprü (pop. 1,250/250 households), and the sur-
rounding villages, Çuruş (pop. 33/6 households), Belençay (pop. 95/18 households), Gücüksu
(pop. 79/16 households), Iregül (pop. 91/17 households), Malahköy (pop. 77/14 households),
Ğaracı (pop. 97/18 households), and Yumacik (pop. 99/18 households).2
The sancak of İnebolu on the Black Sea coast had four Armenian parishes: İnebol (pop.
198); Daşköprü, located some 30 kilometers northeast of Kastamonu (pop. 1,497), Eskiatfa
(pop. 434); and, in the southwestern part of the sancak, Tosya (pop. 130).3 Barely 1,000
Armenians lived in the southernmost sancak, Çanğırı. Almost all of them in the prefecture;
the others lived in the kazas of Koçhisar and Tuhtenli (pop. 129).4
In other words, the vilayet had only isolated communities of little demographic weight,
located in a Turkish-speaking region far from the war theater. This no doubt explains why
the CUP chose to intern a good part of the Constantinople Armenian elite in a town in
this region, Çanğırı, some 100 kilometers south of Kastamonu, late in April 1915.5 The
Ittihad had, moreover, sent one of its leading members, Cemal Oğuz, to Çanğırı as the par-
ty’s responsible secretary, notably in order to oversee the treatment these men received.6
It also established its inspector Hasan Fehmi, one of the party’s chief propagandists, in
Kastamonu.7 It was Fehmi who instructed the vali, Reşid Bey, to proceed with the liquida-
tion of the Armenians living in his vilayet and who ultimately had him recalled when he
refused to obey the order.8 The appointment of Atıf Bey, who had served as interim vali
of Angora until 3 October 1915, to the post of vali of Kastamonu in place of Reşid Bey
confirms, were there any need, the real objectives of the Young Turk leadership in the
region. What is more, Atıf received this promotion as a reward for “applying the program
to extirpate the Armenians” in Angora, according to an official of the Tobacco Régie.9
The vilayet’s secretary general (defterdar), Fuad Bey, briefly served as interim vali with
the support of the Unionist representatives Hasan Fehmi and Cemal Oğuz.10 On occa-
sion, Dr. Fazıl Berki, the CUP’s special delegate, also came to Kastamonu to supervise

Black Sea Sinop
KASTAMONU
Bolu N
çangırı
çorum
the departure of the political prisoners. The vilayet’s Armenian population, however, had
been spared until Atıf’s arrival. Atıf initially called on the help of the local Ittihad club
in carrying out the liquidation of the Armenians of Kastamonu. At the head of it were
Sultan Effendi; Vasfi Effendi; Mehmed Ekşioğlu, the president of the municipality; Hasan
Fahri Bey; Mustafa Effendi, the police chief of the vilayet; Nureddin, the police chief in
Kastamonu; and Dolmacizâde Cemal, a member of the regional council.11 The Armenians
of Çanğırı had managed to escape the first wave of deportations by raising a sum of 460
Turkish pounds and turning it over to Cemal Oğuz and his coworkers.12 Early in October,
however, a week after Atıf assumed office, 2,000 men were deported, 300 of them from
Kastamonu. These deportees from the Kastamonu and Çanğırı areas took the following
route: Çorum, Yozgat, Incirli, Talas, Tomarza, Hacın, Osmaniye, Hasanbeyli, Islahiye,
and then Meskene, Der Zor, and Abuharar. Twenty-one political internees from Çanğırı,
including Vahram Asturian, Azarig, Yervant Chavushian, and Khachadur Khachadurian,
were incorporated into this convoy.13 Clara Richmond confirms that they passed through
Talas in October 1915.14
The Fate of the Elite Interned in Çanğırı

It is of course the fate meted out to the roughly 150 members of the Armenian elite confined
in Çanğırı that gives a special twist to the events that occurred in this vilayet. We have
already noted that these “intellectuals” here lived under conditions of house arrest, unlike
the political prisoners in Ayaş who were confined in a barracks.15 Each internee had to pro-
vide his own means of subsistence and rent lodgings from a local landlord. Several witnesses
say that the prisoners formed groups based on personal affinities, with each man playing a
particular role in these reconstructed households. After a brief stay in Çanğırı, eight people
were authorized to return to Istanbul on 11 May: Dr. Vahram Torkomian, the journalist
Piuzant Kechyan, the musicologist Gomidas Vartabed, the pharmacist Hagop Nargilejian,
the journalist Yervant Tolayian, the minister Keropian, Dr. Misak Jevahirjian, and the den-
tist Zareh Bardizbanian.16 Shortly afterward, a second group comprising some 20 people was
also authorized to return to the capital.17 Interpretations as to why these men were released
vary widely, depending on the source. In the cases of Gomidas or Torkomian, for example,

Deportations and Massacres: Kastamonu 529
it is said that diplomatic circles in Istanbul or court circles interceded on their behalf. It
is also possible that after CUP bodies or the interior minister examined the matter it was
concluded that this or that individual had been rather hastily added to the list of those to
be banned. According to Armenian sources, a member of the Unionist Central Committee,
İsmail Canbolat, was charged with reviewing the files of those interned in Çanğırı,18 so it
is possible that Canbolat allowed the Armenians whom he considered the most innocuous
to return to Istanbul. It is also noteworthy that one of those detained, Stepan Tatarian,
was transferred to Kayseri early in July in order to face court-martial there, and that in the
same period four men – Dr. Boghosian, Melkon Giulesarian, Onnig Maghazajian, and Jirayr
(Onnig Gholnagdarian) – were allowed to return from Ayaş, probably because they had
nothing to do with the political prisoners.19
Once these adjustments had been made, it was decided to proceed with the liquidation
of the remaining detainees. According to an Armenian survivor, the first group of those
exiled to Çanğırı, comprising 56 people, was put on the road on 11 or 18 July 1915 and slain
to a man shortly thereafter.20 The second convoy of “intellectuals” set out on 19 August. In
this group were, among others, Baruyr Arzumanian; Dr. Stepan Miskjian; the pharmacist
Krikor Miskjian; Krikor Yesayan; N. Der Kaprielian (Shahnur); the teacher and writer
Mihran Tabakian; the pharmacist Hagop Terzian; Harutiun Kalfayan; the journalist Aram
Andonian; Mihran, Levon, and Kevork Kayekjian; the pharmacist Asadur Arsenian; the
Russian consulate’s translator, Momjian; and Parunag Sarukhan.21 We know a great deal
more about the fate of the second group because, while none in the first group survived,
there were two survivors in the second. Thus, we know that these men were interned in
the prison in Angora from 20 to 24 August and that on the evening of the 24th, with the
exception of Andonian, who had accidentally broken his leg and been transferred to the
hospital in Angora, all were put on the road and killed a few days later in the vicinity of
Yozgat.22
It seems that a special fate was reserved for five men, among them the physician and
writer Rupen Sevag (Chilingirian) and the poet Daniel Varuzhan. These two were put
on the road after the second convoy set out and murdered by twelve çetes six hours from
Çanğırı, near the khan of Tüney, on 26 August.23 There were only 37 internees left at
Çanğırı by the time Atıf Bey was named vali of Kastamonu early in October.24 Among
them was Diran Kelekian, who was also subjected to special treatment. Officially, Kelekian
had been authorized to leave Çanğırı, but was banned from Istanbul. A close friend of
Atıf’s, Kelekian took advantage of the appointment of his friend to ask for permission to set-
tle in Smyrna.25 According to an official in the Tobacco Regie, Mehmed Necib, it was Atıf
who decided to send this Mulkiye professor away and have him killed.26 Aram Andonian,
however, maintains that Kelekian’s murder should not be blamed on Atıf. He reports that
the commander of the gendarmerie, Nureddin, and five other men came to search his room
in Çanğırı, arrested him, and put him on the road the night of 20 October, officially so that
he might stand trial at Çorum. According to testimony from the navy captain Mustafa
Ethem and a coworker of his on the staff of “Hospital Number 2,” the pharmacist Haroutiun
Beshirian, Diran Kelekian was murdered at eight o’clock that night on the road between
Yozgat and Kayseri, near the Çokgöz Bridge over the Kızılirmak.27 It is probable that the
order to kill him came from Istanbul.
The Main Culprits for the Deportations in Çanğırı

Among those most deeply implicated in the violence visited on the Armenians of the
sancak of Çanğırı, apart from Cemal Oğuz, the CUP’s responsible secretary, we must
underscore the roles played by the mufti Atta Effendi, president of the local Ittihad club;

Süruri, the president of the municipality; Kürd Köylü Hasan Effendi, a member of the
city council; Palancızâde Haci Şakir; Dolmacızâde Cemal; Cincircizâde İsmail; Abdüllah
Effendi; Haciefezâde İsmail; Ali Effendi; Nureddin Bey, the commander of the gendarme-
rie; and Manasebeci Rifât. Among the notables who took advantage of their positions on
the committee responsible for “abandoned property” in order to enrich themselves were
Sarı Yasefoğlu Yasef, İzzet Effendi, Yuzbaşizâde Hamdi, Halvacioğlu Cevad, Haci Effendi
Zâde, Haci İsmail Effendi, Tellal Ahmed, and Semerci Çivici Mehmed Usta. Şükrü Bey,
the mutesarif; Abdülrahim, an imam; Hafiz Ahmed, a muezzin; and Salih Effendi, Mehmed
Fahri, and Salih Sabri, all of them government officials, also took part in “divvying up”
the Armenians’ property. Among the police and military officials, Binbaşi Lutfi, the com-
mander of the gendarmerie; İzzet, the head of the Recruitment Office; Remzi, the police
chief; and Remzi’s assistants Vehib and Fehmi, oversaw the deportation and certain massa-
cres together with their subordinates Husni Çavuş, Salih Çavuş, Süleyman Çavuş, and Lutfi
Şükrü. The local operations of the Special Organization were supervised by Osman Talât,
a jurist; Ömeroğlu Zeki; Sirri Bey, the former mutesarif; Arabaci İsmail, a çete; and Ali, who
murdered Rupen Sevag (Chilingirian).28
After the armistice, only Cemal Oğuz had to answer for his acts. His trial before the
court-martial in Istanbul began in December 1919. He was notably charged with having
“committed major abuses connected with the provision of supplies.”29 At the 3 February 1920
session of his trial he denied “ever having participated in the Armenian affair.” But a witness
recalled the considerable influence that he exerted over state officials and described how he,
in unison with the interim vali and the commander of the gendarmerie, had taken several
hundred pounds gold from the Armenian populace in exchange for a promise not to deport
them. Yet he had, this witness went on, deported the Armenians from Çanğırı. They were
massacred near the han of Tüney.30 Oğuz was condemned and sentenced to five years of hard
labor, but was allowed to remain in the hospital of Gümüşsu.31
Massacres and Deportations in the Sancak of Bolu

In 1914, Bolu’s Armenian colony had barely 1,220 members. It profited from the city’s geo-
graphical location on the main road through Asia Minor to engage in very profitable trade.
Duzce, northwest of Bolu, had an Armenian population of 392; Deverek, 50 kilometers fur-
ther east, had an Armenian population of 670; Zonguldak, on the coast, had a community
with 512 members; finally, Bartin had a community of 420.32
The elimination of the men was carried out behind a facade of legal proceedings. A
“commission of inquiry” headed by someone name Mehmed Ali Bey was created in Bolu. Its
leading member was the police chief, İzzet Bey, who was responsible for house searches and
arrests. The court-martial, under the presiding judge Sopaci Mehmed, was responsible for
condemning those indicted. Its activities were overseen by Dr. Ahmed Midhat, chief of police
in Constantinople, who had been sent by the CUP to Bolu to supervise the 24 September
deportation and massacre of the sancak’s Armenian population, with the help of Suraya
Effendi, a member of the district’s general council; Habib Bey, a parliamentary deputy from
Bolu; and İbrahim Bey (who had been implicated in the 1909 Adana massacres) and Tahir
Bey, the leaders of a squadron of çetes that counted among its ranks, notably, Hafız Ali, Sarı
Mehmed, Postaci Nuri, and Cendarma Kancarci Emin.33
An Armenian survivor, held in the prison of Bolu until the end of his trial on 23 January
1916, reports that some of those indicted were accused of being members of the Armenian
Benevolent Society and condemned to hard labor for that reason, and that others were
condemned to death and executed for reasons just as trivial. He notes, for example, the
28 September/11 October 1915 execution of Siragan Papazian, a native of Adabazar, and

Deportations and Massacres: Kastamonu 531
Aliksan Harutiunian; on 21 December 1915/3 January 1916, of Stepan Ahtzaian, Divrig,

Nshan Markarian, Mgrdich Bartevian, Sarkis Lazian, Karekin Papelian, and Stephani
(a Greek); on 28 December 1915/10 January 1916, of Father Goriun of Adabazar, Sarkis
Kozayian, Ohannes Kozayian, Nazaret Tashjian, Mihran Tashjian, Garabed Haotzian,
Mihran Kiremijian, and others; on 21 March/3 April 1916, of Bedros Genjian, Boghos,
Ohannes Muradian, Khachig Mardirosian, and Hampartsum Cheian; and, on 3/16 October
1916, of Siragan Stambultsian, Armash, Hagop Bijoyan, Kangal, Iskander Tumanian, and
Garabed Zenian, Chengiler.34
According to another account, the police chief İzzet Bey played a crucial role in con-
cocting the indictments by planting “prohibited objects: weapons, bombs, and so forth, and
English, French and Russian flags” in Armenian homes. He is also supposed to have sum-
moned the Armenian notables to the prefecture, where they were arrested and then handed
over to the çetes.35 It is probably that İzzet’s superiors in Istanbul had demanded that an
indictment be fabricated in order to justify the deportation order that Ahmed Midhat took
it upon himself to carry out. The same source has it that Mondays were “holidays for the
Turks, since Monday was hanging day.” The gallows were erected on the square where the
city government was based, toward which “a crowd overflowing with sinister joy” streamed.
Many children were “adopted” by Turkish families, while young Armenian women were
“imprisoned in the harems.”36
Massacres and Deportations in the Sancak of Sinop

In Sinop, a wooded peninsula, there were three Armenian colonies in 1914, in Kuyluci,
Aliseylik, and Göldağ, with a total population of 1,125. Gerze, on the Black Sea coast, had
an Armenian population of 491. The densest Armenian population in the sancak, how-
ever, was to be found in the interior, in Boyabad and the surrounding villages: the total
Armenian population here was 3,650.37 Boyabad constituted Atıf’s first target. As soon as he
was appointed in early October 1915, he had 800 men arrested and interned in the mosque.
Officially, some of them were sent to Angora in order to face court-martial. They disappeared
on the way there.38 The rest of the population was deported by way of Çanğırı, where prison-
ers from Istanbul saw it pass by in mid-October. These people were probably massacred near
Yozgat, as were many other deportees from these areas near the Black Sea.39
We have no reports about the fate of the Armenian men of Sinop and Bartin. We do
know, however, that the rest of the population of these two localities was deported by way of
Sıvas40 and, consequently, must have endured the hell of Fırıncilar.

Chapter 12
Constantinople in the Period of the

W
e have discussed the circumstances surrounding the arrests of the Armenian elite
of the Ottoman capital, as well as the deterioration of the climate brought on by
the May-June 1915 trial of the Hnchaks.1 Official government statements and the
press campaign orchestrated by the government for the purpose of collectively portraying
the Armenians as “traitors” were obviously intended to convince the public of the need for
present and future violence.
By early May 1915, of the Armenian elite of Constantinople, only two figures of impor-
tance – the parliamentary deputies Krikor Zohrab and Vartkes Seringiulian – were still
present in the capital. Their interventions with the interior minister and the grand vizier had
not produced the expected results. On the contrary, they seemed to have convinced the two
Armenians of the Young Turk government’s real intentions. Both Zohrab and Seringiulian
were encouraged by their entourage to flee the country but, reacting in much the same fash-
ion, both refused even to contemplate leaving. On 18 May, Zohrab told Martin Hagopian,
a notable who offered to help him flee: “To whom do you want me to abandon this people,
without leadership or a chief? I do not want to leave; it is my duty to remain on the front
lines to the very last.”2 The public announcement of the temporary deportation law on 27
May, and the information then reaching the Armenian Patriarchate about the massacres in
the provinces, left little doubt about the Young Turks’ intentions. In the course of a stormy
exchange on 1 June with Talât and the CUP’s secretary general, Midhat Şükrü, Zohrab
demanded an explanation for the crimes that had been perpetrated against Armenians in
the eastern provinces. He pointed out to the interior minister that he would eventually
have to account for his actions and when that day came he would not be able to “justify his
crimes.” Sure of himself, Talât responded that he did not see who could possibly ask him to
given an account of himself. The Armenian lawyer answered: “I can, in parliament, in my
capacity as an Armenian deputy.”3 The next day, Zohrab, the Senator Zareh Dilber, the par-
liamentary deputy Bedros Halajian, and the newly resigned minister Oskan Mardikian met
at the “Petit Club.” The purpose of this meeting of men close to the Young Turk government
was to evaluate the situation.4 There is every reason to think that these individuals, who
knew the political mores of the leaders of the CUP better than anyone else, concluded that
a program to extirpate the Armenian population was being put into effect. Nevertheless,
that evening, Zohrab went to the “Cercle d’Orient,” where he played cards with the interior
minister. Two hours after he went back home, the police chief in Pera, Kel Osman, knocked
at his door. Osman searched Zohrab’s apartment, confiscated his personal papers, and then
asked the Armenian lawyer to follow him. At the same moment, Vartkes was also arrested
in his home.5 After being briefly detained in the police station in Galatasaray, the two men
were transferred by boat to the train station at Haydarpaşa under police escort.6 Officially,

they were sent to Dyarbekir in order to face a court-martial. They were murdered on 19 July
on the road to Dyarbekir, shortly after setting out from Urfa, by the famous Çerkez Ahmed,7
who had become the head of a group of “Circassian” çetes.8
Patriarch Zaven’s Impossible Undertaking

On his own witness, the Armenian patriarch found himself singularly isolated on the
Istanbul political scene after Zohrab and Vartkes were deported.9 To the multiple takrir
(requests) that the Patriarchate had addressed to the government from late April 1915
on, the minister of justice had ultimately given an oral response, delivered to the Chief
Secretary of the Armenian Patriarchate, Kamer Shirinian. The statutes of the Patriarchate,
the justice minister said, did not authorize it to make “such political” takrir.10 Of the dip-
lomats then residing in Istanbul, Dr. Mordtmann, the dragoman at the German embassy
who was responsible for Armenian matters there, met with Patriarch Zaven more fre-
quently than anyone else; it appears that he had been charged with feeling out the reac-
tions of Armenian circles.11 His 10 June 1915 visit to the Armenian prelacy was all the
more important in that it took place shortly after Zohrab and Vartkes were deported – that
is to say, at the moment when the authorities decided definitively to close off all channels
of dialogue with the Armenian elite. It also coincided with Dr. Johannes Lepsius’s arrival
in Istanbul in early June,12 which gave the patriarch reason to hope that the Germans
had taken a less-hostile position to the Armenian population or had might even been pre-
pared to intervene on its behalf. Doubtless in order to allay the patriarch’s apprehensions,
Mordtmann suggested to him that the deportation of the population of Erzerum that had
begun on 1 May, “toward the south, far from the front,” was a desirable measure, given the
military situation on the front. The “information” he had about a commission of inquiry
sent to Zeitun “to assess the value of the land owned by the population of the town and
its environs,” so that it might be more justly “indemnified,” was probably also dictated by
his desire to relieve the patriarch’s fears. Zaven Yeghiayan, for his part, pointed out to the
German diplomat that Ambassador Wangenheim had assured him that there would be no
massacres, but that “what is happening now is much worse than the massacres.” In fact,
Armenian circles in the capital were apprised of the situation in the provinces until the
last days of May, thanks to wires from the provincial prelates. But this source of informa-
tion dried up when all communication by telegraph with the provinces was outlawed. From
then on, assessments of the situation could only be based on reports from people arriving
from the provinces.13 It is probable that, with only these scraps of information at his dis-
posal, the patriarch could not take the full measure of the eradication program, so that
there remained at least a little doubt as to the intentions of the Young Turk government.
Even the joint declaration that the powers of the Triple Entente had published on 24 May
1915, which held the Ottoman government responsible for the “crimes against human-
ity” committed against the Armenians,14 could be construed as an almost classic wartime
propaganda maneuver. The Young Turk government’s reaction, which consisted in deny-
ing that there had been massacres and attacking Great Britain and Russia for inciting
the Armenians to revolt, had itself been transformed into an anti-Armenian campaign.
Furthermore, Patriarch Zaven later conceded that at the time of his conversation with
Lepsius in mid-June, he was still very much in the dark about the events that had occurred
in the provinces, having only taken measure of the crime when his nephew Dikran, a
student at Harput’s Euphrates College, arrived in the capital in August 1915.15 It was from
his nephew that the patriarch learned how the notables of the city – such as the primate
Bsag Der Khorenian or Nicolas Tenekejian, a teacher – were arrested and killed, the state
in which the deportees who arrived from the north found themselves, or, again, the fact

Constantinople: Deportations and Massacres 535
that countless corpses lay strewn along the road running through Malatia that his nephew
had taken on his way to the capital.16
After making several fruitless bids to obtain an interview with the interior minister, the
patriarch was finally referred to the minister of justice and religious confessions, İbrahim
Pirizâde, who received him on 8 July 1915. In other words, the authorities proved willing to
receive Zaven only in his capacity as a religious leader. Moreover, the minister initially refused
to say anything about the fate of the civilian population, although he ultimately admitted
the fact of the deportations, which he claimed had taken place “in the best of conditions,
because the government ha[d] given the necessary orders.”17 The response of the patriarch,
who stressed that “all these measures show that the government does not have confidence
in our nation and wants to wipe our people out,”18 suggests that he had a clear perception of
events. For İbrahim Pirizâde, “All this [was] the work of the military authorities, who took the
measures that they considered necessary ... While the empire is making tremendous efforts to
ensure its survival, and is shedding its blood, one has to be careful not to antagonize it.” Zaven
answered by pointing out that the Armenians, too, were shedding their “blood for the father-
land,” while their women and children were being “expedited to the deserts.” He also said that
he understood that the military authorities had to employ “the means they deem[ed] necessary
in the combat zone,” but could not understand why they should do this “everywhere,” thereby
condemning “more than a million people” to death. Finally, he asked the minister “why the
government was punishing women and children, who could not be accused of engaging in
activity directed against the government?”19 The minister’s answer was calculated to justify
the authorities’ decision: he pointed out that they did not want to “deprive families of their
men” and had accordingly opted for a “collective displacement.” This answer shows how lit-
tle credence could be put in the justifications advanced by the government. Pirizâde also
reminded the patriarch that it was a question of the measures taken by the military authorities
in view of the military imperatives with which they were faced.20
Two days later, on 10 July 1915, the Zaven was granted an audience with the grand vizier,
Said Halim, to whom he revealed his underlying concerns at the very outset of their conver-
sation. His people’s plight, he said, obliged him to beg for “the government’s mercy.” He was
now alone, he added, and left to wonder why the state had decided to inflict this fate on his
people, “why it had been condemned to death.”21 Halim’s answer was the more interesting in
that it traced the measures taken against the Armenians back to the reforms in the eastern
provinces. While the grand vizier did not deny that the Armenians’ situation was a “painful”
one, he maintained that they were to blame for it. They had demanded reforms and their
“one segment of the population had taken up arms” against the empire. Zaven Yeghiayan
of course rejected the charge that there had been a “general uprising,” noting that “the
reports sent to the government distort the facts or are deliberately misleading.” He regret-
ted above all that the authorities were punishing “a whole people” and suggested that they
take their example from “Sultan Abdülhamid, contenting themselves with massacring only
the men.”22 Halim denied that the government had set itself “the objective of liquidating
the Armenian people,” but admitted, “that since means of transport were nonexistent, the
muhaciret [migration] could prove difficult.” The rest of the two men’s exchange, as described
in the patriarch’s memoirs, shows a prelate who was trying desperately to bring the authori-
ties to abandon the idea of deporting the Armenian population living outside the border
regions. Halim, however, told him that “the government [had] made an irrevocable decision.”
“Whatever happens,” he said, “they will have to leave.” At the end of the conversation, the
grand vizier finally asked the patriarch why he had not gone to see Talât, thus giving him to
understand that it was Talât who had the power to bring the persecutions to an end. “When
I told him that he would not receive me,” Zaven writes, “he answered: ‘none of this should
ever have happened.’ ”23

Yeghiayan also interceded with the president of the Ottoman Parliament, Halil [Menteşe],24
a Young Turk leader who was reputed to be less radical than the others;25 for, according
to Wangenheim, the patriarch now seemed to “have given up hope of bringing about an
improvement in the situation by intervening with the Turkish government.”26 According to
the patriarch, Halil had received Zohrab, Vartkes, and Halajian after the declaration of war in
order to encourage them to think about the fact that the Armenians were now “defenseless.”
Yeghiayan writes that upon returning from Germany, however, he found that the situation
had deteriorated and endeavored to save the deputies Zohrab and Vartkes “by, at the very
least, having them confined to Aleppo.”27 Like Said Halim, he suggested that the patriarch
“discuss the matter” with Talât, and “immediately reached for his telephone” and obtained
an appointment for him for the next day, while also promising, “to do all that [was] in [his]
power.” On 2 October 1915, the Zaven went to see the interior minister. At the beginning of
their conversation, Talât declared that the Armenians “bore the blame for the situation” and
that he knew that they had decided to “precipitate a revolution” and “support the Russians,”
stockpiling “arms and bombs everywhere” for that purpose. He also attacked them for their
“responsibility for the fact that part of the country [had] fallen into the Russians’ hands.” In
response, Yeghiayan pointed out that “these things [were] the doings of a few individuals,”
which provoked the retort: “Not of a few, not of a few thousand, and not of a few hundred
thousand. Today, it is one political party; tomorrow, another will come into existence. Those
who don’t belong to a party will join one.”28 Without a doubt, Talât was here expressing, with
a ring of sincerity, the central preoccupation of the CUP, which perceived all Armenians as
a future threat for the country. The patriarch pointed out to him that even if his accusations
were legitimate, nothing could justify the fate that had been inflicted on the women, or the
fact that “children [were] being abducted and entrusted to others.” Punishment, he said,
should be “proportionate to the crime.” Talât thereupon declared that “nothing of the sort
was occurring,” to which the patriarch rejoined that it was enough to note that many of these
children were now to be found in the capital. The minister promised that he would com-
mission an inquiry into the matter and punish the “guilty.” Zaven also told him that “[t]he
Armenians [had been] devastated at seeing that they had received this blow from one of the
figures whom they held in highest esteem.” Talât confirmed that he “loved the Armenians,
because [he knew] just how useful they were to the country,” but added that he “[loved] the
fatherland even more than the Armenians.”
At this point in the conversation, the Zaven drew to the minister’s attention the situa-
tion of the Armenians of Rodosto/Tekirdağ, then being deported. Talât had accused these
Armenians of having “inflicted all kinds of brutalities on the Muslims during the Bulgarian
occupation,” contesting the patriarch’s claim that “some deported families [had], at the
time, provided financial aid to the families of the muhacirs.” He also requested that the
authorities aide the deportees and that they not leave young women “scattered through the
villages,” defenseless and without resources.29 The minister promised that the government
would consider the request, on condition that the patriarch not interfere in these matters.
As to the fate of the Armenian clergymen, Talât declared that many, such as the prelate of
Kayseri (whose trial we have discussed),30 were traitors and members of political parties.31
Thus, he implicitly identified the reason for which the Armenian religious leaders had been
“punished.”
In summer and fall 1915, the Armenian patriarch, besides making these appeals to the
key Young Turk political leaders, sought counsel from people reputed to be close to the CUP,
such as the former minister of the Postal and Telegraph Service, Oskan Bey Mardikian.
Mardikian suggested that he turn to the Şeyh ul-Islam, Musa Kâzım, a convinced Ittihadist.
Kâzım, however, refused to intervene.32 The patriarch also appealed to someone who was
close to the Sultan and, to the heir apparent, Prince Yusuf İzzeddin, Senator Abraham Pasha

Yeramian. However, Yeramian shirked his responsibilities on the grounds that his interven-
tion could produce no results.33 Among the Armenian notables who had been spared, it
seems that the only one to work regularly at the patriarch’s side was Vahram Torkomian, who
had been briefly detained in Çanğırı. At Zaven’s request, Torkomian, the private physician
of Prince Abdülmecid, second in line to the throne, went to see the prince on 22 August
1915, in an attempt to persuade him to intercede with the Sultan on the Armenians’ behalf.
According to Yeghiayan, Abdülmecid did not meet with Sultan Reşid to raise the question
of the Armenians’ plight until 8 October, when the sultan supposedly told him that he would
do “what was necessary” and that he had “already repeatedly spoken with Talât,” but that
the Talât had “turned a deaf ear” to his appeals.34 In his memoirs, the patriarch notes bitterly
that people such as Hrant Asadur, a member of the Council of State, blatantly ignored him,
and that Bedros Halajian, a deputy from Constantinople, former minister, and a member
of the Ittihad, avoided him and did not lift a finger to save anyone. Among the Armenian
deputies still alive, only Onnig Ihsan, who had been elected in Smyrna, endeavored to save
people, sometimes successfully. Kegham Der Garabedian, a Dashnak deputy who had been
spared because he had tuberculosis; Bishop Yeghishe Turian, the former patriarch; Hayg
Khojasarian, the president of the Armenian Chamber; Dr. Krikor Tavitian, the president
of the Political Council; the patriarchal vicar, Yervant Perdahjian; and the chief secretary
of the Patriarchate, Kamer Shirinian, who had a reputation as a Turkophile, also gave the
patriarch valuable help and rendered him numerous services.35
Although he was unable to temper the Young Turks’ positions, the patriarch neverthe-
less took it upon himself to inform the outside world of the information he had about the
Armenian population’s plight. In his memoirs, he reports that he sent his unsigned reports to
the bishop of the Armenians of Bulgaria, Ghevont Turian, by way of the Italian embassy.36
His sources of information were quite varied: they included reports by an Islamicized woman
from Bayburt, a young woman from Zile who had been abducted by a Turkish officer and
was living in Istanbul, a Muslim traveler who had come from Harput, foreigners who had
arrived from Erzincan, and so on.37 The details that he provides show that the patriarch was,
from early fall 1915 on, informed about the fate of the Armenians in the vilayets of Erzerum,
Trebizond, Sıvas, Mamuret ul-Aziz, Bitlis, and Dyarbekir, as well as that of the soldiers of the
amele taburis based in the regions of Erzerum, Dyarbekir, and Harput, or, again, about the
situation in Aleppo, Ras ul-Ayn, and Der Zor. In a report of his dated 15 August 1915, he was
already estimating the human losses at around 500,000.38
The patriarch had, moreover, helped organize a network to distribute aid to the depor-
tees who had reached Syria. In this connection, he affirms that the American embassy’s
legal advisor, Arshag Shemavonian, played a crucial role in obtaining Gomidas’s release,
which others had also sought, and that he had, above all, persuaded the American Red
Cross to send the deportees material aid. Initially, this aid was funneled to the Ottoman
Red Crescent, in accordance with this international organization’s standard procedure. But
the Americans saw that their Ottoman counterparts were not passing on any aid at all.39 A
committee made up of American and German missionaries was therefore created in Aleppo
with the support of the U.S. and German consulates. It served to channel the aid sent by the
Constantinople patriarch and the American-Armenian community. It is also known that
Ambassador Morgenthau intervened on the deportees’ behalf, even if his actions failed to
produce the desired results.40
The patriarch is much less indulgent when it comes to the papal nuncio Angelo Maria
Dolci. He notes that Dolci was incapable of gaining access to the Sublime Porte and interven-
ing to save deportees.41 On the other hand, he has words of praise for the Austro-Hungarian
ambassador, Johann von Pallavicini, whom he was able to approach thanks to a Mkhitarist
monk in Vienna, Father Khoren. While the Austrian diplomat did not succeed in convincing

the authorities to allow Armenians who had not yet been deported to remain in their native
regions; stabilizing the situation of the deportees in concentration camps so that they would
not be forced to move again; facilitating wire transfers of funds; making it possible to receive
requests for aid; putting an end to compulsory conversion; or liberating women and children
held in Muslim families, he was able to obtain advantages for people in certain categories,
especially Armenian Catholics.42
On the other hand, it has been definitely established that the German Ambassador Hans
von Wangenheim, the only person who, in the American Ambassador’s words, “could have
put a stop to these crimes,” did not, until his death on 24 October 1915, make the least effort
to help the Armenians, who were in his view, “nothing but treacherous vermin.”43 The death
of this influential diplomat and his replacement by Count Paul Wolff-Metternich, a man
whose views were said to be less rigidly aligned with those of the German chiefs of staff,
emboldened the patriarch to appeal to the newly arrived ambassador. In a 23 November 1915
letter to Metternich, Yeghiayan once again requested that the Germans intercede with the
Sublime Porte.44 Four or five days later, Dr. Mordtmann paid him a visit in the Armenian
Chamber of Galata to inform him that the ambassador wished to have a more detailed report
on the Armenians’ situation. Two days later, the patriarch transmitted a first document to
the embassy, followed by another entitled “The Annihilation of the Armenian Element in
Turkey.”45 Metternich’s correspondence with Berlin indicates that the German ambassador
rapidly delved into the Armenian file, met with the main Young Turk leaders, and “seriously
discussed the massacre of the Armenians” with them.46 Yeghiayan confirms that the German
and Bulgarian Ambassadors interceded with the Ottoman government in December 1915
“so that the crimes against the Armenians would come to an end.” According to him, the
information that had begun to circulate in the Western press had put Germany in a difficult
position. The German Social Democratic Party had also publicly addressed questions to the
German government on the subject in the wake of an article published on 11 January in the
Volkszeitung.47
By the end of 1915, the Armenian Patriarchate, more isolated than ever, was the last
legitimate representative of the Armenians still in a position to speak out and take action,
even if its margin to maneuver was extremely narrow.
Armenian Assets and Solidarity Networks

According to Zaven Yeghiayan’s memoirs, again, the Patriarchate learned, early in 1916,
that the moneys that Armenian institutions had deposited with Ottoman state banks were
going to be confiscated. On 29 January, the Armenian Political Council decided to make
an immediate transfer of the funds held by educational or humanitarian institutions such
as the Tbrotsaser, Azkanver, Zavarian Fund, Oknenk Sasuni, and so on, to the Patriarchate’s
accounts. Thus, when a week later the government sent the state banks a circular inquir-
ing into the balances of the associations and institutions just named, it was told that
no funds belonging to these organizations were on deposit with the banks. Fearing con-
fiscation of the treasury bonds and other assets that the Patriarchate, the parish coun-
cils, the Patriarchate’s humanitarian organizations, and its clergymen had deposited with
the banks, Zaven decided to gather up all these securities and deposit them temporarily
with the American embassy. The Miatsial Educational Association had itself been the
target of several police searches. The patriarch accordingly suggested that the members of
the association who were still present dissolve the association and transfer their archives
to the Patriarchate, along with those of the Akzanver Association. Shortly thereafter,
Zaven deposited two paintings by Aivazovsky with the American embassy, together with
archives connected with the reform plan in the Armenian provinces. Another part of the

Armenians’ assets and archives was, the patriarch writes, temporarily deposited with the
Swedish embassy.48
With the 24 April arrests and the subsequent deportation of Vartkes, the only Istanbul
Dashnak leaders still in Istanbul were Sarkis Srents, Shavarsh Misakian, and Hagop Siruni,
who had had time to go into hiding and form an underground committee. According to the
Patriarchate, they had forged a solidarity network, centered on Hovhannes Cheugiurian,
the purpose of which was to provide financial aid to the families of party militants who had
been “deported,” help people wanted by the police to flee the city, and retrieve Armenian
orphans held in Turkish households. However, by putting the accounts of Oknenk Sasuni or
the Zavarian Fund in the Patriarchate’s name, Yeghiayan had involuntarily deprived this
network of its principal source of revenue. When representatives of the committee asked him
to turn over the money on deposit, the patriarch found himself in an embarrassing situation.
“It is obvious,” he writes, “that any attempt to transfer such a sum would put the Patriarchate
in perilous situation; it was, in fact, practically impossible to effect such an operation secretly,
and we were surrounded by government informers, not to mention the fact that some of
them had positions in the Patriarchal administration.” After several fruitless conversations
and a menacing letter from the committee, it was agreed that the Patriarchate would directly
forward financial aid to families in need on the basis of a pre-established list, demanding
receipts in return.49
In his memoirs, the patriarch also discusses the arrest of Shavarsh Misakian, who had
been making preparations to travel clandestinely to Bulgaria with the local archives of the
Dashnak Party, which had been entrusted to the head of the Kısım Siasi, Reşad Bey, for
translation. These documents do not seem to contain shocking revelations about the ARF’s
putative treachery. It has, however, been established that a copy of the threatening letter that
had been sent to the Zaven was discovered, leading the authorities to publish a declaration
in which they stated, among other things, that “[t]he patriarch was under the revolutionaries’
thumb.”50
We have only a few reports about the clandestine Armenian networks operating in
Istanbul during the First World War, among them that by the leading Dashnak activist
Marzbed51 and the memoirs of Berjuhi, the wife of Sarkis Barseghian, a journalist and politi-
cal militant.52 The network to which Marzbed [Ghazaros Ghazarosian] belonged53 was above
all active on the railway that traversed Asia Minor from Istanbul to Cilicia. It drew much of
its support from Armenian railway employees who worked on this line and counted people
from many different walks of life in its ranks.
According to information provided by the author of a monograph on Marzbed, the patri-
arch was the soul of this network in the capital, while at the other end of the railway, in
Mosul, the police chief Mehmed Effendi – a converted Armenian from Khnus – worked for
it.54 According to Berjuhi, the Istanbul network sought, in particular, to find hiding places
for people who had eluded the 24 April roundups and were wanted by the police. The havens
they found were, as a rule, private homes, preferably ones owned by non-Armenians. When
fugitives were transferred to them, it was de rigueur to disguise them as “Turkish women”
or bearded “old men.” The fugitives never spent more than a week in the same hideout. It
is noteworthy that young women ensured the network’s communications and transported
weapons earmarked for the banned activists.55
Indications are that the network profited from the benevolent attitude of certain neutral
countries’ legations, which generously provided it with passports thanks to which a number
of young men were able to leave the country. The unwritten rule seems to have been to save
the youngest first; the oldest men were left where they were.56
A more specifically feminine network, led by women who were the heads of families, also
concerned itself with abducting children who had been brought from the provinces and

entrusted to Turkish families.57 It was, however, impossible to find and retrieve the thousands
of boys and girls who had been transported to the capital. The Istanbul network therefore
decided to compile lists of the homes in which they were living, including as much informa-
tion as it could about these children. After the armistice, Berjuhi notes, this information
helped mothers who had survived to find their children, while the Patriarchate was able to
retrieve large numbers of orphans.58
The Deportation of the Armenians of

Constantinople and Its Environs
Armenians have lived in Constantinople almost from the day on which the Ottomans cap-
tured the city. Under the reign of the Ottoman Sultans, successive Armenian deportations
(in the sixteenth century) or emigration (in the seventeenth century) led to the formation
of six Armenian neighborhoods in the city. The first exiles constituted the famous altı cemât
(six communities) of Samatia, Balat, Kumkapı, Langa, Hasantipi, and Galata, each inhabited
by people who had emigrated from a single region. At the turn of the seventeenth century, a
new influx of Armenians fleeing the Turkish-Persian wars settled in the outer districts of the
capital: Edirne Kapı, Top Kapı, Eyub, Beşiktaş, Ortaköy, Kuruçeşme, Usküdar, and Kadiköy.
According to the Patriarchate, 161,000 Armenians were living in Istanbul in 1912, not
counting the emigrants who has recently arrived from the provinces.59 The 1914 Ottoman
census put the number of Armenians of all confessions in the capital and its suburbs at
84,093,60 a number well below all known estimates. The density of the Armenian population,
combined with the affluence of certain circles and the confessional hierarchy established
by the empire’s Ottoman masters, constituted the very basis for the survival and develop-
ment of an Armenian identity in the capital. Community life was centered mainly on the
Armenians’ 47 parishes.61 Spread across the European and Asiatic shores of the Bosphorus,
the Armenians boasted, on the eve of the First World War, 42 neighborhood elementary
schools, ten secondary schools, and a dozen Catholic and Protestant middle schools and
lycées, with a total enrollment of about 25,000.62
The Patriarchate, located since 1641 in Kumkapı, was the pivot of the community’s politi-
cal and religious life, with its chamber of elected deputies that met in Galata. The adminis-
tration of the Patriarchate put out a weekly Official Gazette, in which it published a record
of the sessions of the chamber, financial reports, the results of the work carried out by the
commissions, and election results. Another important Armenian institution, the National
Hospital of the Holy Savior in Yedikule, was one of the most modern medical centers in
Constantinople; it extended over several acres and comprised ten buildings, a huge park, a
chapel, a farm, a professional school, a school for nurses, an orphanage, an old people’s home,
and an asylum. The leading names in Ottoman medicine, educated almost exclusively in
France, practiced all the medical specialties of the day there.
In inner Constantinople, the Armenians were mainly concentrated in the southern part
of the city near the sea, in Gedik Paşa, Kumkapı, Yeni Mahale, Samatia, Narlıkapı, Altı
Mermer, Topkapı, and Salma Gömrük, and, to the north, Balat. Outside the perimeter of
the old city, they could be found in Eyub, Balıklı, Yedikule, Makriköy, San Stefano, and,
further to the west, Silivri. On the other side of the Golden Horn they were concentrated
in Hazköy, Kasim Paşa, Galata, Pera, Pangaltı, and, further to the north, Şişli, Dolab Dere,
Feriköy, Beşiktaş, Ortaköy, Kuru Çeşme, Bebek, Rumeli Hisar, Boyaciköy, Stenia Yeniköy,
Tarabia, Büyük Dere, and Sarıyar-Yeni Mahale. On the Asiatic side of the city, there were
Armenians in Beykoz, Kandili, Kuzguncuk, and Usküdar, in the quarters of Melamihe,
Icadiye, and Yeni Mahale, Kadiköy. To the east of Scutari, in Alemdağ, the “Armenian
Village” (Ermeniköy) was divided up between innkeepers and woodcutters. Finally, on the

shores of the Sea of Marmara, there was a big colony in Kartal and on the Prince’s Islands,
in Proti (Kenalı) and Prinkipo (Büyükada). This arid inventory of the areas in which the
Armenian population of Greater Constantinople lived gives a rather poor idea of a dis-
tinct community marked by an original way of life. Grouped around their churches, given
direction by their deputies and clergymen and administered by their parish councils, the
Armenians in the city exercised almost all the trades, from the hamal (porter) who had just
arrived from Mush to the government minister descended from one of the capital’s old aris-
tocratic families. Many Armenians were craftsmen: primarily goldsmiths, silversmiths, bak-
ers, weavers, tailors, compositors, boot-makers, shoemakers, masons, tile-makers, carpenters,
cabinet-makers, potters, and ceramists. The Armenian elites were active in international
commerce, trade, shipping, banking, and industry, as well as in the liberal professions, espe-
cially medicine, architecture, and law. The yearbooks of industry and trade provide a good
indication of the key positions that the capital’s Armenian community held in these fields.
The intellectual and artistic professions, for their part, had undergone rapid growth from
the middle of the nineteenth century on: an increase in the number of schools, newspa-
pers, and publishing firms, together with the creation of professional theaters, offered new
opportunities to young people who wished to pursue intellectual careers. Finally, since the
1850s, the number of Armenians employed at the upper levels of Ottoman government
had increased significantly, notably in the technical, economic, and diplomatic ministries.
It was, moreover, from the spheres of finance, the liberal professions, the higher levels of
government, and the press that the Armenian deputies in the Ottoman parliament and
Armenian Chamber were recruited.
The Ottoman capital, in constant relation with Europe, was of course subject to the
influence of Western ways, especially as far as its affluent and intellectual strata were con-
cerned. The members of these groups almost all spoke French and were steeped in French
culture, wore European dress, and, more generally, lived “à la franca,” to employ the expres-
sion immortalized by the humorist Hagop Baronian. They frequented the fashionable restau-
rants of the Bosphorus and spent their holidays on the islands (on Proti, in the Armenians’
case, where the patriarch had his summer residence).
The center of the political and intellectual life of the empire’s Armenians, and also the
site of the biggest Armenian urban concentration anywhere, Constantinople exerted a con-
stant pull on the provinces, the population of the High Plateau included. When circum-
stances allowed, as was notably the case after 1908, the political parties established their
headquarters and press organs here. The first reflections about the Armenians’ development
and future were forged in this crucible.63
Finally, 2,300 Armenians lived in the kaza of Kartal, on the northeastern shore of the Sea
of Marmara. They were primarily winemakers, particularly in Maltepe and Kartal.64
According to a well-informed Armenian source, the patriarch appealed to the German
Ambassador, then to Bishop Dolci, and finally to the American Ambassador with the request
that they intercede with the government when, around 15 May, the Ittihad was making prep-
arations to deport the Armenians of the capital. It seems, however, that Hüseyin Cahid, Kara
Kemal, and Enver expressed opposition to this decision. According to credible sources, cited
by Aguni, Enver even raised the question at a meeting of the Council of Ministers, where he
is said to have insisted on the disastrous effects that such an undertaking would have in the
capital’s Western circles.65 The writer Yervant Odian, who had eluded the 24 April roundup
and was living more or less underground, notes in his souvenirs that in Istanbul in May 1915
the authorities ordered the mobilization of new age cohorts and the men who had so far been
exempted from the draft because they had paid the bedel. Thus, spontaneous roundups con-
ducted in the streets beefed up the contingents of men sent to the Dardannelles, which was
the scene of intense fighting in this period.66

According to Aguni, the Patriarchate “learned within an hour,” through various chan-
nels, about all government decisions having to do with the capital’s Armenians. He also
reports that the grand vizier, Said Halim, took pains to convoke the patriarch by way of
Senator Zareh Dilber in order to inform him that the Armenians of Constantinople would
not be deported.67 It can be affirmed with virtual certainty that bitter debates about the
fate of the Armenians of Istanbul raged in both the government and the Unionist Central
Committee. Not humanitarian considerations, but most assuredly fear of the negative effects
of hunting down Armenians in the middle of Constantinople militated in favor of allowing
at least part of the capital’s Armenian population to stay put. It is also noteworthy that, after
this collective decision was reached, Interior Minister Talât announced that “all Armenians
who, by virtue of what they say, write, or do, seem likely to work toward the creation of an
Armenia and are considered dangerous” should be deported. In other words, all the active
elements of the Armenian population were to be eliminated. The authorities added to the
list of those subject to deportation all the Armenians who came from the provinces to work
in the capital, especially the men. Lists were compiled quarter by quarter, and deportations
began in the month of June. They affected a second group of the Armenian elite, such as the
lawyer Diran Yerganian, Hagop Ardzruni, or Sarkis Svin.68 Unlike the elites deported in late
April, however, these deportees were sent by rail to Syria, via Konya and Bozanti.
According to Armenian sources, it was a member of the Unionist Central Committee,
İsmail Canbolat, the general director of the Department of State Security and the gov-
ernor of the capital, who was charged with deporting natives of the provinces from the
capital. He is also said to have ordered the murder of those interned in Canğırı.69 Bedri
Bey, the Constantinople police chief and one of the architects of the deportations in the
provinces; Murad Bey, Bedri’s assistant police chief;70 Muftizâde Şükrü [Kaya] Bey, the head
of the Directorate for the Settlement of Tribes and Emigres (Iskân-ı Aşâyirîn ve Muhâcirîn
Müdîriyeti) and the CUP’s delegate in the provinces of Adana and Aleppo in fall 1915; and
İbrahim Bey, the director of Istanbul’s prisons, played pivotal roles in these operations.71 At
a lower level, Tevfik Hadi, the police chief in Constantinople’s Bayazid neighborhood who
worked primarily in the police administration, was very active in carrying out deportations
and in engineering the murders of members of the Armenian elite.72
Yervant Odian was arrested in his home in Şişli on 26 August. The historian Arshag
Alboyajian was arrested the same day. Odian soon found himself in prison with Dr. Kelejian,
a well-known physician, and the journalist Sebuh Aguni. A few days later these men left
by rail for Konya under police guard.73 It seems that Mehmed Talât had not abandoned the
idea of deporting the Armenians of the capital. In September 1915, Halil had nevertheless
succeeded, with the help of the internal opposition to the Ittihad, in taking the Ministry of
Foreign Affairs in hand, having been controlled until then by Said Halim. Halil was one of
the main opponents of the policy of liquidating the Armenians. The result was that, between
September 1915 and May 1916, partisans of deporting the Armenians from the capital were
locked in a ferocious struggle with those who opposed the idea. In the cabinet, the battle
lines ran between Talât on the one hand and Enver and Halil on the other. In the Ittihad’s
Central Committee, they ran between Talât and Nâzım.74
On 8 September 1915, at a time when many caravans had already set out, Ambassador
Pallavicini noted that “the expulsion of Armenians from Constantinople has been called to
a halt, thanks to the energetic actions of the American Ambassador, according to rumors cir-
culating within the Committee of Union and Progress. Yet members of the said Committee
have declared: ‘We have stopped for the moment, but we will still find a way of ridding
ourselves of all the Armenians.’ ”75 A few weeks later, these threats were put into practice.
“According to a credible source,” the German chargé d’affaires Neurath wrote, “the Turkish
government, all its assurances notwithstanding, has decided to deport the Armenians of

Constantinople as well.”76 On 7 December 1915, the German Ambassador Wolff-Metternich

informed Berlin that, “According to information provided by the police chief, four thousand
Armenians were recently expelled from Constantinople and sent to Anatolia; the eighty
thousand still here will be gradually evacuated, to say nothing of the thirty thousand who were
deported over the summer and another thirty thousand who have fled.”77 Ernst von Nahmer,
a reporter for the Kölnische Zeitung, stated in a confidential report dated 5–6 September 1915
that the targets of the first deportations were natives of the provinces, followed by unmarried
men and married men with their families. He added that “the most inoffensive people are
being deported in altogether systematic fashion, such as the two employees in my boarding-
house. They simply disappeared after being summoned to the police station ... The discretion
with which [the arrests] are being carried out finds its explanation in the presence of the
ambassadors.”78 An account by Yervant Der Mardirosian, a native of Talas and a cadet at
Istanbul’s Yakacık Military Academy who was enrolled in the armed forces on 10 September
1915 along with another 40 young Armenians from the provinces, indicates the complex-
ity of the situation of Armenian males. Like his fellow students, Der Mardirosian agreed
to convert, thereby saving his life. The other cadets nevertheless continued to show the
Armenian converts a frank hostility that reflected the effects of the propaganda campaign
waged in Turkish circles. Moreover, every day, down to their departure from the capital in
January 1916, Der Mardirosian and his classmates witnessed the house searches that the
police conducted in Armenian homes in Istanbul and the systematic arrests of young men
and provincials.79
In addition to the inhabitants of the “Armenian village” of Alemdağ, located outside
Usküdar, the Armenians in the villages surrounding the capital seems to have been deported
more systematically than others. The “trial of Büyükdere/San Stefano,” which culminated
in a verdict rendered on 24 May 1919, was based exclusively on charges of financial “abuse.”
Nevertheless, it revealed the way Selanikli Refik Bey, the kaymakam of Büyükdere, Hafız
Mehmed, Abdül Kerim, a police lieutenant, and Rizeli Celal Effendi “shortened the period
authorized by the government for deporting non-Muslims from the Büyükdere area and
appropriated the assets of the deportees.”80 The accused strove to demonstrate that they had
been at pains “to protect the life and property of the persons who were displaced,” yet were in
some cases condemned to pay fines and serve prison sentence of one to two years – in others,
they were simply acquitted. There was never any question of the damages incurred by the
Armenian deportees.81
In closing the present chapter on the Ottoman capital, we must point out that, despite the
human and material losses inflicted on the Istanbul Armenians, the approximately 100,000 of
them who were able to maintain their residence or find refuge there until war’s end provided
invaluable aid to the surviving deportees eking out an existence in Syria or Mesopotamia.

Chapter 13
Deportations in the Vilayet of

Edirne and the Mutesarifat of
Biğa/Dardanelles
I
n the Ottoman epoch, the Armenian community in the vilayet of Edirne developed from
the sixteenth century on, when the famous architect Sinan called on 250 of his compa-
triots to help build the mosque of Sultan Selim in Edirne. At the turn of the seventeenth
century, Armenians from the Kemah and Erzincan areas, victims of the series of famine years
that had followed the looting by the celali (revolts), also settled in Tekirdağ/Rodosto and
Malgara on the shores of the Sea of Marmara and further west in Çorlu and Silivri.
On the eve of the war, 800 Armenian families (4,536 Armenians) were living in Edirne,
the seat of government of the vilayet of the same name.1 They were concentrated in two
inner city neighborhoods, Kale Içi and At Bazar, and also in the suburb of Kara Ağac. The
inhabitants of Kara Ağac were truck farmers, whereas the Armenians who lived in the inner
city were craftsmen, tradesmen, or railroad employees when they were not employed in
tobacco manufacture.2 The biggest Armenian colony was to be found in the port of Rodosto,
the principal town of the kaza of Tekirdağ; the approximately 17,000 Armenians who lived in
the town represented half its total population. Rodosto’s Armenian community, founded in
1606, had settled on the shore, in the Takavor neighborhood in the southwestern part of the
city, and also to the northeast in the suburb known as Çiftlik, the name of which indicates
its connection with agricultural activities. The Armenians here were tinsmiths, blacksmiths,
goldsmiths, and millers, but also ship captains or even fleet owners and bankers.3
In 1914, some 3,000 Armenians lived in the town of Malgara, which lay northwest of
Rodosto. Almost all were descended of natives of Pakarij (a district of Kemah). They, too,
had settled in the region in 1606.4
To the south lay the kaza of Gallipoli, which formed a slightly elevated peninsula. Its
population was overwhelmingly Greek, with a mere 1,190 Armenians living there in 1914.5
They worked principally in commerce and the crafts.
On the road that led to Constantinople, in Çorlu, there lived in 1914 from 1,678 to
3,005 Turkish-speaking Armenians, whose ancestors had come from Yozgat. Finally, 1,000
Armenians lived in Silivri, in the easternmost part of the vilayet; they were reputed to be
among the best kayıkci (boatsmen) on the Sea of Marmara.6
The Deportations in Edirne

During the Balkan Wars, the city of Edirne, which had passed from Turkish to Bulgarian
hands and then won back by the Young Turks, had been the scene of violent acts that
had affected all the groups in the city. The bitterness that had accumulated in the course

• Edirne Black Sea
çatalca Constantinople
Tekirdağ
• • • •• Uskudar
Kartal
Marmara Sea Ismit
Gallipoli Yalova • •
• • BardizagAdabazar
• Karamürsel
•
•
•Şanak Geyve
of these events, especially among the Muslims, resurfaced in fall 1915, when the fate of
Edirne’s Armenians was hanging in the balance. Here the deportation order was made
public much later than elsewhere, on 14 October. There was at least one objective reason
for this. Bulgaria’s late entry into the First World War on the Ottoman side probably forced
the Young Turk authorities to postpone anti-Armenian operations in European Turkey, so
as not to impede the negotiations aimed at inducing Bulgaria to rally to the Ottomans.
Moreover, a 24 October 1915 note from the Austrian Ambassador to the empire reveals
that, “With the cession of Kara-Agatsch [Kara Ağaç] to Bulgaria, all the Armenian fami-
lies in that locality were expelled to Anatolia.”7 The expulsion orders had been issued
by the vali of Edirne, Haci Adıl Bey [Arda],8 a jurist of Cretan origin, Unionist parlia-
mentary deputy from Edirne, former general secretary of the CUP, close friend of Talât’s,
and, for a time, minister of the interior, who had, moreover, been implicated in the 1909
Cilician events.9 The choice of so eminent a CUP leader as vali was probably also a sign
of the importance that the Ittihad attached to this vilayet. In addition to Adıl Bey, the
CUP had sent Abdül Ğani to serve in Edirne as its responsible secretary, with Hayrullah
Bey as his assistant. The Ittihad could also count on Haci Ali Bey, the president of the
Unionist club in Edirne, and two influential Young Turks from the city, İzzeddin Bey,
the head of the Health Department, and Rifât Bey, the mayor. Among the military men
involved in the anti-Armenian violence, Dr. Ertogrül Bey, an army doctor who worked in
the Kalayçi hospital, also played a role in liquidating the soldiers in the labor battalions.
Among the magistrates and civilian state officials, Tevfik Bey, the chief prosecutor at the
court-martial and a member of Edirne’s emvalı metruke; Şakir Effendi, the mektubci (head
of the correspondence bureau); Emin Bey, the vilayet’s defterdar and the president of the
emvalı metruke; Tevfik Effendi, the assistant police chief; and the police lieutenants Niazi
Effendi and Nuri Effendi all had a hand in organizing the deportations and pillaging the
Armenians’ “abandoned property.”10
Departing from the methods employed in Anatolia, the local authorities here did not
give the Armenians any time at all to prepare for the deportation. The order for immediate
deportation was issued on the night of 27–28 October 1915, giving rise to acts of pillage that

Deportations: Edirne and Biğa/Dardanelles 547
profited the local Ittihad club and Turkish schools. Three hundred Armenian shops in the
Ali Paşa bazaar were demolished.11
A report written “of a common accord” by the Bulgarian general consul M. G. Seraphimoff
and the Austro-Hungarian consul Dr. Arthur Nadamlenzki and sent to the Austro-Hungarian
embassy in Constantinople on 6 November 1915, reveals how the CUP organized the liqui-
dation of the Armenians of Edirne:12
The fact that what is happening is obviously only the implementation of a carefully
meditated program, a program the aim of which is the “annihilation of the Christian
elements in Turkey,” is so serious that the undersigned believe it their duty to refer
the matter to the interested powers ... The new system adopted by the ruling circles,
which frightens not only the Jews and the other Christians living here, but also the
overwhelming majority of the Muslim population, was exhibited in all its cruelty and
cynicism on the occasion of the expulsion of the Armenians of Adrianople ... The
procedures that the undersigned were able to observe here bear witness to a desire,
not merely to expel, but, clearly, to eradicate an entire race. On the night of 27–28
October, the organs of the police knocked at the doors of the city’s rich Armenian
families and forced them to abandon, without delay, their homes, their belongings,
and all their assets in order to be transported to an unknown destination. The
scenes that took place on that and the following nights defy description. There took
place things that only an altogether deprived mind and a barbaric, brutal soul could
conceive.
Women still bed-ridden because they had given birth the day before were torn from
their beds; small children who were seriously ill were carried off by force in carts; semi-
paralysed old men were forced to leave their homes. Little girls in the city’s boarding
schools had no idea that their parents had been forced to leave and were thus separated
forever from their fathers and mothers. The unfortunates did not even have the right
to take money or objects dear to them when they left. With a few piasters in hand, men
who had considerable fortunes – four thousand Turkish pounds were discovered in the
chest of one Armenian alone – had to leave the house of their fathers in order to be
led off into dire poverty ... The belongings of those expelled were sold off at ludicrously
low prices in public auctions at which the Turkish buyers were once again privileged
over the others. Thus fortunes were squandered which, by rights, ought to have been
inventoried.
On the very night on which the Armenians were expelled, the Turkish authori-
ties staged little feasts in homes bereft of their masters: people played the piano there,
emptied the cellars, and ate whatever provisions they found. The same scenes were
repeated in broad daylight the next day. We were told by a completely reliable source
that many valuables and a great deal of money have disappeared. The only salvation
the Turks offered the Armenians was to embrace Islam! So far, not a single family has
bowed to this pressure.
The vali and the police chief have declared that widows and their children will be
spared. The Young Turk Committee has found a way to make even this category of
people miserable. It is trying to abduct the young girls and marry them off to Turks.
Two of the Menziljian daughters were able to escape these new dangers only because
they happened to be at the school of the Sisters of Agram and were protected by the
consulate of I. and R. Austria-Hungary. The Bulgarian authorities are doing every-
thing they can to obtain the return of all the Armenian families whose sons and
husbands are fighting in the Bulgarian army for the common cause. The fact that the
children enrolled in the Turkish schools and, in particular, those in the Committee’s

schools were taken out to watch the departure of hundreds of Armenians crazy with
sorrow and despair as if it were a spectacle is, in the opinion of the undersigned, a mat-
ter of extreme gravity! It makes it possible to infer and gives us a glimpse of the secret
designs animating the domestic policy Young Turk Committee, which is inculcating
a spirit of hatred for the Christians in children’s hearts and minds, a hatred that may
one day also be directed against the friends of today. That this circumstance is no mere
accident, but itself part of a pre-established program, is proven by the fact, known to
one and all, that during the persecutions of the Greeks, Turkish schoolchildren were
made to take part in the looting of the Greek villages on the city’s outskirts ... Here,
in the vilayet of Adrianople, almost all the big, wealthy trading houses were, in the
past few years, in Armenian hands. Almost all the rich Jewish and Greek bankers and
merchants left the vilayet after the Balkan War. With the expulsion of the Armenians
who worked together with the big Austro-Hungarian and German factories, the most
important merchants have left Adrianople, without, of course, first settling accounts
with their suppliers, creditors, or debtors.13
This remarkable report needs no comment. Let us point out only that these depor-
tees took the Istanbul-Konya-Bozanti route, by foot or rail, and ended up in Syria or
Mesopotamia. A last wave of deportations, which targeted the families of craftsmen and
soldiers, was carried out during the night of 17–18 February 1916 on the initiative of the
interim vali, Zekeria Zihni Bey, formerly the mutesarif of Tekirdağ.14 It emptied the city of
its last Armenians.
Deportations in the Sancak of Rodosto

In the most important Armenian colony of the region, that of Tekirdağ/Rodosto, with an
Armenian population of roughly 17,000 in 1914, the deportations were preceded by a number
of alarming events. We must first recall the massacres perpetrated from 1 to 3 July by soldiers
in Rodosto, which the Istanbul press quickly painted as a revolt that the army had had to “put
down.”15 We cannot ignore the fire in the Armenian quarter that broke out on 26 August
1914, in the midst of the general mobilization – it was, to say the least, of suspicious origin.16
Nor can we ignore the direct threats hanging over the heads of the Armenian population in
the same period, which had compelled the interior minister to come to the port in person,
accompanied by the patriarchal vicar, Perhajian, to reduce tensions.17 According to a survi-
vor, most of the conscripts from Rodosto were assigned to the region’s labor battalions from
fall 1914 on; very few managed to avoid them.18 Yet, the first arrests, which targeted the city’s
notables, were not made until Monday, 20 September. Officially, it was a question of “punish-
ing” people who were said to have “facilitated the Bulgarians’ entry into Terkirdağ” during the
Balkan war. The day after they were arrested, these men and their families were put aboard
trains bound for Anatolia.19 On Wednesday, 22 September, a second wave of arrests took
place, targeting once again entrepreneurs such as the Keremian Brothers, Krikor Shushanian,
the Jamjian brothers, Hovagim Karanfilian, Hovhannes Papazian, or the lawyer Bedros. All
were immediately put on the road.20 Thereafter, the deportations took a more systematic form.
They went on until 31 October and affected nearly 10,000 people, who followed the Istanbul-
Konya-Bozanti-Aleppo route and ended up in the Syrian Desert. By 10 November, 3,000 more
people had been expedited; only the families of a few dozen soldiers were spared.21 On 20
February 1916, a final group of 120 was sent to Ismit by ship, where it was then sent on its way
to Syria.22
The soul of these operations was the former mutesarif of Tekirdağ and the interim vali of
Edirne, Zekeria Zihni Bey, an Ittihadist of Circassian origins and a graduate of the Mulkiye.23

Deportations: Edirne and Biğa/Dardanelles 549
He was assisted by İsmail Sidki Bey, an evkaf official and CUP delegate in Rodosto, and also
by two local Unionists, Ahmed Hilmi Bey and İbrahimzâde Ahmed Tevfik. The mutesarif
also benefited from the collaboration of Kâzım Bey, his assistant; Ömer Naci, Rodosto’s
mufti; Mehmed Effendi, a civil servant employed in the Registrar’s Office; Nahir Bey, a
captain in the fortress; Arif Bey, the head of the Department of Public Education; Ziya
Bey, the head of the Agriculture Department; Remzi Bey, the head of the Department
of the Public Debt; and Ferdi Bey, the head of the Tobacco Régie. Among those impli-
cated in the pillage of Armenian property, we must note, above all, the activities of Sahir
Bey, the president of the committee responsible for “abandoned property”; İbrahim Nâzım
Bey Zâde, the auctioneer; and Süleyman Bey, Fuad Bey, Haci Mehmed, and Tutunci Eyub
Osman, members of the committee. Among the military men, Natan Bey, the commander
of the local brigade; Haci Hüseyin Bey Baban, the head of the military workshops; Derviş
Bey, the commander of the gendarmerie in Rodosto; and Mehmed Bey, the Head of the
Recruitment Office, carried out the deportations. The men were arrested and tortured by
Tahir Bey, Rodosto’s police chief, who was responsible for recruiting the squadrons of the
Special Organization. He was assisted in turn by Süleyman Bey and Ali Rıza Bey, the assist-
ant police chiefs; Sandalci Hasan Bey; Nusret Bey; Fehmi Bey, the son of the parliamentary
deputy Haci Adıl Bey; Hilmi Bey, a lawyer; Haci Norheddin; Selanikli Haci Mehmed; and
Selanikli Haci Hilmi.24
According to statistics published by the Armenian Patriarchate, approximately 3,500
Armenians from Rodosto survived the deportations.25
Deportations in the Kazas of Çorlu and Gallipoli

What we know of the fate of the Armenians of Çorlu is that they too were deported rather
late, on 15 October 1915, initially by ship to Ismit, and then on foot or by rail to Bozanti
and Syria via Konya.26 Among those chiefly responsible for the exactions perpetrated in
Çorlu were, of course, the Unionists and çetes who were active in Tekirdağ as well. Among
the Ittihadists, the main instigators of these exactions were Sandalci Hasan Bey; Nusret
Bey; Rahmi Bey, the son of the parliamentary deputy Ali Bey; Tahir Bey; Hilmi Bey, a law-
yer; Furuncizâde Fuad; Ahkincizâde Haci Nusreddin; Selanikli Haci Mehmed; and Selanikli
Kanlı Hilmi. Among the civilian and military officials, we should note the roles played by
Ali Sakıb Bey, the kaymakam of Çorlu; Cemal Bey, the commander of the gendarmerie; Eşref
Hasan Bey, Cemal’s second in command; General Osman Nuri Bey, the head of the railroad;
Mehmed Nesip Bey, a judge; Şefik Bey, the police chief; Enver Effendi, the president of the
municipality; Dr. Mustafa, a municipal physician; and Rahim Effendi, a tax collector. The
committee responsible for “abandoned property” was in the hands of Zöhdi Bey, a lawyer;
Mehmed Nazmi Halim; Ağazâde; and Mehmed Şefik Yegenzâde.27
The fate of the Armenians of the peninsula of Gallipoli was sealed in early April 1915.
When the battle for the Dardanelles began, they were temporarily transferred to Biğa and
Lapsaki, and, later, deported.28
According to an Armenian source, several thousand of the more than 30,000 Armenians
of the vilayet of Edirne escaped deportation thanks to the energetic intervention of the
Bulgarian authorities.29
Deportations in the Mutesarifat of Biğa/Dardanelles

In 1914, the Armenian presence in the Dardanelles was limited to some 2,500 people, half of
whom lived in Çanak Kale and the environs. This port, long simply a fortress defending the
entry to the Sea of Marmara, had gradually grown in size and importance, attracting artisans

and merchants who had come from Persia in the first half of the sixteenth century. The
Armenians in the rest of the peninsula were to be found in 1914 in Ezin (pop. 670), Ayvacık,
Bayramiş (pop. 200), Biğa (pop. 409), and Lapsaki.30 As in the case of the Armenians of
Gallipoli, the battle for the Dardanelles precipitated an evacuation of the district’s entire
civilian population. The Armenians were later deported to Syria.31

Chapter 14
Deportations in the Mutesarifat of Ismit
L
ike the Armenian colonies in Thrace, those in Bithynia came into existence between
1590 and 1608, with the arrival of large numbers of peasants from Agn, Arapkir, Sıvas,
Kemah, and Erzerum. Settling in this very fertile but depopulated area, they formed a
continuous string of villages that stretched from the Black Sea coast through Adabazar and
Ismit to Bursa. Early in the twentieth century, Nicomedia/Ismit, the former capital of the
eastern empire, was still the region’s administrative and economic center, profiting from its
exceptional geographical location as a port serving as the entryway to Anatolia. Its domin-
ation, however, was threatened by Adabazar, which, thanks to the railway, was establishing
itself as the new transit center for Anatolian exports and imports.1 On the eve of the war, the
mutesarifat of Ismit boasted a total Armenian population of 61,675, settled in 42 localities.2
The Armenians had 51 churches, a monastery, and 53 schools.3
The Kaza of Nicomedia/Ismit

Set deep back in the Gulf of Ismit, Nicomedia had 12,000 inhabitants in the early twentieth
century. The town’s 4,635 Armenians lived in the Kadibayir/Karabaş neighborhood, around
the Cathedral of the Holy Mother of God in the western part of the city. Ismit’s Armenian
population, which was Armenian speaking, was made up of industrious craftsmen and mer-
chants. With the Greeks, they dominated the bazaar, which lay at the foot of the ancient
acropolis that looked down on Nicomedia. The chief economic activities were silk-making
and the silk trade, as well as the production and sale of tobacco and salt. Eleven Armenian
villages lying within a radius of 15 to 20 kilometers maintained close relations with the
town.4 To the south, the little town of Bardizag/Bağçecik, with its 9,024 inhabitants, was
the last station on the steamboat line that ran between Ismit and the capital. Located six
kilometers from the coast near Mt. Minas and surrounded by forests and fertile farmland,
Bardizag was known above all for its production of silkworms, its vineyards, and its truck
gardens. A large American mission, with a middle school and hospital, was active in the
town on the eve of the First World War.5 Half an hour from Bardizag, the village of Döngel
had a population of 419. To the south and southeast lay the rural centers of Zakar (pop. 404),
Manushag (pop. 591), Ovacık (pop. 3,303), and Jamavayr (pop. 264); Arslanberg (pop. 3,218)
lay to the northeast.
In the northern part of the kaza of Ismit was the Monastery of Armash, founded in 1611.
Its special importance was due to its position as the one and only Armenian seminary in
western Anatolia. In 1910, the village adjacent to the seminary had a population of 1,505. Its
villagers raised silkworms on lands belonging to the monastery. It was the seat of the müdir
of the nahie of Armash, Fakreddin Effendi, who was to become one of the main organizers of
the expulsion of the region’s Armenian population. A few kilometers to the west of Armash
lay the villages of Dagh (pop. 380) and, hard by Dagh, Khach (pop. 202). Hazkal/Pirahmed
(pop. 811) lay an hour to the northeast.6 Thus, on the eve of the war, the total Armenian

population of the 12 localities of Ismit (including Catholics and Protestants) was 25,399, out
of a total population of 70,000 inhabitants, including large numbers of Çerkez who had set-
tled in the area in the late 1870s7 and the muhacirs from Salonika and Rumelia who settled
here after the 1912–13 Balkan Wars.8
The Kaza of Adabazar

In the period that interests us, Adabazar, located 45 kilometers east of Ismit in the immediate
vicinity of the Sakaria River, was, together with Bardizag, undeniably the most important
regional urban center for the Armenians, who represented 50 per cent of the town’s total
population. Many of Adabazar’s 12,450 Armenians lived in the center of town, near the
bazaar, in the parish of the Holy Archangel; the others were to be found in Nemçeler and
Malacılar. The town’s prosperity, which was owing to the construction of the Anatolian
railway that reached Adabazar in 1898, greatly benefited its Armenian craftsmen and mer-
chants, who had grown rich thanks to their silk workshops, provided with thread by the
silk-raisers of the surrounding villages.9 Southeast of Adabazar, on the southern shore of
Lake Sabanca, the Armenians had, in 1710, founded a village of the same name, which, with
its southern “New Quarter,” had 360 inhabitants. East of the town, in the nahie of Handık,
were two more Armenian villages, Hayots Kiugh (pop. 1,007) and Hoviv (pop. 288). A few
more Armenians lived scattered in other localities. To the southwest, in the nahie of Akyazi,
the little village of Kup was inhabited by 1,064 Orthodox Armenians, whose ancestors had
come from Agn.10
Until spring 1915, this region, lying close to the capital, was relatively calm. With the
August 1914 general mobilization, most of the young men were conscripted and assigned to
the region’s labor battalions. The military requisitions spawned abuses, but nothing hinted
at the violence to come. The mutesarif of Ismit, Deli Mazhar Bey, who held his post from
10 June 1913 to 28 September 1916, was a typical civil servant who obeyed the orders he
received from the capital without crises of conscience. Until spring 1915, a few notables and
political activists had been arrested, but the Armenians seemed to be convinced that these
men had fallen victim to narrowly focused repression. Everything changed with the arrival of
two CUP delegates – İbrahim Bey, the former director of Istanbul’s prisons, and Hoca Rifât
Effendi11 – who had plainly been sent to the area to oversee the deportation.
The order to deport the Armenians from the 42 localities of the sancak of Ismit, signed by
the interior minister on 5/18 July 1915,12 crowned two months of activity designed to under-
mine its Armenian communities. Here too this activity had consisted in a campaign to con-
fiscate arms that served to legitimize the increasingly systematic arrests of men throughout the
region. İbrahim Bey and Hoca Rifât, who were also officers of the Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa, could
call on the services of several squadrons of çetes, commanded by Şevket Bey; Faik Bey, the
commander of the gendarmerie in Ismit; Çeteci Mehmed; Çeteci Edhem; and Çeteci Pehlivan
Hasan Çavuş, who were charged with carrying out the operations in the region.13
Major Mustafa Emir, Eşref Adıl Bey, and Beha Bey, commanders of military units; Hüseyin
Çavus, the head of the militias; and Reşid Bey, Ismit’s police chief, took charge of the “legal”
dimension of operations, particularly the arrests. Ismit’s Unionist leaders, who were also
members of the emvalı metruke – İsmail Ali Bey, a navy official; Şerif Bey, a lawyer, and
Cavid, a pharmacist – conducted the party propaganda campaigns and organized the seizures
of Armenian property.14
The first operations targeted the Armenians of Adabazar rather than those in Ismit. In
early May, some 50 Adabazar notables were taken into custody and deported to Sultaniye
(in the vilayet of Konya) and Koçhisar. Shortly thereafter, soldiers of two divisions of the
Ottoman Army were billeted in the Armenian neighborhoods, apparently for the sole

Deportations: Ismit 553
purposed of guaranteeing order in the town. İbrahim Bey, upon his arrival in Adabazar in late
May, proceeded to arrest another group of notables, including the merchant Bedros Afeyan,
the banker Bedros Muradian, and the president of the municipality, Stepan Demirjian.
According to an Armenian source, İbrahim Bey, accompanied by the police chief Reşid
Bey, went to see the Armenian notables, who had been confined in the Church of the
Holy Archangel. He introduced himself to them as a “çete leader” who had long “operated
in Macedonia” and had a great deal of experience in conducting house searches. He also
claimed that he had worked side-by-side with Hnchak militants during the “reaction of 31
March” 1909 and had distributed arms. He therefore knew who had arms and demanded that
the Armenians turn over “two hundred fifty Mausers” without delay.15 That İbrahim held
such a speech about taking back the weapons that the CUP had distributed to the Armenian
“committees” is the more plausible in that it legitimized the arrests that followed in a way
we have had occasion to observe elsewhere. According to our Armenian source, 600 to 700
men were arrested and interned in the Church of St. Garabed in the space of a few days.
The auxiliary primate, Father Mikayel Yeramian, and a notable, Antranig Charkejian, were
the first victims of the torture that İbrahim ordered his men to carry out in order to make the
prisoners confess where they had stashed their weapons. Two weeks later, 10 notables were
brought before the Istanbul court-martial.16
On 11 August 1915, the order to deport the Armenians of Adabazar and the surrounding
villages was published. Soldiers surrounded the Armenian neighborhoods and guarded the
exits from them, blocking all possibility of flight. The authorities did not allow the popu-
lace to take its moveable assets with it. In two weeks, more than 20,000 people, begin-
ning with those who lived in the neighborhoods of Nemçer and Malacılar, were put on the
road to Konya. Twenty-five families of craftsmen who worked for the army were spared and
allowed to remain in their homes, as was the one family that agreed to convert, that of Haci
Hovhannes Yeghiayan.17
As soon as the deportees had left, Necati Sezayi Bey, kaymakam of Adabazar from 19
January to 22 November 1915, and Reşid Bey, müdir of the nahie of Hanlık, set about method-
ically demolishing the Armenian houses and churches – which were in some cases converted
into stables or granaries – and transferred ownership of the schools to the local authorities.
This procedure was apparently motivated by the authorities’ desire to make it impossible for
the exiles to return.18 Hamid Bey, the responsible secretary whom the CUP had dispatched to
Adabazar, and the members of the town’s Ittihadist club, Kalıbcı Hafız, Mehmed Ziyaeddin,
Haci Numan, and Arapzâde Said, helped İbrahim carry out these operations and above all
saw to the seizure of Armenian property.19 In the kaza of Ismit, violence was focused in par-
ticular on two exclusively Armenian localities, Bardizag and Arslanbeg, which the authori-
ties seemed to think should be evacuated before all others. The first problems cropped up in
Arslanbeg in May, when a few dozen notables were arrested and jailed in Ismit, where men
from Bardizag and Ovacık had also been locked up. Shortly afterward, all these men were
transferred to the kaza of Geyve and interned in the Turkish village of Taraklı, where the
local elites of Ismit, Yalova, Çengiler, and so on were already concentrated.20 On 18 July 1915,
under the orders of a commander in the gendarmerie, İbrahim Bey, 200 soldiers and gen-
darmes surrounded Arslanbeg. The deportations began the next morning while the village
was looted by Çerkez çetes of the Special Organization, relayed by Turkish villagers from the
vicinity who completed the task of demolishing Arslanbeg.21 Like the other deportees from
the region, more than 2,000 natives of Arslanbeg were deported by way of Eskişehir, Konya,
and Bozanti, and then were scattered in Rakka, Meskene, Der Zor, Mosul, and Baghdad.
Very few of them ever returned.22
Bardizag/Bağçecik met a fate similar to that dealt out to Arslanbeg. Approximately 1,000
young conscripts were sent to work on construction sites; some 20 doctors, elementary

schoolteachers, merchants, and craftsmen were arrested and deported in May; and the con-
fiscation of weapons led to arrests, house searches, and looting. The CUP’s delegate, İbrahim
Bey, went to Bardizag to oversee operations in early July.23 The Armenian middle school was
a special target of the çetes accompanying the Ittihadist leader, who repeated the threats he
had proffered in Arslanbeg, following them up with torture of the kind we have observed
elsewhere. The searches conducted in the churches did not yield the expected results: the
“discovery” of a fragment of a theater prop led to a good deal of unpleasantness for Father
Madatia Keondiurian, the auxiliary primate, who was accused of possessing a painting depict-
ing “a king of Armenia.”24
From 13 to 15 August, more than 8,000 natives of Bardizag were put on the road. Hard
on their heels was the populace of Döngel and Ovacık, who had first had to turn their house
keys over to the local authorities. A few families took the precaution of depositing their most
valuable belongings with the American mission. Thanks to an Armenian source, we also
know that Ali Şuhuri, the müdir of the nahie of Bağçecik, promised the deportees that they
would be taken no further than Konya, probably in order to calm them down and get them
to submit to him more readily.25 Assembled in Ismit’s train station, the exiles were told to pay
for their train tickets to Konya. An order arrived to the effect that soldiers’ families had per-
mission to return to their homes. But when it became apparent that almost all the families
qualified, the local Young Turk leaders decided not to follow these instructions. This order
was probably a mere deceptive maneuver designed to sow confusion in the deportees’ minds
about the authorities’ real plans for them.26
In Ismit, where the Armenians represented a smaller proportion of the total population,
38 notables were arrested in May on orders from the CUP delegate, İbrahim Bey. The depor-
tations, however, did not take place until 6–9 August, when three convoys were dispatched to
Konya. The authorities then began methodically burning down the houses in the Armenian
quarter and also the bishopric, devastating the graveyard and generally seeing to it that all
traces of the Armenians’ presence in the town were wiped out.27
Arthur Ryan, an American missionary who was in Bardizag from 6 October to 20
November 1915, notes in a report28 that only about 60 Armenians were left there, of whom
30 were handicapped and under the care of the American mission. Ryan also witnessed
“Turkish Officials collecting the moveable property of the deported Armenians,” stocked in
the Armenian church and then sent by ship to Istanbul. Finally, he notes that 60 Muslim
families had already been installed in the Armenian houses still standing, while the women
and children were held in villages in the vicinity but were not given anything to eat because
they refused to convert.29 His description of Ismit, where he went several times during his
stay in Bardizag, confirms that the shops in the bazaar had been thoroughly looted and that
the Armenian neighborhood, which was burned down immediately after the deportations,
was a pile of rubble. He found no trace of Armenians here, apart from 2,500 deportees from
Thrace who briefly camped in the churchyard before continuing their trek to Konya.30
A witness mentions that 900 male deportees from Ismit and Angora passed through
Kirşehir, where they were stationed behind the town’s konak; 380 were massacred nearby, in
Muncur, and had their bodies thrown into the lake by İzzet Hoca, Haci Halil, Derviş Effendi,
and Nuri Effendi.31 The victims may have been men taken from the caravans, but it is more
likely that they were worker-soldiers, for we have no evidence that males were treated differ-
ently than females on the Istanbul-Ismit-Konya-Bozanti route.
The Kaza of Kandere

In 1914 there were two clusters of Armenian villages, one on each side of the Sakaria, in
the kaza of Kandere on the Black Sea coast. One, two hours south of Incirli, comprised four

Deportations: Ismit 555
rural centers founded in the mid-nineteenth century by “Armenian Laz” – that is, natives
of Hamşin: Açambaşi was inhabited by 42 Islamicized families; Kegham had 596 Christian
Armenian inhabitants; Çukur had 40 households, and Aram/Kızılcı had a population of 347.
The other group of villages, lying northeast of Kandere on the left bank of the Sakaria, com-
prised five hamlets that had been founded in the seventeenth century: Fındıklı (pop. 500),
Ferizli (pop. 872), Tamlek (pop. 416), and Almalu (pop. 471). Thus, a total of more than 3,500
Armenians were living in the kaza of Kandere on the eve of the war. They were deported
down the Konya-Bozanti route in August 1915 under the supervision of the kaymakam of
Kandere, Kâmil Bey, who held his post from 9 January 1913 to 10 March 1917.32
The Kaza of Geyve

The kaza of Geyve, which straddled the Sakaria in the southeastern part of the sancak of
Ismit, boasted in 1914 seven villages occupied either exclusively or partially by Armenians.
Geyve and Eçme, on the banks of the river, were inhabited by 2,168 “Armenian-speaking
Greeks,” or Orthodox Armenians whose ancestors had come from Agn. Ortaköy and Saraclı
Karyesi were located in the hills nearby. On the opposite bank of the Sakaria, facing Eçme,
was the village of Kıncılar, inhabited by 2,265 Armenians, whose roots were also in Agn.
To the south, on both sides of the railroad, were the villages of Kurdbelen, on the left
bank of the river, and Gökgöz, on the right bank, with a total population of 3,923. The last
village, Akhisar, lay on the left bank of the Sakaria one hour south of Gökgöz. It had 272
inhabitants. As in the rest of the sancak of Ismit, these Armenians too were deported in
August 1915. The kaymakam of Geyve, Said Bey (who held his post from 19 September 1913
to 21 August 1915) refused to carry out the deportation order and was replaced by Tahsin Bey
(who served as kaymakam until 5 September 1916).33
The Kazas of Karamursal and Yalova

Lying close to Constantinople, the kazas of Karamursal and, further to the west, Yalova,
were in constant communication with the capital thanks to the steamboat lines that served
them, Yalova in particular. Karamursal had an Armenian population of 1,378. Yalakdere
and Merdeköz, which lay two kilometers from the coast, had Armenian populations of 1,125
and 3,000, respectively. Yalova was made up of a cluster of villages on the Black Sea coast –
Şakşak, Kuruçeşme, and Kılıc – with a total population of 1,640 Armenians. Five kilometers
to the south, on the road to Bursa, were two more Armenian villages – Çukur, home to
420 Kurdish-speaking Armenians from an area south of Van, and Kartsi/Lalıdere, which
had 1,264 inhabitants.34 The deportation of these Armenians was carried out by the kay-
makam of Karamursal, Necib Bey, who held his post from 27 May to 2 October 1915, with
the assistance of Mehmed Cemal Bey, the commander of the gendarmerie; Ahmed, a mufti;
Salaheddin Effendi, an imam; Nuri Bey and Tahir Bey, members of the local emvalı metruke;
Mazlum Bey, a mal müdiri; Ahmed Effendi, Mazlum’s assistant; and the çete officers Tokatlı
Ahmed Çavuş, Bursalı Ahmed Onbaşi, Boşnak Hafız Onbaşi, and Tufenkci Mustafa.35 In
Yalova and its environs it was Ruşdi Bey, holding the post of kaymakam from 9 February
1913 to 31 December 1917, who organized the deportation of the Armenians and oversaw
the seizure of their property.
From November 1919 to February 1920, several of those responsible for the deportations
and the pillage of Armenian property in the sancak of Ismit were brought before the court-
martial in Istanbul. The first of those indicted, Hamid Bey, the CUP’s responsible secre-
tary in Adabazar, went on trial on 6 November 1919 for having acquired the Armenians’
assets at “indecent prices.” The former kaymakam Necati Sezayi Bey was the witness for the

prosecution.36 On Tuesday, 17 February 1920, the court-martial, with Esat as its presiding
judge, acquitted Hamid.37
The trial of the authors of violence and “abuses” in the kazas of Ismit and Karamursal
that ran from 15/28 January to 29 February/16 March 1920 culminated in the condemnation
of Hoca Rifât, the CUP’s delegate in Ismit, who was then being held on the island of Malta
and was convicted in absentia; İbrahim Bey (sentenced to 15 years in prison), arrested on 4
March 1919 in Istanbul; and a number of less important criminals: İmam Salaheddine; Ali;
the navigator İsmail Bey; Ali Şuhuri Bey, müdir of the nahie of Bağçecik (two years in prison);
Faik Çavuş (three years and 200 days in prison); Ahmed Çavuş and Hasan Effendi (four
months in prison and 20 strokes of the rod for each). The witnesses who gave evidence at the
trial revealed no more than that İmam Salaheddine had “committed no offense against the
Armenians, but that he did not attend the mosque and drank without respecting the fast.”38
The only noteworthy information to come out at these “trials” had to do with Ali Şuhuri
Bey, müdir of Bağçecik, who, according to several witnesses, bore the responsibility for the
systematic pillage of Armenian property by people who had been charged with organizing
the deportations.39

Chapter 15

the Vilayet of Bursa and the
Mutesarifat of Kütahya
A
t the dawn of the twentieth century, the vilayet of Bursa had, according to statis-
tics compiled by the Armenian Patriarchate, an Armenian population of 82,350.
Located some 20 kilometers from the Sea of Marmara at the foot of Mt. Olympus,
the city of Bursa had until 1915 an Armenian population of 11,500, settled mainly in the
Setbaşi and Emir Sultan neighborhoods. The city’s Armenians and Greeks represented more
than one-third of its population, which also included a large number of muhacirs who had
recently come from the Balkans. The Armenian colony of Bursa, founded prior to the fif-
teenth century, grew considerably in the early seventeenth century with the arrival of exiles
fleeing the Turkish-Persian wars.
Bursa’s prosperous Armenian community possessed, in the middle of the Setbaşi neighbor-
hood, a group of buildings, including a cathedral, a large lycée, and elementary schools. The
Armenians’ main economic activities were silk-making, diamond-cutting, tapestry-making,
and the production of gold jewelry. Their summer residences were located in the suburb of
Çekirge, with its hot springs and spa. There were also two Armenian villages in the immedi-
ate environs, Mulul and Cerahköy.1
According to a French military source, there were 42 functioning silk-mills in Bursa before
the war, but only 12 in 1919, for “lack of a labor-force” and because cocoon production had
“fallen off by 50%.”2 This laconic observation reflects the profound changes that the First
World War brought to the vilayet of Bursa, where the anti-Armenian persecutions began
early. By 15 April 1915, searches were already being conducted in the houses of the local
elite, and teachers and notables were being arrested on various pretexts. Interrogated by the
chief of police in the vilayet, Mahmud Celaleddin, and the senior investigating magistrate,
Mehmed Ali, some 200 of these notables were transferred to Orhaneli, south of Bursa near
Atranos, by the end of May. Others were sent to Bandırma for court-martial.3 According to
an Armenian witness, local magistrates would declare: “You have done nothing wrong, but
given the disadvantages that your presence in Bursa brings with it, you will be deported to
Atranos, where you will remain for fifteen or twenty days.” The arrival in Bursa in early July of
a Unionist delegate from the First Division of the Department of State Security, Mehmedce
Bey, marked the beginning of the veritable expulsion of the Armenians from the region.
Mehmedce’s arrival seems, moreover, to have been timed to coincide with the order, sent to
the vali of Bursa on 5 July 1915, to deport the Armenian population from the Asian regions
near Istanbul.4 It may in any case be assumed that the Ittihadist delegate judged that the pre-
paratory actions, such as the confiscation of weapons or the systematic arrest of the men, had
not proceeded far enough to justify moving immediately to expel the Armenians. Early in

Marmara Sea Bazarköy
• •
N
Gemlek
Biga
•
Banderma Muhalic Yenişehir
• •
• •
Bursa
•Bilecik •
Inegöl
Şögüt Sakaria
Karasi
Kirmasti
•
Edrenos •
•
Balıkeser
Bursa
•
Eskişehir
Pursak
•
Kütahya
•
Uşak •
Afionkarahisar
July, Mehmedce had summoned the Greek and Armenian prelates of Bursa, Doretheos and
Barkev Tanielian, as well as certain notables such as Mikayel Neshterjian, and ordered them
to hand over “the weapons of the revolutionary committees” to the authorities. It would
appear that the Armenians complied, but not fully enough to satisfy the Ittihad’s delegate,
who proceeded to arrest hundreds of men. They were confined in a building known as the
Kırmızı Fener, where they were methodically tortured.5
On 22 July, Mehmedce Bey, accompanied by çetes of the Special Organization, went to
Orhaneli, where some 400 men were being held. Their liquidation began the next day. Every
day, they were taken in groups of 40 to the Karanlık Dere gorge, where they were shot by
çetes, who then burned their bodies. Among the victims were many merchants: Antranig
Hanjian, Onnig Baltayan, Abraham Nalbandian, Hagop Kapujian, Toros Pekmezian, Karnig
Pekmezian, Stepan and Levon Dingiuilian, Lutvig Lutfian, Minas Keuleyan, Hrant Arabian,
Azniv Philibelian, Onnig Philibelian, Gabriel Michigian, the Lapatians, father and son,
and Simenet Bedros Shamamian. Among those shot were also state officials and mem-
bers of the liberal professions, teachers, and craftsmen: Minas Findeklian (an employee at
the Banque Ottomane), Harutiun Yazejian, Harutiun and Armenag Luftian (pharmacists),
Mihran Luftian (an elementary schoolteacher), Artine Uzunian (a lawyer), Stepan Hisian
(a secretary), Mikayel Hanjian, Sarkis Michigian (a student), Piuzant Morukian (a student),
Eduard Beyazian (an official in the Office of the Public Debt), Karnig and Garabed Pachajian
(butchers), Aram Kamburian (a secretary), Sarim Kelejian (a blacksmith), Garabed Ebeoğlu
(a secretary), and Krikor Andonian (an official in the Department of the Public Debt).6
Around the same time, the 100 men interned in the prison of the Bandırma court-mar-
tial, including 20 notables from Bursa who had been incarcerated since late April, were

Deportations and Massacres: Bursa, Kütahya 559
condemned to death or prison terms. The prelate of Bursa, Barkev Tanielian, and Sukias
Diulgerian were condemned to five years in prison and then deported to Der Zor, where
they died of typhus a few weeks later. As for those condemned to death, they were brought
back to Bursa and finally hanged on 24 October 1915.7 The hanged men were Dr. Stepan
Meliksetian (a physician), Parunag Ajemian (a pharmacist), Simonig Seferian (a commission
agent), Misak Mermerian (a goldsmith), Misag Der Kerovpian, Krikor Beoliukian, and four
peasants; they were symbolically hanged on the Setbaşi Bridge, at the entrance to the old
Armenian quarter.8
The deportation order, which was published on 14 August 1915, gave the Armenians
three days to prepare their departure. The looting of Armenian homes began even before
the evacuation. The first convoy left Bursa for Eskişehir on 17 August. One thousand eight
hundred families left the city in the space of three days; 150 Protestant and Catholic house-
holds were exempted from the deportation on orders from Istanbul.9 Like all the convoys
of deportees, those from Bursa followed the railway as far as Konya and Bozanti and then
crossed Cilicia to Aleppo; the most unfortunate were sent on to Der Zor.10 According to
an Armenian source, several hundred deportees managed to go into hiding in the regions
of Konya and Kütahya. Most of the post-war survivors from Bursa were drawn from their
ranks.11
The Austro-Hungarian consul, L. Trano, announced the imminent deportation of the
Armenians of the vilayet and the creation of a committee responsible for “abandoned prop-
erty” as early as 16 August.12 In another message to the Austro-Hungarian Ambassador in
Istanbul three days later, Trano stated that approximately 9,000 people had been deported by
way of Bilecik and Konya, more than 7,000 of them in two-tiered stockcars, and around 1,800
by foot. The consul further noted that the committee responsible for “abandoned property”
had immediately proceeded to “confiscate manufactories and other Armenians’ property.”13
With regard to these “confiscations,” a 31 August cable from Pallavicini to the minister
Burian indicated, on the basis of information that Trano had provided on the 23rd, that “the
Armenians’ property was seized by the members of the Union and Progress Club and certain
other Turkish notables” from Bursa.14 Trano spelled out, above all, the methods used by the
members of the committee responsible for “abandoned property” to get hold of Armenian
assets even before their proprietors were deported. The Armenians were first summoned to
the office of the vilayet’s secretary general in the konak. A bag filled with money had been
placed on the table in this office. A state official asked the person who had been summoned
to sign a prepared document indicating that he was voluntarily ceding his property to a
Turkish buyer, present in the office, who counted out the contents of a purse and handed
the sum over to him. When the “involuntary seller” left the room, he was intercepted by
another official who took the money from him and put it back on the table in the office, and
so on.15 Thanks to this exceptional document, we can gather some notion of the methods
employed by Bursa’s Young Turk circles. It seems reasonable to suppose that these practices, a
combination of formalism and cynicism, were widely utilized to lay hands on the assets of the
most important Armenian businessmen. It is probably no accident that the CUP dispatched
Mumtaz Bey to Bursa and other places in order to set up “committees responsible for aban-
doned property” with the help of two other party cadres, Abdurahman Bey and Receb Bey,
who also came from the capital,16 as well as that of the parliamentary deputies Memduh Bey
and Hamid Rıza Bey.17
Here better than elsewhere, one can observe the precision with which the capital organ-
ized operations, dispatching its delegates to supervise this or that aspect of the general plan
to deport the population and seize its assets. In charge of the political dimension of the
plan were Ali Osman, the vali; İbrahim Bey, an Ittihad inspector; Muhtar Bey, the presi-
dent of the city council; and İsmail Hakkı, the commander of the gendarmerie. Mahmud

Celaleddin Bey, the police chief; Mehmedce, a CUP delegate; Mehmed Ali, a magistrate;
and Tevfi, a police lieutenant, assumed responsibility for arresting the men, and for the inter-
rogations and torture that went hand-in-hand with the arrests. Mumtaz Bey and his men,
as we have said, took charge of the economic aspects of the program.18 Dr. Ahmed Midhat,
the former Constantinople police chief, whose role in the deportation from Bolu we have
already discussed,19 was also delegated by the CUP to Bursa to keep an eye on the progress of
operations there.20 This goes to show how many precautions the Young Turk committee took
to make certain that nothing would hinder realization of its plan. But this multiplication
of party cadres in the area also indicates how deeply the Ittihadist leaders were concerned
about the obstacles that certain local circles could put in the way of the plan, especially for
financial reasons. The CUP seems not to have trusted the members of the local Ittihad club –
Haci Selim Semerci; Bakhal Necip; Haci Safti, the head of the Deutsche Bank; Defterdar
Arif; Attar Haci Sabit Bey; Haci Abdüllah Bey; Sfahanlı Haci Emin; Urganci Abdüllah;
Hafız Sabit; Celal Salih; Sfahanlı Hakkı – who were, in fact, the first to benefit from the
spoliation of Armenian property.21
Government officials also seem to take advantage of the circumstances to enrich themselves.
In addition to Ali Osman Bey, the vali, the following people both organized the deportations
and were at the same time the main beneficiaries of the liquidation of Armenian property:
Seyid Bey, the director of the vali’s cabinet; Ahmed Muhtar Bey, the mayor; Niazi Bey, evkaf
memuri (director of religious and charitable institutions, the wakıf); Reşad Bey, a vergi memuri
(tax collector); Ahmed Haci Effendi, an investigating magistrate; Safet Effendi, the principal
of a lycée; Haydar Bey, the zirât memuri (director of agriculture); Nureddin Effendi, the belediye
memuri (secretary general at town hall); Edib Bey, the head of the Tobacco Régie; Ali Gulvi
and Hasan Fehmi, magistrates; Hulusi Bey, the marif müdüru (director of education); İsmail
Hakkı, the commander of the gendarmerie; Ziya Bey, the military commander; Arap Fuad, an
officer in the gendarmerie; Mahmud Celaleddin, the police chief; Çerkez Tevfik, the assistant
police chief; and Haci Tevfik and Hidayet Tevfik, police officers.22
At the trial of those responsible for the anti-Armenian persecutions held before the court-
martial in Bursa, the two people who received the heaviest sentences, the CUP’s delegate
Mehmedce Bey, who was condemned to death, and İbrahim Bey, the Ittihad’s inspector,
who was sentenced to eight years in prison, were, significantly, judged in absentia. Similarly,
the police lieutenant Haci Tevfik, the policemen Yahia and Sadık Süleyman Fevzi, and the
gendarme Hasan indeed received sentences of ten years of hard labor, but were officially
“fugitives from justice,” whereas the people present at the trial who were the most heavily
implicated in the deportations and violence were all acquitted.23 Moreover, a report drawn
up by the French Navy’s intelligence service in April 1919 indicates that these men were all
in Bursa, where they were living without being put out in any way by the new authorities.
They even seem to have been involved in the murders of Armenians then returning from
exile, which occurred daily.24
The Kaza of Bazarköy

Lying in the northern part of the sancak of Bursa, around Lake Iznik, the six Armenian
villages in the kaza of Bazarköy constituted the biggest demographic concentration in the
region. In 1910, a total of 22,209 Armenians lived here; their ancestors, who came from Agn,
Arapkir, Palu, Harput, and Erzerum, settled in the area between 1592 and 1607.25
To the northeast of Lake Iznik, Keramet had 1,215 inhabitants. Two hours further west lay
Medz Norkiugh – Cedik Kariye for the Ottoman administration – with its 2,937 Armenians,
almost all of whom earned their living either from the cultivation of grapes and olives or as
craftsmen. Three kilometers further west, Michakiugh/Ortaköy had a population of 3,000.

Çengiler, also in the immediate vicinity, was a large village of 5,000 inhabitants known for
its silk workshops, which employed several hundred workers, and its 500 to 600 steam-driven
wheels in the workshops of the village. Around 1914, the village exported more than 2,000
kilograms of raw silk annually to Marseille, Lyons, Milan, and London by way of a coopera-
tive that local craftsmen had founded to secure supplies and promote sales. The 1,000 inhab-
itants of the village of Benli/Gürle, on the southwest shore of the lake, lived mainly from
fishing. Finally, the village of Sölöz, two hours further south, boasted a population of 4,000.26
The August 1914 general mobilization very quickly drained all these Armenian villages of
their young men, but there is no record of any particular problems occurring in any of them
until late May 1915. At that point, house searches and arrests began; the official objective
was to induce the population to hand over its weapons to the authorities.27
The first target of these operations was Çengiler. On 4 August 1915, 2,000 soldiers and
gendarmes surrounded the village28 under the supervision of Haci Alaeddin, the CUP’s tem-
porary delegate and a member of Bazarköy’s Ittihadist club, and Abdülhamid Bey, the military
commander of Bursa, who had been charged with carrying out the deportation in Çengiler.29
After a short exchange with the local notables, they put some one thousand two hundred
families on the road with a sizeable escort. These deportees were not allowed to take their
moveable assets with them. The men were separated from the rest of the convoy a half-hour
from the village and slain on the banks of a stream in the place known as Barzudag.30 About
100 men were maintained in the village in order to transport the Armenians’ belongings to
the church, where they were divided up among peasants, soldiers, and gendarmes. After that,
the village was methodically plundered and put to the torch. The 100 men were led from the
village under guard and slaughtered.31
The inhabitants of Ortaköy, Medz Norkiugh, Keramet, Sölöz, and Benli were deported
shortly after the population of Çengiler.32 In Medz Norkiugh, the deportation order was
issued on 16 August; the villagers were given three days to make preparations for their
journey, under the supervision of the müdir, Mehmed Fahri. On 19 August, these convoys,
escorted by squadrons of çetes, set out for Eskişehir, and proceeded from there down the
Konya-Bozanti-Aleppo route on foot.33
It is noteworthy that a few dozen young recruits from Çengiler, Ortaköy, and Sölöz took to
the maquis when they learned that their families had been deported, and that the inhabit-
ants of Benli put up a degree of resistance, burning their harvest before leaving their homes.
According to Aguni, the Armenian recruits resisted for about one year in a mountain dis-
trict, securing their food supply by raiding Turkish villages and, sometimes, inflicting losses
on the forces that came looking for them. Many of them died fighting on a farm in Sölöz
where they had been surrounded.34
Armenian sources give the names of those bearing the main responsibility for the atroci-
ties inflicted on the kaza of Bazarköy: Kürd Sâmi Bey, an officer in the gendarmerie; Refik
Bey, a former director of the Department of the Public Debt; Tahir Effendi, the secretary of
a regiment; Softaoğlu Mehmed; Ali Bey; Hüseyin Bey; Giridli Adıl Bey; Recepoğlu Salih;
Urufat; Tabuk İbrahim; Halil Effendi; Küçük Ahmed; and Onbaşi Musa Ali.35
The Kaza of Gemlik

In the district of Gemlik, lying just west of the kaza of Bazarköy on the coast not far from
Bursa, there were three Armenian villages on the eve of the war with a total population of
12,100. In the basically Greek port of Gemlik, there were barely 100 Armenians. The big
village of Beyli, in contrast, located three kilometers to the west, was entirely Armenian; its
7,000 inhabitants were blacksmiths, animal breeders, farmers, and craftsmen, whose ances-
tors had come from Agn and settled there around 1600. Two kilometers farther south, Karsak

had an Armenian population of 5,000. These three groups were deported at the same time
as the Armenians of the kaza of Bazarköy, in mid-August 1915.36
The Kazas of Muhalic, Kirmasti, and Edrenos/Atarnos

The three districts of Muhalic, Kirmasti, and Edrenos/Atarnos, located west and south of
Bursa, boasted a total Armenian population of 8,459 on the eve of the war. The principal
town of the kaza of Muhalic, a small Greek town with 8,000 inhabitants, had an Armenian
population of 400. There were another five rural communities scattered throughout the
area. The densely populated kaza of Kirmasti had only one modest Armenian colony
with around 1,000 members, all of whom lived in the seat of the kaza. More than 4,000
Armenians, however, lived in three localities in the kaza of Edrenos, south of Bursa, most
of them peasants who earned a living by raising silkworms.37 In these three kazas, the
deportations were carried out in August 1915 by the local authorities, acting under super-
vision from Bursa. In Kirmasti, the kaymakam, Kâmil Effendi; Osman Effendi, the mufti;
Kambur Reis, a muhtar; Ayaşköylu Mehmed Bey; Ziya Effendi; Muezzin Mehmed; and Haci
Muharım organized the expulsion of the Armenian population to Eskişehir and down the
Konya-Bozanti route.38
The Deportations in the Sancak of Ertuğrul

The 13 Armenian villages in the sancak of Ertuğrul had also been founded at the turn of the
seventeenth century. According to the 1914 Ottoman census, they had a total Armenian
population of 25,380 in that year. The statistics of the Constantinople Patriarchate put their
number somewhat higher, at 28,629. Most of these Armenians were Turkish-speaking, unlike
those in the sancaks of Ismit and Bursa.39
Located on a hillside on the left bank of the Karasu river, Bilecik, the seat of the mutesarif,
had somewhat more than 10,000 inhabitants in 1914; 4,080 of them were Armenians who
lived in the Balipaşa neighborhood. They were chiefly occupied in raising silkworms and
spinning silk in the seventeen silk-mills, almost all of them Armenian owned.
There was also a small number of Armenians in the northern part of the kaza: in Mekece,
on the right bank of the Sakaria, in Lefke, ten kilometers further south, and in Gölbazar
or Nor Kiugh, a village with an Armenian population of 500. Further to the southwest lay
the village of Göldağ, with an Armenian population of 2,200, and the big village of Decir
Hanlar, with an Armenian population of 2,500. Ten kilometers further to the east, the village
of Turkmen was, despite its name, exclusively Armenian; it had a population of 2,630.40
In August 1915, these 13,110 people found themselves deported in the space of a few days.
To carry off this operation, the CUP sent Ahmed Mercimekzâde as its responsible secretary
to Bilecik; there he was able to count on the support of Ali Kemal Bey, the president of the
local Ittihadist club, and other influential members of the club, such as Fuad Mercimezâde,
Haci Ahmed, and Saraf Imam Abdüllah.41 The administrative dimension of the plan to
extirpate the Armenian population was seen to by the mutesarif, Cemal Bey, Teymuz Bey,
the kaymakam of the kaza of Bilecik, and Binbaşi Rifât, the commander of the gendarmerie
of the sancak of Ertuğrul, who served for a time as interim kaymakam.42
A Mkhitarist monk who witnessed the events notes that he was in Bilecik on 16 August
1915, the date on which the notables and the auxiliary primate, Father Simon, were sum-
moned by the mutesarif Cemal Bey and told that they had to leave in three days. The monk
observes that there were very few men in the town, since they had been mobilized; that, for
a week, it had been impossible to travel outside the town; and that the Armenians of Bilecik
had witnessed the passage of convoys of deportees from the west in a state that gave them

some notion of what lay in store for them. Once the deportation order had been made public,
the Armenians began to sell off their furniture to their neighbors, who had flocked to buy
what they could at extremely low prices. Scenes of the pillage of Armenian homes began to
multiply from 17 August on, when the villagers from the environs came to take their part
of the loot.43 On 18 August, according to the Mkhitarist monk, who was spared because he
was a Catholic, the Armenian church was full for the last service. The next morning, all the
Armenians of Bilecik left the town in a single convoy bound for Eskişehir. The schoolchil-
dren were invited to help demolish the Armenian quarter. In particular, they were given the
task of removing house windows and doors; the women followed them into the abandoned
houses. This pillage, and the sacking of the Armenian quarter, went on for ten days. Only
the cathedral, which had been converted into a depot, and the homes of a few notables,
occupied by government officials, escaped destruction. The orchards surrounding the city
and the Armenian cemetery were also sacked.44 With the exception of a few Catholic fami-
lies, Bilecik was emptied of its Armenian population.
The Kazas of Yenişehir, Inegöl, and Şögüt

Lying on both shores of the eastern half of Lake Iznik, the kaza of Yenişehir had, in 1914,
three Armenian colonies with a total population of 4,750. Two hundred fifty Armenians
lived in Nor Kiugh [“New Village”], just outside Nicea/Iznik; 2,500 were to be found in the
village of Marmaracık. Finally, in Yenişehir, the seat of the kaza, with a mixed population,
there were more than 2,000 Armenians, most of whom earned their living as farmers.45
A heavily wooded region lying about 40 kilometers east of Bursa, halfway between Bursa
and Bilecik, the kaza of Inegöl had, in 1914, two Armenian villages, Yenice (pop. 2,000) and
Ceran (pop. 2,500).46
In the westernmost kaza in the sancak of Ertuğrul, Şögüt, there were on the eve of the
genocide four Armenian villages, located to either side of the Sakaria. To the south, Çalgara
had 900 inhabitants. On the right bank of the river lay Muraca, with a population of 2,600;
Asarcık, inhabited by 1,200 of the faithful; and Yenibazar (pop. 700). One thousand four
hundred seventy-two Armenians, including a handful of Protestants, lived in the seat of the
kaza, Şögüt.47 The deportation of this population and the seizure of its property was super-
vised by Young Turk cadres from Bilecik, who delegated Emin Effendi, the CUP responsible
secretary, and the parliamentary deputy from Inegöl, Mehmed Bey, to oversee operations.
They were assisted by the members of the local club, Ahmed Alizâde ali Effendi, Sadıkzâde
Haci Hüseyin Effendi, Sabri Effendi, and Tüfenkcibaşizâde Molla Yusuf. Among the gov-
ernment officials, Said Bey, the kaymakam of Inegöl; Nuri Effendi, a civil servant in the
Department of Finance; Süleyman Effendi; Mustafa Effendi, director of the Office of the
Public Debt; and Osman Nuri, the commander of the local gendarmerie, all played pivotal
roles in the deportation carried out in August 1915.48
The Deportations in the Sancak of Karasi/Balikeser

According to the Patriarchate’s 1913–14 census, there were approximately 20,000 Armenians
in the sancak of Karasi, almost all of whom were concentrated in the kazas of Bandırma
and Balıkeser. The colonies of this sancak, which had close ties to Istanbul and Bursa by
virtue of their geographic location, had been founded in the first years of the seventeenth
century.49
In the Balıkeser prefecture, known for its cotton production, there were in 1914 3,684
Armenians, who were settled in the Alifakiye neighborhood. The only Armenian-populated
villages in the environs were Bali Maden (pop. 480) and Babaköy/Burhaniye (pop. 320).50

Set deep in the Cyzique Gulf, Bandırma served as the port of the sancak of Karasi; a
steamboat line ran between the port and the capital. In 1914, 3,450 Armenians lived here,
most of them earning a living either raising silkworms or in weaving, embroidery, or the
silk-trade. In the northern part of the kaza, in Erdek, on the peninsula of the same name,
a colony of 1,000 Armenians was established in a Greek environment. Opposite Erdek, on
the coast, the port of Eydincik had an Armenian community with 1,470 members. Finally,
south of Lake Manias, in the environs of the city of the same name, there was an Armenian
population of 1,200; another 1,302 Armenians lived in the village of Ermeniköy, located on
the shores of the Sea of Marmara. To these figures, we must add the few thousand Armenians
who lived scattered throughout the rest of the sancak – for example, in Sultançayr Maden
(pop. 450), Susurlu (pop. 100), Armudova (pop. 250), or Edremid (pop. 65).51
Here, too, the deportations were organized in August 1915,52 under the direction of
Ahmed Midhat Bey, the mutesarif of Balıkeser; Dyarbekirli Cemal Bey, the secretary general
of the sancak; Necib Bey, the head of the Regie; and Rıza Bey, a retired battalion commander.
The murder of several dozen men and the seizure of the Armenians’ property were the work
of the members of Balıkeser’s Young Turk club – Arapzâde Sabaheddin Bey, the president,
assisted by Atıf Bey, a parliamentary deputy from Biğa; Hasan Bedu Bey; Recayi Şükrü Bey;
and Laz Haci Mustafa Effendi.53
In Bandırma, the main organizers of the extirpation of the Armenians from the region
were Ömer Lutfi Bey, the CUP’s responsible secretary; Servet Bey, the president of the
municipality and president of the committee responsible for “abandoned property”; as well
as the local Young Turk notables Mehmed Bey Mulkizâde, Mehmed Bey Velibeyzâde, Haci
Sâmi Bey, Giritli Celal Bey, Selanikli Sabri Bey, Reşad Bey Taşcizâde, Mehmed Bey, Balıklı
Tahir, İsmail Effendi Hakkızâde, Eberlerin Içak Hadi, Hacinâzımbeyzâde Teza Bey, Musazâde
Tevfik Bey, and Dabağ Dervişoğlu Ahmed. Among the government officials, Nizameddin
Bey, the kaymakam of Bandırma; Tahtaci İsmail Effenci, the president of the commercial
court; Hüseyin Çavuş, the commander of the local gendarmerie; and Reşid Bey, the police
chief, saw to the administrative aspect of operations, leaving it to the club and the Special
Organization to carry out the massacres. The local Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa was headed by the fol-
lowing commanders of squadrons of çetes: Adal Haci Ahmed, Tellal İsmail Bey, Hanci Ali
Çavuş, and Boykotci Mehmed.54
In the nahie of Eydincik, the deportations were organized by the müdir, Necip Effendi;
Haci Yusuf, the mayor; Behcet Effendi, an official in the Tapu (Land Registry Office); Tatar
Mustafa Çavuş, the commander of the gendarmerie; Veli Effendi, an official in the Telegraph
Office; and Ali Effendi, a civil servant employed in the Office of the Public Debt. They were
aided and abetted by the local Unionist notables, who committed several murders: Kara
Mustafa Bey, Nuri Ömer Effendizâde, Ramzi Abdo Mollaoğlu, and Karabaşoğlu Rağıb.55
Deportations in the Mutesarifat of Kütahya

Kütahya’s Armenian colony, founded at the turn of the fifteenth century, was one of the old-
est in the region. It was famed, above all, for its production of faience. There were also two
small rural centers in the vicinity of Kütahya, Alinca and Arslanik Yayla, and two Armenian
colonies in the northwestern part of the kaza, in Tavşanlı (pop. 320) and Virancik (pop. 200).
Thus Kütahya had a total Armenian population of 3,578.56 Located in the southernmost tip
of the sancak of Kütahya, the Armenian colony of the kaza of Uşak, with 1,100 members, was
essentially concentrated in the seat of kaza, also named Uşak; economic activity here was
organized around rug-making and the fabrication of woolens.57
The Armenian population of the sancak of Kütahya was not deported – a fact rare enough
to be singled out for mention. The mutesarif, Faik Ali Bey, was one of the state officials who

refused to carry out the orders he received from Istanbul; yet, contrary to expectations, he
was not dismissed. According to Aguni – who after the war asked the mutesarif in person
how he managed to maintain the region’s Armenians in their homes – the local Turkish
population firmly opposed the deportation of the Armenians, with the encouragement of
two families of notables, the Kermiyanzâdes and Hocazâde Rasik. This had its effects on the
central government. Yet, while Mehmed Talât threatened the mutesarif and these notables
with retaliation, he seems to have exhibited a certain indulgence in this particular case,
a sort of exception that proves the rule. Although, initially, fewer than 5,000 people were
supposed to benefit from this exception, several thousand deportees from Bandırma, Bursa,
and Tekirdağ also profited from the benevolent attitude of the mutesarif and the local popu-
lation, thus escaping the fate that awaited them on the Konya-Bozanti-Aleppo route. It was
ultimately the Grand Assembly of Ankara that would liquidate, a few years later, this oasis of
life, after extorting a heavy contribution from it “for the defense of the fatherland.”58
The histories of a few individuals detained in Çanğıri who were among the rare prison-
ers released, on condition that they reside elsewhere than in Istanbul – the architect Simon
Melkonian, Sarkis Arents, the pharmacist Hajian, Kasbar Cheraz, Mikayel Shamdanjian, and
Father Vartan Karageuzian – illustrate the uniqueness of the case of the sancak of Kütahya. After
passing through Eskişehir and being expelled from Smyrna on 31 October, these men arrived, on
3 November, in Uşak, whose population had also not been deported, because, at the administra-
tive level, the city was attached to Kütahya. Thanks to the station-master, M. Dedeyan, and the
priest, Father Harutiunian, who vouched for them with the authorities, the local police granted
them permission to settle in Uşak, where they remained for three years – the only deportees
present in the town – and even founded a school for the Armenian children there.59
Deportations in the Sancaks of Eskişehir and Afionkarahisar

It is revealing that, despite what was just said, the Armenian population of the sancak of
Eskişehir did not benefit from the privilege accorded the Armenians of the neighboring
sancak, although Eskişehir was administratively attached to the mutesarifat of Kütahya. In
the Armenian quarter of Eskişehir, founded early in the seventeenth century, there were
barely 1,000 Armenians. They worked mainly in the bazaar, which they ran together with
Greeks. There were another three Armenian villages in the rest of the kaza, Artaki Çiftlik,
Karaharac, and Bey Yayla; the total Armenian population of the district was 4,510.60 These
Armenians were deported on 14 August 1915, under extremely harsh conditions; they were
not authorized to take any belongings at all with them.61 Rifât Bey, the mutesarif of Eskişehir,
and Halid Ziya, the mayor, played important roles during the administrative phase of opera-
tions, but the veritable architect of the deportation was Dr. Besim Zühtü, the CUP’s respon-
sible secretary in Eskişehir.62 Zühtü had the support of the members of the local Unionist
club: Abdüllah Sabri Bey, who was also a member of the emvalı metruke; Derecioğlu Ali
Velioğlu, the president of the local club; and Reşid Bey. Among the government officials,
Edhem Effendi, the director of the Department of Public Education, and Zeki Bey, the head
of the Committee for Emigration, played crucial roles in preparing the deportation. Reşid
Bey, the police chief; İsmail Hakkı, the assistant police chief; Besim Bey, the commander
of the gendarmerie; and Ömer Lutfi, an officer in the gendarmerie, were chiefly responsi-
ble for carrying out the deportations. The seizure of Armenian property was organized by
Elvadcizâde Abdülrahman, Telcizâde Haci Hakkı, Mustafa Besim (a lawyer), Fakreddin Haci
Nebi, Emin Bey, Hocazâde Arif, Kenanzâde Süleyman, Abdüllah Sabri Bey, Kianizâde Halil
İbrahim, Megalici Halil, Bayrakdarzâde Ali Ulvi, Haci Çakerlar, Haci Hafiz Ömer, Yaver
Hoca, Hasan Effendi, Hafız Osman Nuri, Haci Edhem Bey Zâde Faik, Dedelikzâde Arif,
Erdemzâde Muslin, and Hasköylı İbrahim.63

When Father Vartan Karageuzian passed through Eskişehir around 25 October, the city
had been entirely emptied of its Armenians, with the exception of a few Catholic families.64
The sancak of Afionkarahisar was no more spared the deportations than was Eskişehir.
The Armenian colony of Afion, the prefecture, boasted 6,500 members in 1914; it was
reputed for its production of furniture and objects made of wood inlaid with silver. There
were also two small communities in the kaza of Azizye, to the north of Afion, in Muzlice and
Sandıklı (pop. 170). Thus, 7,448 Armenians lived in the sancak as a whole; all were Turkish-
speaking.65 The population of the villages of the kaza of Aziziye was deported on 13 August
1915, with the exception of twenty-seven artisans and their families, who had to convert.
The Armenians of Afion were deported on 15 August.66
The violence and deportations were organized by Dr. Moktar Besim, the CUP’s respon-
sible secretary in Afion, At Osman Zâde, the president of the local club, and the town’s
other Unionists, most of whom were Bosnian muhacirs: Boşnak Muhacir Salih, Pambuk
Mehmed Effendi, Boşnak Mehmed Ali, Boşnak Hilmi, and Boşnak Mehmed Effendi. The
mutesarif, Hakim Bey; the mayor, Rizazâde Alaheddin Effendi; İbrahim, the director of the
Agricultural Bank; Elmas Effendi, a magistrate; Dr. Mustafa, the municipal physician; and
Hayreddin Effendi, the president of the emvalı metruke, carried out the administrative opera-
tions, while Bahaeddin Bey, the commander of the gendarmerie; Osman Nuri, an officer;
Hasan Fehmi, the police chief; and Mustafa Effendi, the assistant police chief, implemented
the deportation order. The main beneficiaries of the spoliation of the Armenians’ property
were the following notables: Nyasi, Boşnak Eyba, Köroğlu Halil Ağa, Gübeleoğlu Ahmed,
and Şeyh Derviş.67

Chapter 16

the Vilayet of Aydın
T
he fact that there was very little anti-Armenian violence in Smyrna during the war
was attributed by those who took part in the events of the day to the energetic activ-
ity of the vali, Mustafa Rahmi [Evranos], one of the founders of the CUP in Salonika
and an influential member of the party.1 The correspondence of the Consul General of the
United States in Smyrna, George Horton,2 like that of his colleague Vladimir Radinsky, who
managed the Austro-Hungarian consulate,3 tends to show that the Armenians of the vilayet
of Aydın owed their survival and the fact that they could remain in the city exclusively to
the influence of Rahmi Bey, who is supposed to have resisted the orders he received from
Istanbul. This was also the opinion of both circles close to the Patriarchate, in particular
the journalist Sebuh Agnuni, who does, however, point out how much this “cost” Smyrna’s
affluent families.4
The story of Smyrna, however, can obviously not be reduced to the action of a single man,
however powerful he may have been or whatever the personal profit he may have reaped from
his acts. The fact that a member of the CUP as influential as Mustafa Rahmi should have
been appointed vali of Smyrna in the aftermath of the Balkan Wars probably had to do with
the Young Turks’ plans to “homogenize” the regions of the Ottoman Aegean coastline. Put
into practice in spring 1914 by a decision of the Young Turk Central Committee, this plan,
the objective of which was to eradicate the Greek population of the coast, was entrusted to
Rahmi’s “administrative” leadership.5 There is every reason to think that the vali himself
helped draw up this plan. In other words, it was the Greek dimension of the plan for the
ethnic “homogenization” of Anatolia, which was then at the center of Rahmi’s preoccupa-
tions and also those of the commander-in-chief of the Fourth Army Corps, General Pertev
Pasha [Dermirhan]. If these operations had slowed by the eve of the war, the reason was
doubtless the crucial stake represented by Greece’s neutrality or even entry into the war on
the German side. Moreover, the forced exile of tens of thousands of Greeks to the Kingdom
of Greece and the deportation of hundreds of thousands of others to the interior allowed the
CUP to realize its basic political and economic objectives: the assets of this population group
were seized. Having accomplished that goal, the Ittihadist party-state could have spared
Smyrna and what remained of the vilayet’s Greek population, which it indeed did. Rahmi
promoted this policy by magisterially manipulating the local press.6 An Austro-Hungarian
diplomat noted that “Rahmi Bey has had a reputation for being an inveterate Grecophobe
ever since the expulsions from the coast, [but] he knows how to make the editor-in-chief of
Réforme publish laudatory articles certifying that the Orthodox Greeks of Smyrna and the
environs are happy with their government.”7 The vali also displayed a benevolent attitude
toward the Englishmen whom the war caught by surprise in Smyrna. He was in fact so suc-
cessful at this that the Foreign Office thought he might be a “potential interlocutor” on bad

Pergama
•
• Manisa
•
Smyrna
• Ödemiş
•
Aydın
Denizly
•
Aegean Sea
terms with the Ottoman capital.8 In Smyrna, accordingly, during the first year of the war, a
sort of armed peace reigned with the Greeks, who were on their guard and overall hostile to
the Young Turk regime.
In such a context, the elimination of the city’s Armenians would no doubt have spawned
tensions in Greek circles, where it would have been perceived as a danger that could affect
the Greeks as well. According to the 1914 Ottoman census, corroborated in this case by the
Patriarchate’s statistics, there were nearly 21,000 Armenians in the vilayet of Aydın, more
than 11,000 of whom lived in Smyrna and its suburbs, Burnabad and Cordelio.9 Playing the
card of fidelity to the empire for all it was worth, the Armenian archbishop organized in
November 1914 a church service for the victory of the Ottoman Army, which was attended
by the vali and Pertev. The service was followed by a reception at which Rahmi took pains
to point out that whenever the government launched a patriotic appeal, “the Armenians
were always the first Christian group to answer it.10 It goes without saying that declarations
of this kind were intended to reassure the Armenians, but also to indicate how much less
interested the Greeks were in the fate of the “fatherland.” This state of grace ended in April
1915, when Rahmi summoned Archbishop Mattheos Injeyan and a few notables to destroy
all the arms and ammunition in their possession.11 On 2 and 3 May, police searches were
carried out in the homes of Armenian political leaders; 100 people were arrested and 20
were brought before the court-martial in Smyrna.12 According to information relayed by the
American and Austro-Hungarian consuls, explosives and grenades had been found. It seems,
however, that the explosives in question had been entrusted to the Smyrna ARF by the local
CUP club during the 1909 “counter-revolution” for the purposes of the struggle against the
“reactionaries.” What is more, the devices had been buried for six years and could apparently
no longer be detonated.13 It is well known that relations between the local CUP and ARF
committees were close and that in April 1909 the local Ittihad club had appealed to the ARF
and Hnchaks to “form volunteer groups in the next twelve hours.”14
Nevertheless, after a two-month pretrial investigation and two trial sessions held on 4
and 5 July 1915, the Smyrna court-martial condemned seven of the indicted men to death for
having explosives in their possession.15 Smyrna’s Armenian notables tried to obtain “imperial

Deportations and Massacres: Aydın 569
clemency” for them, arguing that the men had been unjustly condemned. To that end, they
appealed to the vali, Rahmi, and foreign diplomats, brandishing a “memorandum” in sup-
port of their position. This appeal for mercy seems to have been inspired by the fear that
the threatened executions would “create the impression, among the most ignorant Turkish
fanatics, that the Armenians were plotting against the government, something that could
precipitate a massacre.”16 The vali informed the notables that he would do what he could,
but added that the decision to execute the sentence was in the hands of the commander of
the Fourth Army Corps, Pertev Pasha. On 4 August 1915, the sultan finally commuted the
death sentence to 15 years of hard labor, and five of the condemned men were sent to Konya
to serve out their sentences.17
This episode shows that the authorities employed the usual methods in Smyrna in order
to portray “the” Armenians as conspirators and traitors, but without translating the implied
threat into action by deporting them. It is probable that, as in Istanbul, they had staged this
spectacle in order to justify actions they were taking elsewhere, while at the same time mak-
ing a show of their magnanimity to foreign observers. Mustafa Rahmi seems to have played
the role of protector exceedingly well and thus assured himself of the generosity of Smyrna’s
leading Armenian families.
However, the Armenians of the vilayet of Aydın were not yet delivered of the threat
hanging over them, and were subjected to regular harassment until fall 1918. It should be
recalled in this connection that all unmarried men from other regions living in Smyrna
were gradually arrested and deported to the Syrian deserts18 by the police chief, Yenişehirli
Hilmi, and two of his henchmen, Bazarlı Haci Abdüllah and Spahanlı Haci Emin.19 Also
noteworthy is the fact that, on 1 November 1915, the city’s main Armenian neighborhood,
Haynots, where the Cathedral of St. Stephen and the adjacent archbishopric were located,
was surrounded by the army, which proceeded to carry out a systematic search and to arrest
some 2,000 people.20 These operations had been sparked by an anonymous proclamation,
written in Turkish and French and pasted up in a few places with Smyrna, which took issue
with the government’s pro-German policies. The author of this lampoon, a certain Stepan
Nalbandian, was identified in rather short order. The ensuing investigation showed that
he had acted on his own. That, however, did not prevent the vali from deporting several
hundred people in different convoys sent in different directions on 28 November and then
again on 16 and 24 December. Among them were a considerable number of British, Italian,
and Russian subjects, many of whom died on the road. This suggests that Rahmi had profited
from the occasion to eliminate these “foreigners” and lay hands on their property, distrib-
uting part of it to police officials and members of the Ittihadist club, such as Ali Fikri or
Mahmud Bey.21
After every police action, the Archbishop Mattheos Injeyan and Armenian notables
Diran Achnan, Misak Morukian, and Nazaret Hilmi Nersesian assiduously solicited the vali’s
intervention, heedless of the expense, in order to save members of their community. Rahmi
took advantage of every such occasion to pocket large sums.22 Armenian Apostolic circles,
however, were not the only ones targeted. The Armenian Catholics, who had previously
been spared because they were relatively well protected by the Austro-Hungarian consul,
came under attack in September 1916. The police searched the Catholic cemetery on 16 and
17 September and claimed to have found bombs there. There is reason to think that this was
a provocation engineered by the vali and the Unionists of the port city, for this “discovery”
provided justification for the arrest of 300 Armenian Catholics from Smyrna, Cordelio, and
Karataş, some of whom were deported to Afionkarahisar, where they were followed on 9 and
10 November by 300 to 400 people from the affluent classes.23 The choice of the people to be
deported seems to have depended on the assets they possessed, coveted by this or that local
notable or government official.

These deportations did not just affect Armenians from Smyrna. In the rest of the san-
cak, the 1,000 Armenians of Pergamon and the 1,500 of Ödemiş, as well as the members
of the little colonies of Menemen, Kuşadası, Bayındir, and Söke, were also targeted.24 The
Armenians of Söke, like those of Pergamon, were quietly deported in mid-August 1915, fol-
lowed by those of Ödemiş in February 1916.25 The deportations were carried out under the
supervision of Farah Bey, the kaymakam of Kuşadası/Dikili, and Arif Hikmet Bey, the kay-
makam of Pergamon.26
The Deportations in the Sancak of Manisa

Located northeast of Smyrna, the sancak of Manisa boasted an Armenian colony 2,875
strong. The Armenians here were concentrated in the lower quarter of the town, known
as Malta, and in the upper quarter, which was entirely Armenian. In the rest of the sancak,
there were also small colonies of 1,000 members each in Kasaba, Akhisar, and Kırkağac.27
In Magnesium, an Armenian witness states that the mutesarif, Tevfik Bey, succeeded in
saving the Armenian population by only going through the motions of carrying out his
orders. Four hundred people were expelled from their homes rather late, on 15 October 1916,
and on the initiative of the commander of the gendarmerie, Fehmi Bey.28 Furthermore,
the weaver’s workshop that belonged to M. Sariyan, who was deported from Smyrna on 24
December 1916, was turned over on 29 December to two influential members of Smyrna’s
Unionist club, Husnizâde Ali Fikri and the officer Ahmed Bey, on “an order come from
Smyrna.” But the Armenians in the other towns and villages of the sancak were spared,29
except for those from Kırkağac, who were deported to Konya in November 1915.30
The Deportations in the Sancaks of Aydın and Denizly

Only a few Armenians lived in the southern part of the vilayet of Aydın. They were to be
found in the seat of the sancak, also called Aydın (pop. 500), Nazilly (pop. 543) and, 25 kilom-
eters to the east, in Denizly (pop. 548).31 These Armenians had, however, already been par-
tially eliminated along with the Greek population in spring 1914. As in the region of Manisa,
a local official named Nuri Bey succeeded in preventing the mutesarif, Reşid Bey, a former
director of the political division of the Istanbul police force, from carrying out the deporta-
tions.32 In Denizly, a few dozen men were arrested during the house searches carried out in
early May 1915, and one of them was even executed in public on 16 September 1916. The
colony as a whole, however, was spared.33 In other words, the balance of the Ittihadists’ anti-
Armenian policies in the region is a mixed one, serving chiefly to put Greek and Armenian
businesses and the inherited wealth of the leading families in Turkish hands.

Chapter 17

in the Vilayet of Konya
D
uring the deportations of summer and fall 1915, all the deportees from Thrace and
western Anatolia who were following the Adabazar-Konya-Bozanti route to exile in
Syria were concentrated in the vilayet of Konya. Konya’s train station, which lay on
the last trunk of the railway, also served as a transit or regrouping center for the deportees. By
the same token, it played a crucial role in the system put in place by the government to expel
the Armenians from western Anatolia. An examination of the methods employed here by
the local authorities and the CUP delegates sent to Konya offers an opportunity to examine
the way the Special Organization and the ministries responsible for the armed forces and
police intervened in these operations. This examination is the easier to make because there
were around 24,000 local Armenians in the vilayet of Konya, according to the Patriarchate’s
statistics (nearly 14,000, according to the Ottoman census),1 even if a large proportion of
them were deported as well. The reports by these Konya Armenians, as well as the observa-
tions of American missionaries or deportees who spent time in Konya, shed light on the
system set up by the Ottoman government.
In the city of Konya, where the vali had his seat, 4,440 Armenians lived in the upper
quarter known as Allaheddin. There were also nearly 5,000 in Akşehir, in the northwest-
ern tip of the sancak, somewhat more than 1,000 in Karaman, in the south, and another
1,000 in Eregli, in the southeast.2 Since 6 August 1914, the vali, Azmi Bey, formerly pre-
fect of police in Istanbul,3 had been mistreating the Armenian population of the vilayet
and had extorted large sums from it “for the war effort.” In early May 1915, he organized
house searches that went on for several nights, especially in the Armenian schools and
the homes of notables. Officially, the purpose of these operations was to locate illegally
held weapons. In reality, Azmi’s instructions were probably to work up a compromising
case against the Armenians in order to justify arresting the Armenian elite here as well.4
On the basis of a list apparently compiled earlier by the local Ittihadist club, 110 mer-
chants, financiers, and elementary schoolteachers were summoned to the police station,
then taken to the train station and sent off toward Sultaniye, east of Konya. In the same
period, 4,000 Armenian deportees from Zeitun arrived in Konya in a pitiable state, after
having trekked through Tarsus and Bozanti with no means of subsistence whatsoever. In
an exchange with the vali that took place on 6 May, the chief physician of the American
Red Cross Hospital in Konya, Dr. William S. Dodd, asked Azmi for permission to go out to
meet these deportees and provide them with food and basic necessities. The vali categori-
cally refused.5 For his part, the Armenian primate, Karekin Khachadurian, went to great
lengths to win the deported men the right to return home. He made an appeal to this
effect to Azmi, who had just returned from a trip to Istanbul. “The policies adopted with
regard to the Armenians,” the vali answered, “cannot now be modified. The Armenians of

•
Afion karahisar
Aksaray
•
Nevşehir
Burdur • •
Isparta
• KONYA Nigde
•
Eregli
•
Adalia •
Karaman
•
ADANA
Mediterranean
Sea
Konya should consider themselves lucky because they have been deported no further than
to a neighboring province.”6
On 18 June 1915, Azmi, who had been appointed vali of Lebanon, was replaced by Celal
Bey, who had until then been posted to Aleppo (from 11 August 1914 to 4 June 1915). The
result was a shift in the policies of the authorities in Konya. The new governor was a well-
meaning man who refused to deport the Armenians of his province. It was while he was
absent – he left for “medical care” in Istanbul – that the first convoys of deportees from
Adabazar arrived in Konya, around 15 August, after being pillaged on the way. Dr. Dodd, who
describes their physical condition, also notes that 2,000 of them had been put in a medrese
in Konya and left there without any food at all. “All reports,” he writes in this connection,
“that the Government are providing food are absolutely false, those who have money can
buy, those who have none beg or starve [...] How many can survive it?”7
The urgent dispatch to the capital of several Syrian divisions forced the authorities to
call a temporarily halt to the movements of the convoys of deportees.8 Taking advantage
of the fact that Celal was in Istanbul, the local Young Turks hastened to put nearly 3,000
Armenians from Konya on the road on 21 August. Although Azmi had already assumed his
new functions in Beirut, indications are that he continued to exert a great deal of influence
in Konya.9 Ferid Bey, known as Hamal Ferid, the CUP’s responsible secretary in Konya,
organized these deportations. He was assisted by the main Unionist notables in the city:
Muftizâde Kâmil Bey, the mayor and president of the Ittihadist club; Haydarbeyzâde Şükrü
Bey, the president of the “Committee for National Defense”; Köse Ahmedzâde Mustafa Bey;
Akanszâde Abdüllah Effendi; Haci Karazâde Haci Mehmed Effendi; Dr. Rifki, who had
been charged with supervising the deportations; Hamalzâde Ahmed Effendi; Momcizâde
Ali Effendi; Şükrüzâde Mehmed Effendi; and Dr. Servet, who had been responsible for the
massacre of the worker-soldiers in the amele taburis.10 Among the state officials from whom
he received support were Edib Effendi; Rifât Effendi, the secretary general in the town
hall; Mehmed Effendi, the registrar; and İsmail Hakkı, the head of the Régie. Ali Vasfi, the

Deportations and Massacres: Konya 573
head of the office of military recruitment; Saadeddin, the police chief; and Hasan Basri,
the assistant police chief, carried out the deportation procedures.11 The most active among
the notables, especially in the seizure of Armenian assets, were Hacikarazâde Haci Bekir
Effendi; Molla Velizâde Ömer Effendi; Kâtibzâde Tevfik Effendi; Ruşdibeyzâde Mustafa
Effendi; Allaeddin Ağa; Mustafa Ağazâde Bedreddin Effendi; and Hacikaransinoğlu Deli
Ahmed Effendi.12
In the few days that preceded the departure of the first convoy from Konya, the city was
transformed into a marketplace. Improvised sales took place everywhere. Often, the city’s
Turkish inhabitants went to inspect the Armenians’ houses and suggested that their owners
give them their belongings, for which they would have no further use, “since [they] would
be left alive, at best, only a few more days.”13 Archbishop Khachadurian, accompanied by
the Reverend Hampartsum Ashjian, sought in vain to bring the commanding officer of the
German contingent stationed in Konya to step in. Even the American missionaries could
only stand by helplessly and watch as the Armenian presence in Konya was wiped out. The
committee responsible for “abandoned property” laid hands on the deportees’ houses and
arranged the transfer of bank accounts and the precious objects they had deposited with
the banks before going to watch the demolition of the Armenian cathedral ordered by a çete
leader, Muammer.14
A second convoy, comprising the last 300 Armenian families from Konya, had been
assembled at the railway station and was ready to set out when the vali, Cemal, returned from
Istanbul around 23 August. Saved by his intervention, these families were given permission
to return to their homes, which had already been stripped of a good deal of their furniture.
For as long as Cemal held his post – that is, until early October – these people remained in
Konya and, side-by-side with the American missionaries, rendered great service to the tens
of thousands of Armenians from the western provinces who passed by way of Konya’s train
station. As soon as the vali was transferred elsewhere, they were deported in turn, on the
initiative of the CUP’s responsible secretary, Ferid Bey.15 It is, however, noteworthy that lists
of people to be exiled were regularly drawn up beforehand and Celal was unable to prevent
them from being deported.16 In this regard, Dr. Dodd writes, “The vali is a good man but
almost powerless. The Ittihad Committee and the Salonika Clique ruel all. The chief of
Police seems to be the real head.”17
The Kaza of Karaman

In line with the schedule of anti-Armenian operations observed elsewhere, the houses of
Karaman’s Armenians were subject to police searches on Sunday, 23 May 1915, and a number
of men were arrested. The operation was organized and overseen by the local Unionist club,
which was under the control of the mayor, Çerkez Ahmedoğlu Rifât, Helvadızâde Haci Bekir,
and Hadimlizâde Enver. An enormous bribe paid out to the Young Turks nevertheless made
it possible to limit the number of men who were “sent away.” The veritable deportation of
the Armenian population was not set in motion until 11 August 1915. The convoy took
the Eregli-Bozanti-Tarsus-Osmaniye-Katma-Aleppo route and eventually reached Meskene
in the Syrian Desert. Armenian property in Karaman was pillaged immediately after the
deportees’ departure.18
The Kazas of Akşehir and Eregli

In the principal town of the kaza of Akşehir, also called Akşehir, which had a big Armenian
population, the deportations began on 20 August and went on until October. The members
of the first convoy, after traveling a short distance by rail to Eregli, where the kaymakam,

Faik Bey, the police chief, İzzet Bey, the commander of the gendarmerie, Midhat Bey, and
Mustafa Edhem Bey stripped them of their belongings, continued their journey on foot as far
as Osmaniye. They were left there until 23 October and were then sent off to Katma and the
Syrian deserts. Of Akşehir’s 5,000 to 6,000 Armenians, 700 were allowed to remain in the
town. In 1919, there were, furthermore, 960 survivors, almost all of the women and children
who had been abducted: three hundred were in Aleppo, 460 were in Damascus, and 200
more were scattered throughout Syria. One hundred young girls were also held by families
in Akşehir.19
As elsewhere, the CUP’s responsible secretary, Haydarbeyzâde Şükrü Bey, and his local
henchmen, Kürd Topal Ahmedoğlu Ömer and Fehmi Effendi, the müdir of the nahie of
Cihanbey, played decisive roles in expelling the Armenians of Akşehir. They had the active
help of government officials, above all Ahmed Rifât Bey, the kaymakam; Kütahyalı Tahir,
the director of the Agricultural Bank; Nâzım Bey, a magistrate; İzzet Bey, a Treasury official;
Hasan Vasfi Effendi, the police chief; Ömer Effendi, the kaymakam’s secretary; Kâmil Effendi,
the head of the Telegraph Office; Rifât Effendi, the secretary general of the municipality;
Kâmil Effendi, the director of the Turkish orphanage; and Mehmed Effendi.20
When Reverend Hans Bauernfeind passed through the Eregli train station on the after-
noon of 23 August 1915, he observed that “everything here is simply terrible. Armenians are
camping without shelter by the thousands; the rich have lodgings in town ... They do not
suspect the imminent danger [they are in].”21 The 1,000 Armenians of the Eregli community
had been dispatched toward Syria a few days earlier by the kaymakam Faik Bey; the police
chief İzzet Effendi; Yusufzâde Nadim, the head of the Office of Deportations; and Major
Hasan Bey, the military commander of Ulukışla.22
The Deportations in the Sancaks of Burdur,

Niğde, Isparta, and Adalia
In 1914, the Armenian presence in this sancak in the southwestern part of the vilayet was
concentrated in Burdur (pop. 1,420).23 Toward mid-August, the mutesarif, Celaleddin Bey
(who held his post from 23 April 1915 to 27 August 1916) summoned the vicar, Father Arsen,
and informed him that he would have to leave the city with his flock in 24 hours. The
Armenians’ property was confiscated on the spot and sold off for next to nothing. The con-
voy was first sent to Konya, where it remained for two weeks on the premises of the Sevkiyat
(the organization responsible for carrying out the deportations), while a political battle raged
between Celal Bey, who was trying to have the Armenians sent back home, and the police
chief, Saadeddin, a Unionist, who ultimately obtained permission from Istanbul to deport
them. By foot or rail, these 1,000 deportees traveled through Rakka and Ras ul-Ayn and
were then sent in the direction of Der Zor. By January 1919, only seven families were still
alive.24 Haci Ahmed, the president of the local Ittihad club; Major Murad Bey, the head of
the recruitment office; and Mehmed Bey, the police chief, helped the mutesarif conduct these
operations.25
In the prefecture of the sancak of Niğde, 1,500 Armenians made a living as stockbreeders.
Located close by, Bor had an Armenian population of nearly 900; 1,500 Armenians lived in
Aksaray, located in the northern part of the sancak; perhaps another 2,000 lived in Nevşehir.
The total Armenian population of the sancak was thus over 6,000.26
Bauernfeind, who traveled through Niğde on 22 August, noted that the Armenians
“had all been sent into exile” and observed the same thing in Bor. On the way, he came
across a group of Armenian men. “Even the young, intelligent çavuş accompanying us,” the
Protestant minister wrote, “shares the view that they are all going to be killed.”27 Nazmi Bey,

Deportations and Massacres: Konya 575
the kaymakam of Niğde, and Lieutenant-Colonel Abdül Fetah, the head of the deportation
office in Aksaray, organized the massacres in Aksaray in late August.28 The Armenians of
Nevşehir were deported to Syria in mid-August 1915 by the kaymakam Said Bey, who held
his post from 17 April 1914 to 17 November 1915.
The 200 Armenians of Adalia, the 500 of Elmaly, and the 1,180 of Isparta were spared,
possibly thanks to the mutesarifs of Adalia, Kâmil Bey (who held his post from 3 September
1913 to 3 April 1916), and Isparta, Hakkı Kilic Bey (who held his post from 5 November 1914
to 28 December 1915).29
According to Dodd, the many Çerkez living in the province were the backbone of the
squadrons of çetes who harassed, pillaged, and massacred the deportees in the convoys that
crossed the region on their way to Bozanti.30

Chapter 18
The Deportees on the Istanbul-

Ismit-Eskişehir-Konya-Bozanti Route
and Along the Trajectory of
the Bagdadbahn
T
he railway generally known by its German name, the Bagdadbahn, ran between
Istanbul and Bozanti, where there was a gap in the line. The tracks began again north
of Adana and ran to a point further south in the Amanus district, where the line was
once again interrupted. In the First World War, the Bagdadbahn served as a crucial instru-
ment in the German-Turkish military operations on the eastern front. It was also a pivotal
element in the deportation plan elaborated by the Young Turk party-state. An examination
of this railroad is all the more worthwhile in that it illustrates the contradiction between
military imperatives and political goals, between the empire’s strategic objective and its pol-
icy of eradicating the Armenian population.
From the earliest phase of its construction, the Bagdadbahn was an enterprise dominated
by German capital held by the Deutsche Bank. The Deutsche Bank, however, was not merely
a financial company. Its vocation was also to serve as a tool for the German policy of pen-
etrating Turkey while breathing life into Germany’s economic ambitions there. Because it
was closely tied to the German government, the Deutsche Bank was subject to constraints
imposed by the alliance between Germany and Turkey. Moreover, by way of the Bagdadbahn
Company, which it owned, it was implicated in both the conflict and, quite against its will,
the genocidal treatment of both the deportees from Thrace and western Anatolia and also
its own employees.1
During the war, the board of directors of the Bagdadbahn had to overcome three major
obstacles that constituted so many impediments to the proper functioning of the company:
1) the threat of deportation hanging over the heads of its Armenian employees; 2) the inter-
ruption of work on the tunnels through the Amanus due to the deportation of Armenian
workers and managers; and 3) the authoritarian, unpaid for utilization of its means of trans-
portation to expedite the Armenian population to the Syrian deserts.
German sources suggest that the decision to deport personnel – managers, office staff,
and manual workers – employed by the Bagdadbahn was made by the minister of war in May
1915. Early in July, workers from Kilis who were employed on the railroad’s Amanus construc-
tion site were forced to quit their jobs in order to follow their families, who had received a
deportation order. In Osmaniye, the military authorities resorted to a different method: they
confiscated the property of the railroad company’s Armenian employees in order to force
them to leave. To be sure, M. Winkler, the engineer responsible for construction of the rail-
road in the vilayet of Adana, contacted the vali and pointed out to him all the disadvantages

that interrupting the construction work would entail. The vali, however, told him that there
was nothing he could do because his orders came from the minister of the interior and the
minister of war, Talât and Enver.2 Subsequent events showed that the Armenian workers
on the Amanus site were also targets of the deportation order: on 7 and 8 July 1915, all the
company’s employees from Zeitun, Hacın, Hasanbeyli, Intilli, and Bahçe were deported and
the houses were turned over to Muslim muhacirs. Indeed, the vali suggested to Winkler that
he hire these muhacirs to replace the deportees, a move that Hilmar Kaiser translates in these
terms: “Clearly, the company’s operations had become a target of CUP chauvinism.”3 The
momentary interruption of work on the line brought on by the deportation of the Armenian
workers, and the resignation of certain engineers, do not seem to have disturbed the gov-
ernment unduly. On the contrary, it threatened to seize the railway if the company proved
unable to resume work on it. The threats were so serious that Franz Günther, the head of
the Anatolian Railway Company, demanded that Winkler put the construction site back
into operation at all costs. This tactic, which consisted in creating a problem in order then
to exploit it, illustrates the methods that the Young Turk leaders used to nationalize the
economy, whatever the consequences might be. In order to meet his obligations, Winkler
had no other choice than to recruit qualified personnel from the ranks of the Armenian
deportees who now began to arrive from the west – that is, to violate the government ban
on hiring Armenians. Many of them were employed under false names or assigned a ficti-
tious nationality. Doctors were recruited to keep the company’s hospital in Intilli in opera-
tion, and engineers, accountants, secretaries, foremen, carpenters, and so on were invited to
come work on the Amanus site. It was the more urgent that this work go forward in that the
October 1915 defeat of Serbia opened a direct rail connection to Germany that could be used
to move troops and matériel. The sole obstacle to these movements toward the Egyptian front
was the incomplete section of the railroad represented by the planned Taurus and Amanus
tunnels; for Germany, finishing these tunnels now became a strategic priority.4 Despite their
obsessive desire to carry through with their program to eradicate the Armenians, the Young
Turk authorities temporarily closed their eyes to the illegal recruitment policies prevailing at
the Amanus site. They refused, however, to spare the employees and managers working on
the Bagdadbahn Company’s lines. As in the case of Armenian civil servants, the authorities
ordered that these Armenians, too, be deported. They were, however, once again confronted
with the resistance of the board of the Bagdadbahn, which pointed out that it could not
assure a proper flow of traffic without these competent staff workers. The better to impose
“nationalization” of the railway’s staff and to exclude non-Turks, the government decreed
that the company’s correspondence and bookkeeping had to be conducted in Turkish rather
than French – in other words, it decreed that Armenian employees be dismissed and replaced
by Muslims.5 Among the measures adopted to this end, the local authorities first isolated
employees from their families, then deported them separately. Thus, in Angora, the vali Atıf
Bey had 19 Armenian employees of the Bagdadbahn arrested and deported on 3 September;
according to a witness, they were in fact put to death near the train station. This operation
naturally led to protests from a company representative. Atıf Bey answered: “It is impossible
to bring them back. Impossible, do you hear me? They will never return.”6
Alarmed by the scope of the operation, Günther requested a meeting with the interior
minister in order to convince him that systematic deportation of the railway’s Armenian
employees could paralyze transportation. The argument seems to have convinced Talât, who
in a 25 September letter ordered the local authorities to suspend deportation of personnel
in certain categories while waiting for an ad hoc committee to rule on the issue. Winkler,
however, suspected that Talât had issued a secret counter-order, for he observed that the
local authorities and the CUP clubs continued to deport the families of his employees who
could not abandon their loved ones.7 The ad hoc committee confirmed the deportation order

Deportees Along the Trajectory of the Bagdadbahn 579
at its 17 October meeting, but granted delays that varied with the employees’ specialties in
order to allow the board of the Bagdadbahn to train “Turkish” replacement personnel.8 Given
the Bagdadbahn’s military importance, Lieutenant-Colonel Böttrich, the head of the railway
transport department of the Ottoman general staff, was asked for his advice. Böttrich not
only gave an opinion favorable to deportation but also signed the document that made it offi-
cial. Günther pointed out to both the Deutsche Bank’s board of directors and the German
Embassy in Istanbul that the office had committed an act of extreme irresponsibility in sign-
ing such a document, which implicated the Germans in “the Armenian persecutions.”9
In addition to the fate of the manual and white-collar workers on the Amanus construc-
tion sites, Günther, the director of the Anatolian Railway Company, was also concerned
about the use of the company’s means of transportation to deport Armenian populations
from the west. In August 1915, he received many reports from his coworkers about the exac-
tions perpetrated against the deportees on the railway. In a 17 August 1915 letter to Arthur
von Gwinner, the president of the Deutsche Bank, Günther uses the term “bestial horrible-
ness” to describe “the extermination of the Armenians in today’s Turkey.”10 He also draws
his superiors’ attention to the responsibility of the company, involuntarily transformed into
a tool of the Young Turks’ extermination program. Arthur von Gwinner seems, however, not
to have taken the full measure of the crime being perpetrated in Turkey and its consequences
for his enterprise. On 30 October 1915, Günther therefore sent von Gwinner a photograph of
Armenians packed into cars. He wrote about this photograph: “Enclosed I send you a picture
illustrating the Anatolian Railway as a bearer of culture in Turkey. These are our so-called
mutton cars, in which for example 800 human beings are transported in 10 cars.” This letter
proved effective; Günther obtained financial aid for the deportees from the Deutsche Bank,
accompanied by the recommendation that the humanitarian actions he undertake not give
the impression that the bank was hostile “to an allied government.”11
A military commissar who answered to the Ministry of War was charged with inform-
ing the board of the Eastern Railway of the rules to be applied in replacing its Armenian
personnel. For example, a 7 November 1915 letter instructed the authorities in the vilayet
of Edirne to suspend the deportation of three traffic managers who had been sent away and
were in Tekirdağ at the time.12 The same officer demanded that he be provided, in accord-
ance with the committee’s decisions, with a list of agents “in both of the categories working
on your railway, and also a list of those who have been dismissed from your service after the
expiration of the delays accorded them.”13 It seems, then, that the authorities were following
the Bagdadbahn’s Armenian employees particularly closely. An 8 November circular from
the military commissar for rail transportation spells out the general regulations established
by the ad hoc committee.14 After confirming that the “government is engaged in changing
the place of residence of Armenians living in certain parts of the empire,” the commissar
states that plans have also been made to deport Armenians working for the railroad com-
panies, “whose numbers are considerable.” However, he notes, “in view of the fact that this
would disturb the service exploiting the railway, my ministry is of the opinion ... that a sound
method and pre-established rules would be preferable.” In accordance with the committee’s
decisions, “the Armenian agents employed on the railway” were assigned to two different
categories: “one [is] to be replaced within twelve months and the other within two to four
years.” Consequently, the railway companies must be made “to recruit people (naturally,
from the Muslim population or other trustworthy groups) before the prescribed deadlines,
without exception.” Aware of the problems that this program could be expected to cause,
the committee envisaged, “notwithstanding the fact that the greatest possible effort must be
deployed to find people to take the places of the individuals to be replaced ... allowing the
latter to continue to work for the company for a certain period. But this derogation should in
no case be applied across the board.”15

The same day, the interior minister approved the committee’s decisions (which thereupon
ceased its activities) about “the [gradual] replacement of the Armenian employees working
for all railway companies, including the Anatolian company, in such a way as not to perturb
railway service.”16 In the wrestling match between the Bagdadbahn’s German administrators
and the Turkish authorities, the decisions adopted may be qualified as compromises. It is
impossible, obviously, to say how strictly this “replacement” program was carried out in prac-
tice, but there is every reason to believe that it proved unable to replace many white-collar
workers and that the program’s main victims were to be found among the unskilled.
Notwithstanding a few concessions that had become indispensable, the Young Turk
authorities’ obstinate desire to deport both those working on the Amanus construction sites
and also the employees of the Bagdadbahn appears on balance as one of the clearest expres-
sions of their genocidal policy and their project of a “national economy.” In the case at hand,
these objectives had priority over all other considerations, including the war effort. This
experience also showed them how long it would take to “replace” the Armenians whom they
had decided to exclude.
If this affair caused some tension between the German government and its Turkish ally,
it ultimately showed the Young Turks that German political and military circles were willing
to close their eyes to the crimes perpetrated against the Armenian population, even when
those crimes were detrimental to German interests. The most that can be said is that the
Bagdadbahn’s engineers and managers, who daily witnessed scenes of horror, showed a certain
concern for the Armenian deportees.
The Istanbul-Ismit-Eskişehir-Konya-Bozanti Deportation Route

The fact that Armenian employees worked on the Istanbul-Bozanti-Aleppo railway line proved
highly beneficial to the deportees. We read in many different accounts that stationmasters,
engineers, or doctors working for the company provided their compatriots with assistance.
The network based in Konya and later in Aleppo served above all to transmit detailed reports
to Constantinople and extract a few deportees from the convoys.17 It was, however, the actions
of the vali, Celal Bey, who held his post in Konya from 18 June to early October 1915, which
enabled tens of thousands of deportees to remain at least briefly in Konya.18
The number of deportees who took this route in August, September, and October might
be put at around 400,000. Some of them followed the railroad tracks on foot and then took
the train as far as Bozanti. Others traveled by rail. Still others walked the entire distance,
following the railway as far as the Taurus mountain chain. Obviously, the money or valu-
ables at their disposal determined the means of transportation these deportees used. While
the Bagdadbahn’s German administrators complained that the authorities required them to
transport the deportees without compensation, leading to financial losses for the company,19
the fact that the deportees were transported free was a windfall for the gendarmerie or the
local authorities, who systematically made them pay for their “tickets,” sometimes demand-
ing four times the official tariffs.20 Apart from a few “political” deportees, who were under
close guard, those who were able to take the train traveled in two-tiered sheep cars, at 80 to a
car.21 Under normal conditions, a train could make the journey from Haydarpaşa to Bozanti
in fewer than 24 hours. However, the war and troop movements considerably interfered with
traffic on this line, which consisted in many places of a single track, so that convoys of
deportees were often forced to remain in the middle of a field for hours on end without food
or, even worse, water.22
The deportees were not, then, transported directly and without interruption, but in sev-
eral stages. This led to the formation of improvised transit camps around the main train sta-
tions. The first, northernmost station where such a camp was formed was in Eskişehir. Late

in August, Dr. W. Post, who was traveling to Konya, counted 12,000 to 15,000 deportees
camping there under precarious conditions. He observed that the local police “protected”
the deportees during the day but every night helped the local populace pillage the camp
and abduct or rape young girls. According to this American physician, 30 to 40 people
died daily in the Eskişehir camp.23 He noted the presence of 5,000 or more deportees, most
of them natives of Bursa, trapped in the Alayun train station under similar conditions.
Further south, in Konya, there were already 5,000 to 10,000 deportees from Bursa, Ismit,
and Bardizag by 2 September; dysentery and malaria were wreaking havoc among them.24
Toward mid-September, the number of deportees there had risen to around 50,000. They
lived in an immense “tent” camp.25 The absence of even elementary sanitation, lack of
food, and, above all, water, led to many deaths every day. The bodies were burned in the
city’s Armenian cemetery.26 According to Dr. Post, the CUP’s responsible secretary and his
henchmen took advantage of the vali’s absence in late September to dispatch most of these
50,000 deportees to Cilicia and Syria. Post notes that two German officers posted near the
train station witnessed the methods employed and protested, but it was in vain. This human
tidal wave was dispatched on foot in a few hours, by way of the Konya desert. A handful
of families who still had money or valuables negotiated the right to travel by rail with the
gendarmes or the police.27
Dr. Dodd, the director of Konya’s American Hospital, reports that a “committee responsi-
ble for exiles” had arrived from Istanbul. Its coming had been announced by a telegram from
Enver stating that the committee had been given the mission of settling the deportees in
the vilayet. However, Dodd observes, it soon became apparent that these men had been sent
from the capital in order to clear the route and “speed up the traffic” coming from Bozanti
and Adana. “It is reported” he writes, “that now the destination is Arabia.”28 Given the
CUP’s known modus operandi, it seems reasonable to suppose that the minister of the inte-
rior and the minister of war decided to dispatch these party cadres to organize the expedition
of the convoys to the south and recall the undisciplined vali of Konya to Istanbul.
The sources at our disposal do not allow us to state the number of deportees who traveled
by foot. A survivor reports that the 11,000 people in his convoy, natives of Balıkeser,
Bandırma, Erencik, Bursa, Gemlik, Benli, Marmarcık, Gürle, Yenice, Adabazar, Darasu,
Yalova, Çengiler, Ortaköy, and so on, walked all the way to Konya, because the trains had
been requisitioned by the army.29 We know from other sources that the tens of thousands of
men deported from Istanbul “arrived in Konya after this journey of 400 miles” on foot, where
they lived for a while with funds sent by their families.30 It was these convoys of people on
foot that were the last to arrive in Konya, in the second half of October; an example is pro-
vided by a group of 16,000 deportees that was briefly held up in Afionkarahisar.31
By late October, the camp around the Konya train station was empty. A few thousand
Armenians had managed to hide in the city, now under the control of a new vali. These
were, above all, affluent families from Bursa who paid a certain sum to officials every month
in exchange for the right to stay.32 But also among them were Protestants who had come
from the west and Catholics from Angora, who sometimes succeeded in settling there on
the strength of the late order by the interior minister concerning these population groups.
According to Dodd, to “relieve the congestion thus created in the city,” the authorities
scattered these deportees through the rural areas, where they were attacked by çetes, who
abducted the young women among them. Some of them managed to find work that enabled
them to survive; others had no access to their bank accounts, which had been frozen. It
seems that local Turkish businessmen had been given strict orders not to hire deportees.33 A
number of Turkish families nevertheless employed girls or women as domestics.34
Further south, the Eregli train station, like the train station in Konya, was the site of a
vast tent camp. Fifteen thousand deportees were living there by early September. The men

from Konya who had long been held in Sultaniye were sent to this camp in the same period
and incorporated into the “ninth convoy,” which left for Bozanti.35 Post, who traveled to
Bozanti on 20 November, counted 250 “refugees” there, and nearly 2,000 in the Eregli train
station nearby, mainly craftsmen who worked for the army.36 Post also says that, according to
the statistics gathered by Bagdadbahn officials, 500,000 deportees passed by way of Bozanti.
If, to the 400,000 Armenians deported from the west, we add the convoys from the north
that traveled through this town, Dodd’s figure seems reasonable. The municipal physician,
Dr. Manug, who had been recruited from among the deportees’ ranks, saved many deportees
in transit, according to witnesses, providing them with medical care and material aid.37 The
commander of the gendarmerie, Musa, had arrogated unto himself the right to pillage the
convoys that passed by way of Bozanti,38 the last train station the deportees saw before con-
fronting the mountain passes of the Taurus region.
We have very few accounts by deportees of their passage down the Istanbul-Bozanti route.
We do know, however, that the losses they sustained were rarely due to physical violence.
They died, rather, of hunger and thirst.
Another American physician, Dr. Hoover, who was returning to Istanbul by rail, witnessed
the spectacle of deportees in transit in every train station. He saw, notably, the abduction of a
15-year-old girl by a captain who tried to justify himself on the grounds that by abducting her
he was saving her life. In his own words, it was only then that the doctor began “to realize the
enormity of the crimes.” “Why,” he asked the captain, “are you taking such brutal measures
to accomplish your?” The officer answered, “Why, don’t you understand, we don’t want to
have to repeat this thing again after few years. It’s hot down in the deserts of Arabia, and
there is no water, and these people can’t stand a hot climate, don’t you see?”39
The majority of the available accounts of the Istanbul-Bozanti route are due to the mem-
bers of the Constantinople elite who were deported much later than the hapless colleagues
of theirs who were arrested on 24 April 1915. These people were deported by rail under
police escort and imprisoned at every station of their journey. We are, for example, familiar
with the case of the journalist Levon Mozian, who traveled through Konya in July, guarded
by two policemen, benefiting from the help of the prelate Karekin Khachadurian and the
director of the Armenian middle school, Mgrdich Barsamian, before being sent on to Eregli
and Bozanti.40 The same holds for Krikor Zohrab and Vartkes Seringiulian, who were in
Konya on 9 June 1915. Writing from that city, Zohrab informed his wife that he had met
in the Baghdad Hotel his fellow parliamentary deputy, Mustafa Fevzi, the representative
from Saruhan, whom he had asked to intercede on his behalf.41 In a letter to his friend the
interior minister, he expressed his surprise over the plans to send him to Dyarbekir without
first informing him of the charges against him. “According to the information making the
rounds,” he wrote, “[I am being sent to Dyarbekir for] plotting against the government and
exhibiting an unfriendly attitude. I do not accept this accusation in any way.”42 The Istanbul
humorist and writer Yervant Odian, who was deported early in September with the journalist
Sebuh Aguni and the pharmacist Nerses Chakrian, also traveled by rail under police guard,
at a time when the Istanbul-Bozanti route was clogged with traffic.43 In prison in Konya,
he met Vahan Balabanian, a Dashnak militant from Smyrna who had been condemned to
death and then pardoned.44 At the station, in a khan, the three companions encountered
a throng of families from Adabazar and Bandırma, as well as Lieutenant Hrant Samuel, the
former editor of the daily Zhamanag, in an officer’s uniform, and the parliamentary depu-
ties from Aleppo, Harutiun Boshgezenian, and Adana, Mattheos Nalbandian, who were
on their way to Istanbul to participate in the opening of the new parliamentary session.45
All the complexity of the system set up by the Young Turks is summed up in these unlikely
encounters. Among all these exiles, two deputies and an officer – remnants of normalcy, as
it were – were free to come and go as they pleased. Further south, in Eregli, Odian witnessed

the misery reigning in the hundreds of tents in which the deportees were living, many state
officials and lawyers from Bursa and Ismit among them. He also saw an Istanbul businessman
who could still communicate with the Patriarchate thanks to Armenian railway officials.46
On 24 September, Odian arrived in Bozanti without impediments, thanks to the friendly
attitude of the Armenian stationmaster and ticket collectors. He joined the mass of depor-
tees there.47

Chapter 19
Deportations from Zeitun

and Dörtyol: Repression or
Genocidal Program?
W
e have already seen how the events that occurred in Zeitun and Dörtyol in March
and April 1915 were perceived in Istanbul.1 We shall now look in some detail at
the way they unfolded, with a view to assessing the credibility of the accusations
that the local and, later, national authorities leveled against the Armenian population of
these regions.
Let us begin by noting that the region of Maraş/Marash, of which Zeitun was a part, had
been elevated to the rank of a mutesarifat early in March 1915.2 Until then, the sancak of
Marash had been under the jurisdiction of the vali of Aleppo, Celal Bey, who himself seemed
to believe that the capital had “recently” granted this district autonomy for the sole purpose
of preventing him from interfering with operations there.3 Celal thus implied that the “inci-
dents” that took place in Zeitun had their origins in a general plan established in Istanbul.
The dates on which they occurred likewise suggest that their objective was to incriminate
“the” Armenians – that is, to prepare the “legal” groundwork for the genocidal measures to
come. Indeed, the very special attention that the capital lavished on Zeitun’s Armenians was
anything but fortuitous. The inhabitants of this mountainous region had been heard from
more than once in the nineteenth century; they had consistently displayed a strong spirit of
independence and a capacity for self-defense that had caused one sultan after the next no small
amount of trouble. A latter-day remnant of the Armenian Kingdom of Cilicia, Zeitun, the
Armenian Ulnia, had in 1618 received confirmation of its autonomy from Sultan Murad IV in
exchange for an annual tribute. This state of affairs had persisted down to 1862. In the course
of that year, the inhabitants of Zeitun successfully withstood the assaults of several tens of
thousands of Ottoman soldiers. During the 1895 massacres, they also successfully beat back the
large armed force that Constantinople had sent to crush them. The CUP, obviously drawing
the lessons of these military debacles, had made Zeitun one of its primary objectives in 1915.4
On the eve of the First World War, the kaza of Zeitun, which was almost entirely Armenian,
had more than 22,000 inhabitants. They lived in the town of Zeitun and six rural commu-
nities. Located at the foot of the southern face of Mt. Berid, the town was built, level after
level, on the slopes of two valleys. To the north, on the heights, lay the monastery of the Holy
Mother of God. In 1914, the town of Zeitun had a population of 10,600. It was divided into
four neighborhoods (located in the two upper and the two lower quarters) governed by a city
council headed by the bishop of the region. It was known for horse-shoeing, stonecutting,
and the production of agricultural tools, but its inhabitants also cultivated olive trees, fruit
trees, and a few different types of grain. They also raised horses, cattle, sheep, and goats, and
produced brandy, wine, raisins, honey, wool, and leather.

An hour southeast of Zeitun laid the villages of Avakenk, Kalustenk, Hacidere, Avakhal/
Mehal, and Alabash (3,200 Armenians). Finally, in the northernmost part of the kaza laid
the village of Yarpuz (1,100 Armenians).5
In August 1914, the induction of the men old enough to bear arms took place without
resistance, although these mountaineers, required to serve in the army for the first time,
were hardly used to military discipline. According to the minister Dikran Andreasian,
a preacher in Zeitun, a non-negligible number of men from Zeitun nevertheless dodged
military service, a circumstance that did not fail to produce tensions.6 The mutesarif, Ali
Haydar Pasha, went to Zeitun in person, accompanied by an army brigade. He summoned
the Armenian notables there, who were arrested and tortured in the barracks located in
the city’s heights. Officially, it was a question of bringing them to confess that they were
preparing a rebellion, and also of forcing them to give up their arms. A total of 42 nota-
bles, notably the charismatic leader of the inhabitants of Zeitun, Nazaret Yeniduniayan,
were taken to Marash in chains. Most of them were poisoned or killed in some other way
in the following weeks.7 In other words, the authorities utilized a method in Zeitun that
would be brought to bear on other regions the following year. These events did not fail to
produce a certain indignation in Zeitun, but the catholicos of Cilicia, Sahag I Khabayan,
reacted immediately, making it clear to the faithful in Zeitun that the least sign of a revolt
would have “disastrous consequences for all Armenians.” In the fall, witnesses noted that
the gendarmes stationed in the town were openly provoking incidents: they entered houses
without warning, committed thefts, and treated women disrespectfully.8 The absence of
the men of fighting age, who had either been mobilized or had fled to avoid being recruited,
naturally gave the gendarmes and troops the impression that they were free to do as they
pleased. Yet, the possibility that they had received instructions from Maraş to provoke the
populace cannot be excluded. The fact that weapons held by the people of Zeitun were
confiscated in August 1914 indicates, at the very least, that the town had been under close
surveillance from the beginning, unless we are to suppose that Istanbul was thus paving
the way for the operations it would carry out later.
The choice of Zeitun as the region’s recruitment center, into which recruits streamed
from all sides,9 was probably no accident and helped keep tensions running at a high pitch
there. The number of rapes committed by gendarmes10 perhaps also contributed, after a
fashion, to the rise of a powerful feeling of exasperation among the Armenian populace.
Initially, the kaymakam, Hüsni Bey (who held his post from 15 June 1914 to 14 March 1915)
and the military authorities closed their eyes to the 100 to 200 deserters from Zeitun who
roamed through the region and staged raids in order to get food. Early in 1915, however,
skirmishes began to multiply between these fugitives and the forces of order. Yet, it was
not until March that the situation became genuinely tense: on Monday, 8 March, a squad-
ron of the army was attacked in the vicinity of Zeitun by a group of deserters. According
to Aghasi, who participated in these events, the attackers were seeking to obtain arms.
They killed twelve soldiers before withdrawing to an impregnable monastery situated on
the heights overlooking Zeitun to the north.11 The American consul in Aleppo, Jesse B.
Jackson, states in a letter that these 25 deserters were worker-soldiers who had been working
on a site in Bazarcık between Ayntab and Marash before deciding to take to the maquis.12
The killing of the soldiers obviously sowed panic among Zeitun’s populace, which unani-
mously condemned the act and dispatched a delegation to the deserters to ask them to
cease all attacks on the army or gendarmerie. On the evening of 9 March, two squadrons
arrived from Marash, followed on 13 March by the mutesarif himself.13 By intervening as
promptly as they did, Armenian circles had doubtless hoped to limit the retaliation that
inevitably awaited the region’s Armenian population. The immediate destitution of the

Deportations: Zeitun and Dörtyol 587
kaymakam, Hüsni, on 14 March – he was replaced by Hilmi Bey on 7 April – might have
left them with the impression that the authorities had understood that the many different
provocations orchestrated by this high-ranking official since fall 1914 had contributed to
the deterioration of the situation. The delegations from the town that, one after the other,
went to see the rebels and ask them to turn themselves in might also have encouraged
people to believe that the authorities wished to settle the matter without using force. But
the leaders of Zeitun had, according to Aghasi, already understood that the authorities
had a solid pretext for liquidating their town, and that after getting the better of the 25
deserters they were doubtless going “to exterminate [them] as well.” Their only hope was to
limit the retaliatory acts to the men and prevent “the town from being reduced to ashes”14
by exhibiting unwavering loyalty.
Moreover, the gradual arrival of some 5,000 troops from Aleppo between 17 and 22 March
191515 was a sign of the authorities’ intentions. It is more than obvious that so large a force
was not needed to bring 25 deserters barricaded in a monastery under control. On the night
of 23–24 March, the people of Zeitun further observed that all the state officials had “fled” to
the barracks overlooking the city, an indication of events to come. The townsmen immedi-
ately made contact with the mutesarif, with whom they held an impromptu meeting at which
it was decided to wire the Patriarch, Zaven, and the catholicos, Sahag Khabayan, in order to
request that the catholicos send representatives to Zeitun capable of persuading the deserters
to surrender. Aware of the gravity of the situation, the catholicos had, with the approval of
the mutesarif of Marash, already dispatched a five-man delegation to Zeitun, which arrived
the morning of 24 March. It was made up of the auxiliary primate, Sahag Der Bedrosian, the
catholic vicar Khoren, the Protestant minister Aharon Shirajian, and the director of the
German hospital and orphanage in Marash, Reverend H. Blank.16 While the delegation was
able to meet with Zeitun’s notables, who persuaded it that the problem was confined to the
men who had barricaded themselves in the monastery, they were not given permission to
meet with the insurgents and were soon firmly requested to leave.17 It is probable that the
mutesarif and General Hurşid, the commanding officer of the troops dispatched to Zeitun,
had already received the order to launch the assault, which began at dawn on 25 March.18
Some 20 men, most of them from the Yeniduniayan family, had joined forces with the desert-
ers, embittered by the earlier murder of a member of their clan, Nazaret Çavuş. The Turkish
forces, after shelling the monastery with a mountain cannon and destroying part of its outer
wall, charged up the slope with the intention of capturing it, but encountering stiff resistance
they retreated, leaving behind a captain, Süleyman, and a few dozen other casualties.19 The
next day, when the troops launched a second assault, they discovered that the rebels had
burned down the monastery and fled overnight.20 Immediately thereafter, the army brigades
surrounded Zeitun. The townspeople hoisted a white flag to make it clear that they had no
intention to resist.21 The catholicos contacted the commander of the Fourth Army, Ahmed
Cemal, and implored him to order the Turkish forces to spare the population of Zeitun.
Armenian sources report that Cemal agreed to meet the Armenian prelate’s request and
sent a cable to this effect to Zeitun’s military authorities on 31 March.22 There is, however,
every reason to believe that the Young Turk general had made a purely formal declaration,
unless we are to suppose that conflicting orders later arrived from the capital. For, on 8 April,
the deportation of the Zeitun Armenians commenced. The 35 leading citizens of the town,
including our witness and the director of the orphanage, were put on the road to Osmaniye
with their families; from there, they were sent on to Konya. A second convoy, including three
priests, arrived in Marash on Monday, 11 April, and a third, with the “suspects,” arrived on
Wednesday, the 13th.23 The patriarch notes in his memoirs that “[i]t was a golden occasion
to deport all the Armenians from Zeitun.”24 Thus, a total of around 18,000 people was put
on the road in three days: nearly 6,000 were set marching in the direction of Konya and

Eregli, and thence to Sultaniye;25 5,000 more were set toward Aleppo, and all the others to
Rakka, Der Zor, Mosul, and as far as the environs of Baghdad.26 In the second half of April,
the Armenian population of the two neighboring kazas, Göksun and Elbistan, was deported
in its turn.27
In the kaza of Göksun, which lay in the Anti-Taurus and took in the whole northwest-
ern part of the mutesarifat of Marash, 9,500 people living in 18 localities were affected
by the deportations. The principal town of the kaza and the surrounding villages had a
total Armenian population of nearly 3,000. Göksun (pop. 380), Hüyük (pop. 120), Kirec
(pop. 650), Gölpunar (pop. 150), Taşoluk (pop. 600), and Seyirmendere (pop. 400), together
with the outlying farms, were the first localities to be evacuated. Further to the south, the
deportations targeted the town of Geben, with a Turkish-speaking Armenian population
of 3,000, as well as the villagers of Deyirmenbaşı, Çukur, and Bunduk (pop. 245). The last
big group of Armenian villages affected by the deportations was located near the town of
Furnuz, in the southern part of the kaza. A total of 3,000 Armenians lived here, including
the inhabitants of six outlying villages, among which were Çağlağan and Telemelik, and
on some 15 farms located somewhat further off, where 300 people lived.28 The kaymakam
Garib Bey, who held his post from 7 February 1914 to 25 October 1915, played a central role
in organizing these operations, carried out by the army. Dr. Fred Shepard of the American
Hospital in Ayntab notes, for example, that in Geben the women were doing their wash
in the laundry when the order for immediate deportation was issued, and they were forced
to leave without being able to take anything at all with them. As for their men, they were
deported separately.29
In the kaza of Elbistan, located in the northeastern part of the mutesarifat of Marash, the
deportations targeted nearly six thousand Armenians, nearly four thousand of whom lived in
the seat of the kaza and the neighboring village of Bavurköy. Operations here were overseen
by the kaymakam, Hüseyin Derviş Bey.30 Kate Ainslie, a missionary, notes that the authori-
ties made the deportees from Elbistan take a particularly mountainous route, circumventing
Zeitun, so that they needed almost a week to reach Marash.31 From there they were sent
toward Ayntab and Aleppo.32
Several witnesses have pointed out that the Armenian localities of the kazas of Zeitun,
Göksun, and Elibstan were immediately occupied by Muslim muhacirs from Macedonia and
Rumelia. Ainslie observed as she left Marash on 14 June that Zeitun was now inhabited by
Macedonians, who chopped down the fruit trees for firewood.33 Reverend John Merril, from
Marash, noted that the muhacirs who took the place of the Armenians of Furnuz and Geben
had been temporarily left in Ayntab while waiting for the Armenian houses to be emptied
of their occupants. He states that, “From confidential sources in Marash, the secret report
is made that is the intention to deport the Christian population of all the Marash villages,
extending as far north as Hasan Beyli.”34
Arnold Toynbee has quite rightly observed that the fact that muhacirs were thus early
stationed in the vicinity of Zeitun as early as 8 April is “one special feature about the execu-
tion of the scheme in Cilicia which is evident that it was carried out deliberately and thought
out far ahead.” “Immediately the Armenians were evicted from their villages,” Toynbee con-
tinued, “their houses were assigned to Moslem refugees [...] from Roumelian vilayets,” while
these refugees from the Balkan Wars had until then been “on the Government’s hands” in
camps in Thrace or along the Aegean coast. In other words, high-ranking authorities had
organized the transfer of these muhacirs “from the western fringes of the empire to the other
extremity of the Anatolian Railway” so that they would be ready “to occupy the homes of the
Armenians in Cilicia immediately their rightful owners had started on their road to exile.”35
In endeavoring to provoke a reaction from the inhabitants of Zeitun, the authorities no
doubt singled out the population assuring them the best chance of success. However limited

Deportations: Zeitun and Dörtyol 589
the reaction to the provocation was, it afforded the Young Turk government the opportunity
to light a fire that it carefully kept burning thereafter.
As for the fate of the deportees from Zeitun, a European witness saw some of them pass
through the Adana train station bound for Konya in “pig-cars,” and others who were headed
for Aleppo by way of “Arabia.” The last convoy of these deportees passed by in mid-May,
made up of old people and children in a lamentable state.36 According to a survivor, the
inhabitants of Zeitun who were held up in Sultaniye lost around 700 of their number in two
months’ time before being put back on the road on 8 August, bound for the deserts of Syria
and the Dera’a district by way of Adana and Aleppo.37
The decision to rename Zeitun Süleymanlı after the officer who was killed during the
assault on the monastery marks, no doubt symbolically, shows the beginnings of the program
of Turkifying the Anatolian region by way of the liquidation of its Armenian population and
also by changing place names there.38
The Deportations from Dörtyol

When the Ottoman Empire entered the war, the sancak of Cebelbereket, like the whole
of the region of the Gulf of Alexandretta, found itself under pressure from the British and
French fleets. The Allied ships were positioned near shore and regularly shelled the railroad
that ran southward, skirting the coast. The shelling deeply alarmed the local population,
which feared an Anglo-French landing. The other element contributing to the tension reign-
ing in the region was the presence of some 40,000 Armenians who lived in 29 towns and
villages of this coastal sancak, who were suspected of harboring sympathies for the Triple
Entente. From the outbreak of the war, the inhabitants of the kazas on the coast, Yümürtalık
and, especially, Payas, had been placed under close surveillance by the army. Payas, which lay
a few kilometers from the sea on the western slopes of the Amanus mountains, boasted an
Armenian population of 11,000, settled in three localities all in the same area: Dörtyol (pop.
7,000), Ocaklı (pop. 2,545), and Özerli (pop. 1,560).39 According to Armenian sources, from
November 1914 on, the coast near Alexandretta, Payas, Dörtyol, and Ayas was under the
surveillance of a British warship, the Doris. As a result, the Ottoman military authorities had
set up a system of obligatory passes; it was illegal to travel without one. Early in November,
the kaymakam summoned the auxiliary primate, Father Mesrob Esefian, two members of the
diocesan council, and four muhtars in order to tell them that there was a risk that the British
would attempt a landing. The kaymakam suggested, consequently, that the Armenians “tem-
porarily seek refuge” in the Amanus region, like the other inhabitants of the coastal region.
He warned them that if they did not do so “spontaneously,” the authorities would not hesitate
to use force.40 This threat was not carried out, but the Armenians perceived it as a clear
warning. In February 1915, after the port of Alexandretta and its railroad had been shelled,
the authorities mobilized 600 Armenians from Dörtyol to repair the damage.41
As in Zeitun, an incident accelerated events. Late in February, someone named Saljian, a
native of the region who made his home in Cyprus, was arrested by the troops guarding the
coast just after a British warship put him ashore.42 The authorities immediately proceeded
to arrest Armenians living in coastal areas and organized a public execution of peasants
from villages near Payas, accused of having created a spy ring. The dragoman of the German
vice-consulate in Alexandretta escaped a similar fate thanks only to the intercession of the
German Ambassador in Constantinople.43 As in the Zeitun affair, the primate of Adana,
Father Kevork Arslanian, was summoned by the vali, Colonel İsmail Hakkı, and asked to
send a reliable representative to Dörtyol to convince the local population to submit to the
authorities. The chief secretary of the Catholicosate was chosen to accomplish this mission.
He learned, before setting out, that Colonel Hüseyin Avni Bey, commander of the vilayet’s

gendarmerie and presiding judge at the Adana court-martial, had himself gone to Dörtyol,
where he had proceeded to arrest all the men between the ages of 18 and 65 “in order to
conduct them to the interior” and confiscate weapons.44 The chief secretary wrote in his
report on his mission that he had taken the train as far as the station in Toprakkale, and
continued his journey from there in a car, after laboriously making his way past the military
checkpoints that had been thrown across the road here and there. In Ocaklı, he had encoun-
tered two cars in which Father Mesrob and a handful of notables from Dörtyol were sitting.
They had been summoned to appear before the court-martial in Erzin on the initiative of
the Bosnian Colonel Hüseyin Avni.45 The chief secretary of the Catholicosate, after a brief
conversation with the kaymakam, Colonel Avni, and the commander of the gendarmerie in
Dörtyol, Çerkez Murad Bey, convinced the town’s notables to turn in their arms, essentially
hunting rifles and daggers.46 In a letter to his ambassador, the German consul in Adana
expressed doubts as to the reality of the ostensible revolution that the authorities accused
Dörtyol’s Armenians of planning, and wondered whether it was legitimate to arrest all the
men in the town, when they “had demonstrated their submission to the authorities and not
shown them the least resistance.”47 One thousand six hundred adult males were sent to the
kaza of Osmaniye, in Hasanbeyli, to work on building a section of the road 23 kilometers
long; only a handful of the men in Dörtyol were spared this fate. The accusation of an “insur-
rection” was plainly baseless; nothing indicated that the least preparation had been made for
armed resistance. On the other hand, it was notably Talât Bey himself who issued the order
to launch the operation against Dörtyol, in a 2 March 1915 letter to the vali of Adana.48 This
makes it highly probable that the whole business had been concocted in the capital. It must
further be pointed out that chief among those brought before the court-martial in Adana
were the leading notables of Dörtyol, who were judged and publicly hanged over the follow-
ing weeks.49 Osmanağazâde Hasan; Dellaloğlu İsmail, who organized the death squadrons of
the Special Organization in the region beginning in January 1915; Şükrü Bey, the mutesarif
of Cebelbereket; Hüseyin Avni Bey, the presiding judge at the Adana court-martial; Haci
Ali Effendi, the mufti of Dörtyol; Divlimoğlu Haci; Köisenoğlu Ahmed; Köisenoğlu Mevlat
Effendi; Muftizâde Mustafa Effendi; and Haci Hamdi Effendi led this operation before bring-
ing these men back to Dörtyol in order to deport them with their families to Adana and then
Meskene, Rakka, Ras ul-Ayn, and Hama. In all, 20,000 Armenians from the kazas of Payas,
Yümürtalık, and Hasa were deported to the south late in April. Around three thousand five
hundred of them – basically people who had been deported to the Damascus area – were still
alive when the armistice was signed.50
That said, it must be pointed out that very few local massacres took place in the course
of these operations. They nevertheless prefigured, by virtue of the methods used in them,
especially the way that they were prepared, the extermination program carried out elsewhere
in the following weeks.

Chapter 20
Deportations in the
Mutesarifat of Marash
A
fter the operations that early in the day had affected the Armenian populations of
the kazas of Zeitun, Göksun, and Elbistan, the regions of Marash and Bazarcık in
turn fell victim to the Young Turk extermination plan. A region forming a kind of
pivot between the worlds of Cilicia, Cappadocia, and the Armenian plateau, in an enclave
between the Antitaurus and the Taurus, the mutesarifat of Maraş/Marash was inhabited in
1914 by more than 70,000 Armenians living in 64 towns and villages. When the last two
kazas began to be emptied of their Armenians, there were fewer than 35,000 of them left in
24 localities. Most of them were living in the city of Marash, whose 22,500 Armenians rep-
resented in 1914 around 50 per cent of its population. Almost all of them were concentrated
in a neighborhood west of the citadel that extended to an area below the monastery of Saint
James, on the outskirts of the city. Within this perimeter were no fewer than five churches,
several Armenian schools, an American College, and a German hospital and orphanage.
The other Armenian localities of the region were Fındıkcak, located 22 kilometers from
Marash, with an Armenian population of 2,500; Kişifli (pop. 560), Dereköy (pop. 1,000),
Camustul (pop. 250), and Döngel (pop. 1,500). There was a second group of Armenian vil-
lages around Yenicekale (pop. 800) and Mucukdere (pop. 500), between which lay the Red
Monastery of Kesun: Arablı (pop. 100), Kötekli (pop. 150), Yeğialar (pop. 150), Çurukköz
(pop. 300), Demerek, Punarbaşı (pop. 100), and Dikilitaş (pop. 100). Still further to the
southwest, on the boundary-line of the kaza around Enderun (70 Armenians) were three
other villages: Acemli (pop. 84), Dırtadlı (pop. 280), and Deyirmendere (pop. 140). The last
Armenian village, Chivilgi, lying in a northerly extension of the Enderun mountain chain,
had an Armenian population of 1,760.1
Taking in the entire southern part of the mutesarifat of Marash, the kaza of Bazarcık was
home to 1,500 Armenians, all of whom lived in the seat of the kaza, also called Bazarcık.2
In Marash, whose Muslim inhabitants had a reputation for being very conservative, the
German consul in Aleppo, Walter Rössler, who visited the city on 31 March 1915, observed
the tension that had been reigning there since the events that had occurred in the neighbor-
ing town of Zeitun. A state of siege had been declared in the city and a court-martial had
been formed.3 According to two American doctors, Marash’s Muslim leaders took advantage
of the situation to pressure the mutesarif into imposing harsh treatment on the Armenian
population. A military committee had been sent to the town around 7 April and proceeded
to conduct searches in Armenian institutions and the homes of certain notables, looking
for evidence indicating that a rebellion was being organized. The committee gave the popu-
lation three days, from 9 to 11 April, to turn its arms over to the authorities. On 8 April,
Hagop Horlakhian (Kherlakian), a notable who even had access to the imperial palace,
was summoned to appear before this committee, which demanded that he see to it that the

Armenian population comply with the government’s orders.4 There is every reason to believe
that the military commission began to cooperate closely with local Young Turk leaders. Dr.
C. F. Hamilton and Dr. C. F. Ranney report that on 13 April the Armenians of Marash
learned that “a black list of 300 to 600 names” was circulating in the city. Some Armenian
notables nevertheless downplayed the significance of a document of this sort, making a game
of trying to guess who was on the list.
Arrests in Marash took diverse forms. One of the methods most often employed was to
invite all the men of draftable age, including those who had paid the bedel, to register for
the draft. In fact, the registration campaign, which took place on 15, 16, and 17 July 1915,
allowed the authorities to isolate these men, the better to liquidate them.5 Among the first to
be arrested were 11 notables, including the auxiliary primate, Father Ghevont Nahabedian,
the Protestant minister Aharon Shirajian, Garabed Nalchayan, Armenag and Nazareth
Bilezigji, and Konstan and Hovnan Varzhabedian, all of whom were sent to Aleppo.6 In the
course of a 21 April conversation with the vali of Aleppo, Celal Bey, the Protestant minister
John Merril learned, moreover, that there was a plan to deport the “refugees” from Zeitun,
but that the government’s policy was above all, “to prevent such public and unordered vio-
lence.” The American missionary’s long experience taught him how to translate this remark:
“This is a plan for the breaking down of the Christian population without bloodshed and
with the color of legality.” He had already observed that “false” reports about the Armenians
had been transmitted to Istanbul “to be the basis for the orders now being carried out.”
Finally, he noted that the first to be deported were the best educated men, especially those
who were close to American missionary circles.7
In the neighboring localities, where the villagers were deported at the same time as the
Armenians of Marash, the only unusual occurrence was the resistance put up at Fındıkcak.8
It was quickly crushed by the army, which massacred part of the population on the spot and
deported the women and children.9
Some 30 men organized the squadrons of çetes, with some 20 irregulars in each, which
wreaked havoc in the region. These 30 men, who also supervised the massacres and
served as the members of the committee responsible for “abandoned property,” were Ali
Haydar Pasha, the mutesarif of Marash; Kocabaşizâde Ömer Effendi, the president of the
Unionist club of Marash; Şevketzâde Şadir Effendi, parliamentary deputy from Marash;
Ğarizâde Haci Effendi, a former parliamentary deputy from Marash; Dayizâde Hoca Baş,
ulema; Haci Bey, the mayor of Marash; Eczaci Lutfi, a pharmacist; Sarukâtibzâde Mehmed;
Eşbazâde Haci Hüseyin; Bulgarizâde Abdül Hakim; Sarukzâde Halil Ali; Şismanzâde Haci
Ahmed; Şismanzâde Nuri; Ap Acuz Haci Effendi; Mazmanzâde Mustafa; Evliyazâde Evliya;
Hoddayizâde Tahsin Bey; Hodayizâde Ahmed; Nazifzâde Ahmed; Hocabaşzâde Ahmed;
Karaküçükzâde Mehmed; Derviş Effendi, the former mayor; Saatbeyzâde Şükrü; Eviliyazâde
Ahmed, an imam; Bayazidzâde Ğadir Pasha; Bayazidzâde İbrahim Bey; Çuşadarzâde Mustafa;
and Çuşadarzâde Mehmed.10
The principal local leaders of the Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa were Vehbizâde Hasip Effendi;
Dr. Mustafa; Karaküçükzâde Mustafa; Koçabaşzâde Cemil Bey; Hoddayizâde Okbeş;
Mazmanzâde Mustafa; Mazmanzâde Hasan; Haci Niazi Bey, secretary of the Department of
Finance; Şakir Effendi; Cevdet Bey, the director of correspondence; Atıf Effendi, from Kilis;
Ömer Effendi, an officer in the gendarmerie; Ömer’s two sons; and Fatmaluoğlu Mustafa.
Those mainly responsible for perpetrating the exactions were Bayazidzâde Şukri Bey;
Bayazidzâde Kasim Bey; Bayazidzâde Kerim Bey; Bayazidzâde Hasan Bey; Buharizâde Abdül
Hakim Effendi; Kocabaşzâde Haci İbrahim; Ayntablıoğlu Ahmed, the assistant police chief;
Çuşadarzâde Mehmed, a member of the local CUP; Safiyeninoğlu Alay Mustafa Effendi, a reg-
imental secretary; Kusa Kurekzâde Ahmed, a belediye mufettişi (municipal inspector); Cemal
Bey, a criminal court judge; and Hayrullah Effendi, a teacher in the Idadi middle school.11

Chapter 21
Deportations in the
Vilayet of Adana
A
ccording to the censuses conducted by the Catholicosate of the Great House of
Cilicia, more than 80,000 Armenians lived in the vilayet of Adana in 1913. They
were settled in 70 towns and villages, with nearly 28,000 of them in the sancak of
Adana alone.
The city of Adana itself, with an Armenian population of more than 26,000 on the eve of
the First World War, held a significant place in the political and economic life of the vilayet.
There were only a handful of Armenian villages in its environs: to the north, Kristianköy
(pop. 190); to the east, Incirlik (pop. 250), located on the Bagdadbahn, and Misis (pop. 480);
and to the southeast, Abdoğlu (pop. 340) and Şeyhmurad (pop. 300).1
Since the April 1909 Cilician massacres, which took an especially heavy toll in Adana,
tensions in this coastal region, exposed to the maneuvers of the French and British navies,
had never really subsided. Local Young Turk leaders under the lead of İsmail Safâ [Özler],
whose heavy involvement in the 1909 violence we have already discussed,2 had maintained
their influence intact. Even before the Ottoman Empire’s entry into the war, the tone of
things to come had been set at a 10 September 1914 meeting by Safâ, the president of Adana’s
Unionist club and an active proponent of unilateral abrogation of the Capitulations (the
abrogation of which was officially made public on 1 October) and “nationalization” of the
economy.3 In other words, Safâ advocated eliminating the entrepreneurial middle classes,
the main partners of the European enterprises implanted in Cilicia. These social strata,
made up above all of Greeks and Armenians, complained precisely about the economic
crisis spawned by the war, which they blamed on the Germans. Probably for economic
reasons, their critique did not go unnoticed. According to the German consul in Adana,
a German officer deemed it an act of “high treason” that called for punishment.4 While
the diplomats were not of the same mind as the military men here, this affair nonetheless
revealed how suspect Greeks and Armenians were in the eyes of the Ottoman Empire and
its allies.
A report by an American resident of Adana allows us to grasp the reasons for the bitterness
that Greek and Armenian businessmen felt at the time. She observed that the mobilization
and requisitions had been a veritable catastrophe for them, pointing out in particular that
“[t]he Armenian shops were robbed at pleasure without payment.”5 Yet, while the Dörtyol
“affair,” the frequent public executions of condemned Armenians, and the repercussions
of the events in Zeitun had disconcerted certain Adana Armenians, it must nevertheless
be pointed out that no particular measures were taken against them until late April. The
first harbinger of the future persecutions was the arrest, at the end of April, of 400 mem-
bers of the elite of Adana, especially teachers and entrepreneurs such as Samuel Avedisian,
Yesayi Bezdigian, Garabed Chalian, Mihran Boyajian, and the Bedrosian brothers. William

Malatia N
Albistan •
•
Hacın
• Konia • Zeytun
•
Eregli Sis/Kozan Marash
• Bozanti •
• • Urfa
•
Karaman ADANA Aintab
• •
Birecik •
Tarsus
• • Cebelbereket •Suruc
Mersina • •Dörtyol •
Kilis
Içil • •
Mumbuc
Alexandretta
•Antioche •• ALEPPO Rakka
•
Chambers, who had been working in Turkey for 37 years, points out that those arrested were
first and foremost men who had survived the 1909 massacres and been kept under close sur-
veillance by the authorities.6 Contrary to what happened in other regions, however, these
men were freed after one week in detention.7 The vali, İsmail Hakkı Bey, an Albanian with
a reputation as a moderate,8 probably had something to do with this. Also involved, in all
likelihood, was Cemal Pasha, the commander-in-chief of the Fourth Army, who had himself
served as vali of Adana for a year after the 1909 massacres and had cultivated relations with
a few leading Armenian families. It is also reasonable to suppose that the vali had Cemal’s
support, which was indispensable if he wished to keep his post and withstand the pressures
exerted by the local Unionist club. To the extent that one can deduce his position from his
acts, Hakkı was not systematically opposed to the orders he received from the capital. Thus,
he organized the deportation of more than 4,000 “non-resident” Armenians in Bozanti in
May 1915, but succeeded in bringing them back to the town a few weeks later.9 He likewise
proved willing, early in May, to deport 30 of the richest Adana families, most of who returned
in three weeks’ time, apparently as a result of the intervention of the American Ambassador
in Constantinople.10 Another revealing sign of the vali’s benevolent attitude came late in
April 1915, when the Istanbul court-martial sent him a dispatch demanding that Adana’s
primate, Archbishop Khachadur Arslanian, be immediately transferred to the capital. His
response was to instruct the Public Health Inspector to issue a certificate attesting that the
prelate was physically unable to undertake the voyage to Istanbul.11
The first convoy of deportees from Adana, comprised more than 4,000 Armenians, left
the city on 20 May under police escort, but with the money the deportees had obtained
from the sale of their moveable assets.12 The German consul, Dr. Eugen Büge, informed
Wangenheim in an 18 May cable that the deportation had begun throughout the prov-
ince, that the prisons were full, and that death sentences were being executed daily.13 The
interior minister, for his part, sent an inquiry to the local authorities about how far their
implementation of the deportation program had advanced. In particular, he wanted them
to inform him of the names of the localities whose inhabitants had been deported, and also
the number of deportees.14 According to the chief secretary of Adana’s Armenian arch-
bishopric, the catholicos of Cilicia, Sahag Khabayan, had called a meeting of the diocesan
council and officers of the Banque Ottomane and Tobacco Régie on 23 May/5 June. He told
them that it seemed to him inevitable that the Armenians of the vilayet would be deported

Deportations: Adana 595
and that the businessmen would therefore do well discretely to transform their stocks into
cash. He added that he himself had decided to take up residence in Aleppo in order to
organize there as best he could a program of assistance for the deportees passing through the
city.15 The arrest of 18 notables from Adana, which took place almost immediately after this
meeting, and the deportations set in motion in the rest of the vilayet nevertheless prompted
the city’s Armenians to send the chief secretary of the archbishopric, Kerovpe Papazian,
to see the catholicos and ask him to intercede with the commander of the Fourth Army,
Cemal Pasha.16 With the help of the parliamentary deputy Artin/Harutiun Boshgezenian,
Sahag I wrote a letter addressed to Ahmed Cemal. In early June, Papazian was able to meet
with Cemal in Aley, Lebanon, and deliver the catholicos’s message to him. On his account,
Cemal immediately sent a wire to the vali of Adana and the military commander of the
region in which he ordered them not to deport a single Armenian “without informing [him]
of it.”17 According to information provided by the American consul, Edward Nathan, a
temporary halt was called to the deportations from Adana alone around 28 May. Over the
opposition of the influential members of Adana’s Unionist club, Nathan even announced
the return of the families of the notables that had been expelled three weeks earlier and
hinted that advocates and opponents of the deportations had had a rather sharp confronta-
tion on the issue.18 Armenian survivors would later confirm that İsmail Hakkı Bey and the
police chief, Cemal Bey, were hostile to the deportations and had clashed with members
of the Ittihadist club led by Safâ.19 The vali was apparently powerful enough to withstand
the pressure put on him by the local Unionists. He had an additional advantage in that the
CUP had no responsible secretary in Adana looking over his shoulder. It is probable that
Cemal Pasha’s intervention made his task easier.
Without a doubt, it was with the intention of putting an end to this situation that made
Adana an exception – between April and July, the Armenian population of Dörtyol, Hacın,
Zeitun, Hasanbeyli, and Sis had been deported – that Talât’s second in command in the
Interior Ministry, Ali Münîf, who was also a parliamentary deputy from Adana, was dis-
patched to the city. His presence there produced effects virtually overnight: late in July,
some hundred “suspects,” including N. Geokderelian and the lawyer Garabed Chalian, were
arrested and deported to Aleppo. Public hangings also began again. A 14-year-old adoles-
cent from Dörtyol was executed together with adults after being condemned by a court-
martial headed by Colonel Hüseyin Avni.20 Münîf, “a member of the Special Commission on
Deportations” who was there to “superintend the matter,” served notice of a general deporta-
tion from Adana, Tarsus, and Mersin. Two hundred fifty families received an order to leave
Adana. The same number was ordered to leave Mersin and Tarsus, where accusations of
spying and insurrection were again being bandied about.21
Around the same time, the Austro-Hungarian vice-consul in Adana, Richard Stöckel,
informed his superior in Aleppo that Muslim muhacirs continued to arrive in order to settle
in localities “abandoned” by the Armenians.22 The “non-residents,” who had initially been
spared, were deported for good in mid-August; on 2 and 3 September 1915, they were followed
by the bulk of the Armenian population of Adana, Catholics and Protestants included. Eight
convoys, comprising some 5,000 families, were thus put on the road under the direction of
Münîf and the police chief, Adıl Bey, between early September and late October. However,
Around 1,000 craftsmen and their families, as well as the families of skilled personnel work-
ing for the army or the government, were exempted from the deportation, together with some
40 people who had agreed to convert.23 According to the missionary William Chambers, the
Armenians of Adana were authorized to sell their moveable assets before leaving, but their
real estate was confiscated before they set out.24 A foreign resident estimated that 20,000
Armenians were deported from Adana in the last days of August 1915, during which it
seemed as if the city were the site of a massive clearance sale.25 Another witness noted

that the authorities seized the Adana Armenians’ bank deposits and the valuables they had
deposited in bank safes, and had also requisitioned, in addition to the population’s real estate,
the Armenian schools and churches in the city.26
However, unlike the deportees from other Ottoman provinces, it seems that a non-neg-
ligible proportion of the Adana Armenians was sent to the Damascus region and areas
further south on Cemal Pasha’s “personal application.”27 Once again, the former vali of
Adana seems to have shown generosity toward those he had formerly governed. By allowing
a number of them to avoid the passage through the concentration camps strung out along
the Euphrates, he very plainly saved their lives. This special arrangement, the exclusive
privilege of his “friends” from Adana, indicates that Cemal Pasha was very well aware of the
fate in store for the deportees who were being led toward the camps in the Syrian Desert.
After traveling to the camp at Osmaniye by train, the deportees from Adana discovered
what was waiting for them as they continued their journey on foot toward the concentra-
tion camps of Intilli and Katma and, thereafter, the transit center at Karlık, located near
the Aleppo railroad station. We shall see later the role that Karlık played during the second
phase of the genocide.28
Among the Armenians who had the right to remain in Adana beyond the craftsmen
and specialists who were indispensable to the army’s needs, the parliamentary deputy from
Kozan/Sis, Matteos Nalbandian, was able to save a few people by passing them off as mem-
bers of his family.29 The American mission of Adana also managed to save some of the little
girls who attended the mission’s school.30
In a report written early in 1916, the Austro-Hungarian vice-consul in Adana, R. Stöckel,
drew up a list of 205 Armenian businesses in Adana and Mersin that went out of opera-
tion as a result of the deportations, many of them having worked together with German
and Austro-Hungarian firms. Their shutdown caused these European companies consid-
erable losses. Stöckel also observed that the Mersin branch of the Deutsche Orientbank
suffered heavy losses because the government committees had confiscated the Armenian
assets that had served as collateral for their loans in order to transfer them to muhacirs from
Macedonia.31
The Adana Region, a Place of Transit for the Deportees

The procession of the hundreds of thousands of deportees from the provinces of western
Anatolia who passed through the vilayet of Adana was headed by the Armenian elites of
Istanbul. They found themselves in transit through the regional metropolis in June 1915 –
that is, well before the local population itself was deported.
One of the most reliable witnesses, the chief secretary of Adana’s archbishopric, Kerovpe
Papazian, reports, for example, the circumstances under which Nazaret Daghavarian, Rupen
Zartarian, Karekin Kazhag, Aknuni, Harutiun Jangiulian, Sarkis Minasian and five of their
companions, all of whom had been expelled from Ayaş on 2 June, were held for a few days in
the konak.32 Papazian relates how, having gone to see the vali to settle certain administrative
questions, he was hailed by Daghavarian, an old acquaintance of his, who asked that the
catholicos, Sahag I, intercede with the vali to secure permission for him and his companions
to go pray in the cathedral. İsmail Hakkı readily agreed to grant them an exceptional three
hours’ leave. The political deportees were immediately escorted to the archbishopric in “two
closed cars.”33 In fact, it seems that Daghavarian’s real objective had been above all to meet
with the catholicos. The chief secretary, who was present at the conversation that these
men held with the prelate after briefly praying, notes in his memoirs that the parliamentary
deputy from Sıvas seemed to him to be the most serene and courageous person in the group,
although he was well aware of the fate that awaited all of them. According to Papazian, the

ranking Dashnak Rupen Zartarian and Sarkis Minasian were in contrast very agitated, and
said nothing throughout the audience.34 One can readily imagine that the dejection of these
dyed-in-the-wool party activists showed was not unrelated to the bitterness they felt over the
policy of their former allies, the Young Turks, whose ideological motivations they understood
better than anyone else, and also to the feeling that they had been tricked.
The Adana stopover of the parliamentary deputies Krikor Zohrab and Vartkes Seringiulian,
who arrived shortly thereafter, makes it possible to gather some idea of the psychological state
of the two main Armenian leaders. Interned in a room of the local barracks, where their
meals were served to them, they had access to the press and were visited by the secretary of
the archbishopric. Zohrab seemed demoralized to Papazian, more worried about his family’s
fate than his own; Vartkes, fatalistic and courageous, seemed worthy of his reputation, and
little concerned by the prospect of imminent death.35
Others among the deportees from Istanbul, however, had better luck because they were
less closely guarded: they managed to slip away to one place or another with the help of
Armenian railroad employees or local businessmen working for the army. For instance, the
writer and publicist Yervant Odian and the journalists Levon Mozian, Aram Andonian, and
Sebuh Aguni benefited from the assistance of a physician, Dr. Boghosian, who had been
temporarily assigned to the transit camp in Tarsus. Thanks to Boghosian, these four intel-
lectuals found refuge, late in September 1915, with the Shalvarjian brothers, who owned a
large flourmill that provided the 25,000 troops stationed in the region with flour. For this
reason, the Shalvarjians had permission to send and receive money by wire. They allowed
the deportees to take advantage of this possibility, cashing on their behalf the sums sent
to them by relatives in the capital or elsewhere. Thus, they participated in a vast assist-
ance network that most certainly helped prolong or save the lives of many Armenians in
transit in the region. These Armenians lived in a camp containing 6,000 tents belonging
to deportees from Bardizag, Ismit, Adabazar, Bursa, Edirne, Rodosto, Bandırma, and so on,
surviving by working as amateur barbers, grocers, or by selling liquor (rakı). This camp lay
near the Gülek railroad station, one hour from Tarsus. Dr. Boghosian gave unreservedly of
his time and energy, treating many patients, especially victims of epidemics, as best he could.
According to Odian, people in the camp were dying at the rate of around 70 every day, with
their bodies being buried in the surrounding fields.36 H. E. Wallis, who witnessed the events,
puts the number of those living in the camp, out in the open, at 10,000 to 15,000; no one
else had the right to approach it, much less provide the Armenians with material assistance.
The foreign witnesses seem to have been the most profoundly shocked by the sight of the
deportees crammed into the sheep-cars parked in the train station, who, forbidden to leave
the cars, begged passerby for a little water.37 Odian, who spent several weeks among them
before he was saved, notes that every day, day and night, around 1,000 people were led off
toward Osmaniye by the agents of the Sevkiyat (Deportation), whose local chief was someone
named Hutsi Bey. With the October rains, the camp became a scene of death in which the
deportees had to wade through the mud.38 Elizabeth Webb observes that the camp, like cer-
tain others, was also regularly attacked, and that villagers from neighboring localities carried
off young women and girls.39
One of the few men allowed to remain in Tarsus was a typographer who put out the
Ottoman Agency’s daily bulletin: he was apparently the only person in town who knew the
ins and outs of the modern printer’s trade. There were also a few deportees who had been
saved thanks to two Greek businessmen, Simeon Oğlu and Tripani, who passed them off as
Greek employees of their firms.40 Late in October, the camp at the Gülek train station was
closed for good. The handful of deportees who had managed to find hideouts in the city was
flushed out by systematic police manhunts.41 Among those captured were the four intellectu-
als mentioned above. The last arrival, Aram Andonian, had managed to find lodgings with

a Greek from Tarsus after a short stay at the train station and later joined Sebuh Aguni and
Levon Mozian, who had somehow managed to rent a room.42 They had already been reu-
nited with Yervant Odian, who had found refuge in the industrial flour mill belonging to the
Shalvarjian brothers, Aram and Ardashes. Located half an hour from the city, it turned out
50 to 60 tons of meal daily to meet the army’s needs.43
Adana’s American mission also gave a few deportees temporary shelter, and provided oth-
ers with material assistance. Elizabeth Webb mentions, among the people with whom she
had contact in this period, a young woman from Ismit named Osanna and her four children,
who had come to Adana on foot (two of her children died on the way) and found work as a
domestic with an Iranian family living in the city; or, to cite another example, a 13- year-old
girl from Tekirdağ whom an Arab from Ras ul-Ayn had sold “for about $2.00” to a Turk from
Adana who had tried to force her to “marry” him until the child managed to find refuge in
the mission; or the adventures of two sisters, Mariam and Khatun, from a village near Sıvas,
who had reached Adana in such a state that it had taken them several weeks for them to
“regain physical and mental equilibrium”; or, finally, Mariam from Mush, kidnapped and
“married” by a Kurd who had been unable to prevent her from fleeing with the child she had
had by him, who had died during their flight.44 American sources also describe the fate of
the schoolboys at Talas’s American school, who had been transferred to a Turkish school in
Adana.45 The school administration had made a “great effort” to convert them, and then
decided to murder the oldest, who resisted Turkification, while sending the youngest to other
institutions after giving them Turkish names. The orphanage for Armenian children, which
Ahmed Cemal had created in 1909 while still the vali of Adana, had been converted into
a “Turkish orphanage” in turn after its director was hanged for being in “possession of two
pernicious Armenian books.”46
The 19 March 1916 appointment of Cevdet Bey, the former vali of Van, to head the
vilayet of Adana marked the end of these exceptions. It was the prelude to the creation of
the apparatus required to enact the second phase of the genocide.
The Deportations in the Sancaks of Mersin and Içil

Mersin, which served the capital of Cilicia, Adana, as a port of transit, developed late in
the day, but rapidly. In 1914, 2,300 Armenians lived there; another thousand Armenians
lived in villages nearby. Syrien and Çerkez immigrants as well as Greeks from Cyprus
also lived in the city. Halfway between Mersin and Adana, Tarsus, known as Darson in
Armenian, had in 1914 an Armenian population of only a little over 3,000. This was
a direct result of the 1909 massacres, which had also claimed many victims at Kozoluk
(Armenian population 290), a village near Tarsus.47 A total of 6,987 Armenians living in
the sancak of Mersin were affected by the deportation measures decided on in Istanbul.
While the vali of Adana showed a degree of moderation that benefited the local Armenian
population, the same did not hold for Mersin, where the mutesarif, Tevfik Bey, the presi-
dent of the Unionist club, Dr. Hayri, the police chief, Mehmed Bey, the commander of
the gendarmerie, Çalip Bey (a brother of the Young Turk leader Küçük Cemal), and a
few notables such as Ğalib Effendi, Hoca Ahmed, Kalaycı Abdüllah, and Hamdi Effendi
worked untiringly to liquidate the port city’s rich Armenian community, not without ulte-
rior motives of a financial nature.48
In late April, six “suspects” fell victim to a first wave of arrests. They were sent off to
Adana, where they were imprisoned in the former French lycée together with 30 men from
the city.49 The American consul Edward Nathan also notes the deportation of a few dozen
families from Mersin and Tarsus around 18 May 1915.50 In August and September 1915, 600
families were gradually deported from Mersin, with the result that only around 30 craftsmen

and their families were still living there by the fall, including the only Armenian in the town
to have converted, Khoren Sarafian.51 A second wave of deportations, organized in February
1916 after the British had shelled Mersin, put a definite end to the Armenian presence in
the city.52
Apart from a few dozen notables who were deported around 18 May, the Armenians of
Tarsus were put on the road at the same time as those of Adana, with the further exception
of a handful of craftsmen and employees working in state enterprises, as well as their fami-
lies. The Shalvarjian brothers, who were millers, were also spared; all of them boasted of the
great generosity that they showed both the intellectuals mentioned earlier and the deportees
in the camp at the Gülek train station, through which all the convoys traveling by rail to
Osmaniye had to pass.53
In September 1915, the American consul was still hoping to save the last Armenians
threatened with deportation, the “pupils” of the Institute of St. Paul of Tarsus, whom the
local authorities were seeking to lay hands on and deport using all the means at their dis-
posal.54 The kaymakam, İbrahim Edhem Bey, who had taken office in November 1911, had
probably been deemed too soft, for he was replaced on 4 November 1915 by the former
kaymakam of Adabazar, Necati Sezayi Bey, a man who had proved that he possessed the
qualities required that the post called for. Seyazi was able to count on the collaboration of
Ahmed Emin Bey; Kurkli Hoca Effendi; Sadık Pasha, a parliamentary deputy from Tarsus;
Hamdi Bey, the police chief; Ahmed Şükrü and İbrahim Çavuş, policemen; and Hakkı Bey,
a member of the city council. These men were also the chief beneficiaries of the despoliation
of the Armenians.55
The Armenian presence in the neighboring sancak of Içil was limited to two colonies –
Selefke (371 Armenians), the ancient city of Seleucia, and Mala (pop. 95). These Armenians
were expelled in September under the supervision of Ata Bey, who had been appointed to
replace Rauf Bey on 17 September 1915.
The Deportations in the Sancak of Sis/Kozan

Sis, located in the very heart of Cilicia, was in 1914 the seat of the sancak of Kozan. The
ancient capital of the Armenian kingdom of Cilicia and the official residence of the catholi-
cos, it formed a monumental architectural ensemble. Overlooking the town at the dawn of
the twentieth century was the royal citadel, surrounded by a colossal wall with 44 towers. In
1914, Sis was still almost three-quarters Armenian, with an Armenian population of 5,600
out of a total population of nearly 8,000, and it still clearly preserved its medieval character.
In the rest of the kaza of Sis were a dozen Armenian villages, of which the most important
were Karacalın and Gedik. In the ancient capital of the Rupinian dynasty, Anavarza, which
lay 30 kilometers further to the south, one could still see traces of the extraordinary fortress
built on the rocky outcrop towering over the plain, which was covered with Greco-Roman
ruins.56
The kaza of Feke, located in the northern part of the sancak of Kozan in the foothills of the
Antitaurus mountain chain, had in 1914 around 5,000 Armenian inhabitants, 1,150of whom
lived in the principal town of the kaza, Vahka/Feke. Three hours to the south, on the banks
of the Saros River, the village of Yerebakan had a Turkish-speaking Armenian population
of 735. Halfway between Feke and Yerebakan, Kaladere was home to 300 Turkish-speaking
Armenians. Ten hours to the north, in the forests of the Antitaurus, three Armenian vil-
lages still existed in 1914: Karaköy, Dikmen, and Sazak (pop. 349). Finally, four hours south-
east of Feke laid the village of Tapan (267 Turkish-speaking Armenians).57
Still further north in the valley of the Şatak Su laid Hacın, the seat of the kaza of the
same name. It was located in a site in the form of an amphitheater on a rock spur that lay at

the intersection of two valleys. A mountain fastness par excellence, particularly well suited
to self-defense, Hacın lay on one of the three routes between Cilicia and Cappadocia. The
1914 Ottoman census put the total number of Armenians in the kaza at 13,550, but the
diocesan statistics, which are corroborated by missionary sources, indicate that the town of
Hacın alone had an Armenian population of 26,480.58 Four hours north of Hacın, Rumlu
(comprising three villages: Köroğlu, Seki and Kuşkaya), lost in the forests of the Antitaurus,
had an Armenian population of 250. On the northern boundary of the kaza, Şar, the antique
Comana, had an all-Armenian population until 1915 (pop. 1,120).
In other words, Sis and Hacın, which had put up successful resistance to the 1909 mas-
sacres, were the two Armenian towns in the region on which the authorities concentrated
their attention after extirpating the Armenians of Zeitun and Marash. The first incident to
occur in this eagle’s nest came in January 1915: a leaflet written in Turkish with Armenian
characters – the Armenians here were Turkish-speaking – was plastered to a wall in the
courtyard of the Cathedral of St. George, calling on Hacın’s Armenians to “remain vigi-
lant” and “focus their efforts on self-defense.” The primate, Bishop Bedros Sarajian, tried
to hush up the affair, but the authorities soon got wind of it.59 The primate was summoned
to the konak, where the kaymakam, Kemal Bey (who held his post from 15 February 1914
to 13 April 1915), gave him two days to find out who the authors of the text were and
turn them in. The investigations carried out by the local Hnchak chiefs, under Garabed
Kizirian’s lead, had soon revealed that the provocative document had been produced on the
police chief’s initiative and that a child by the name of Aram Boyajian had been entrusted
with the task of pasting it up at the church. Handed over to the authorities, the adolescent
is nevertheless supposed to have told the police chief – that is, the person who had ordered
him to post the incriminated leaflet up at the church – that the “Hnchaks” had given it
to him. It does not much matter how this “revelation” was obtained; it provided the local
Young Turks a pretext to arrest 35 ranking Hnchaks. Twenty-four of them were released,
but 11 were brought before the court-martial in Adana on a charge of “rebellion.” Four of
these 11 were condemned to death and hanged; the others received a sentence of “life in
exile.”60
According to different witnesses to these events, the Hacın authorities adopted a method
sui generis that consisted in deporting the Armenian population in small groups, staggering
their departures so as to reduce the risks of a “general rebellion.” The fact that the task of
supervising operations in the region was entrusted to Colonel Hüseyin Avni, the commander
of the vilayet’s gendarmerie and presiding judge of the Adana court-martial (whom we have
already observed in action in Dörtyol, in the Cebelbereket region, from 7 to 12 March),61
suggests that direct orders about this matter had come down from the capital. The Bosnian
colonel had come to Hacın on 14 May, accompanied by a judge on the Aleppo court-martial,
Alay Bey, and left several brigades of soldiers there at five o’clock. According to Edith Cold,
an American missionary in Hacın, Avni and Alay immediately held a series of meetings with
the police chiefs and local notables. They then summoned Sarajian and gave him from 18 to
20 May to deliver up deserters and the weapons held by the population. At a long meeting,
these notables decided to yield to the authorities’ demands so as not to provide a pretext for
accusations of rebellion and, above all, to ward off the threat of an intervention by the 3,000
to 4,000 men than returning from Zeitun.62 Urged by their elders to comply with the authori-
ties’ orders, the handful of deserters in town turned themselves in on 23 May, while those
who had rifles gave them up (a total of 70 weapons were delivered up to the authorities). The
same day, the cavalry and infantry squadrons that had come from Zeitun invested Hacın and
requisitioned the Armenian school for boys, the orphanage-monastery, and an American
institution, which they converted into barracks.63 The missionaries’ protests against the
army’s confiscation of one of their properties were in vain. Their interlocutor, Sâmi Bey,

the commanding officer of the cavalry unit, was, to be sure, “very courteous,” but not at all
disposed to give these complaints a hearing.64
Once these preliminary operations were completed, the arrests of the local elites began
on 27 May. Two hundred notables were interned in the Monastery of St. James and 50 more
were jailed in the konak, where they were systematically tortured.65 The following day, the
American missionaries requested a meeting with the military men responsible for these opera-
tions, Hüseyin Avni and Ğalib Bey, in order to “obtain” explanations of these arrests from
them.66 This intervention was fruitless, and did not prevent the authorities from issuing a
general deportation order on 3 June. The first convoy comprised only 30 of the most impor-
tant Apostolic and Protestant Armenian families, among whom were people employed by the
American mission. On 10 June, a mere 150 families were put on the road. But the departures
of convoys proceeded steadily throughout the summer, under the orders of the new kaymakam,
Kemal Bey, who had been appointed to his post on 13 April 1915. By early October, only a few
craftsmen and their families were left in Hacın, along with 250 widows and soldiers’ wives.67 All
the deportees were dispatched on foot toward Osmaniye and Aleppo, by the Kiraz mountain
road rather than the road to Sis, which was practicable by wagon. The obvious intention was
to make it impossible for them to use means of transportation.68 Edith Cold reports that the
American missionaries refused to let the Armenians deposit valuables at the mission because
they had no instructions on this subject.69 She further observes that the mufti of Hacın had
refused to give his approval to the deportations and even took the assets of one of his Armenian
friends in hand to prevent them from being plundered.70 The case of two men mentioned by
Cold reveals a great deal about the effects that the deportation order had on people who were
serving their country. The first, Bedros Terzian, a graduate of the Constantinople law school
who had fought in the imperial cavalry in winter and spring 1915, returned to Hacın on leave
in May and was deported with the first convoy on 3 June. The second, Bedros Boyajian, a
government official in Hacın, had been on mission in a village when he learned that his wife
had been ordered to leave and reached the city a few hours after the convoy she was in had set
out.71 In the other Armenian localities in the region, especially Şar and Rumlu, the deporta-
tions took place shortly after the beginning of operations in Hacın.72 The convoys all took the
same route to their final destinations of Ras ul-Ayn, Rakka, Meskene, or Der Zor.73 According
to Sebuh Aguni, 5,000 of the more than 28,000 Armenians of the kaza of Hacın survived the
deportations.74 The 5,000 Armenians of the kaza of Feke were deported relatively late, and
were even able to benefit from the assistance of Hacın’s American mission.75 According to
Cold, the Muslims of Feke and Yerebakan exhibited their hostility to the deportations, with
the Turks of Feke behaving in “honourable” fashion.76
After overseeing the task of disarming and deporting the Armenians of Hacın, Colonel
Hüseyin Avni attacked the Armenians of Sis and the kaza of Kozan. On 2 May 1915, the
mutesarif, Safvat Bey (who had assumed office on 2 December 1914), was dismissed, prob-
ably because he was judged unreliable, and replaced the same day by Salih Bey. In Sis, the
Bosnian colonel also secured the support of local state officials and notables, particularly that
of Hüseyin Bey, the head of the municipality; Ali Bey, its secretary general; Halilağazâde
Haci; Kâmil Effendi; Halil Effendi; Yegenzâde Mehmed; Yegenzâde Ahmed; Hayta Çavuş;
Yarumzâde Ahmed; and çetes77 recruited in the area on Avni’s initiative.
The official order to deport the Armenians of Sis, confirmed by the interior minister in
person, did not reach the prefecture until 17 June 1915. As in Hacın, the inhabitants of the
city and the surrounding villages were gradually expelled in the direction of Osmaniye and
Aleppo. From these towns they were dispersed over the different deportation routes.78
The somewhat more than 5,500 Armenians of the kaza of Karsbazar lived in six localities:
Kars/Kadirli (1,800 Armenians), Hamidiye, Çokak (pop. 650), Akdam (pop. 420), and the com-
munities of Boğazdelik and Kuyumjian. They were deported in the course of June 1915.79

The Deportations in the Sancak of Cebelbereket

We have already seen that 20,000 Armenians from the coastal kazas of Payas, Yümürtalık,
and Hasa were dispatched southward in late April 1915, in the wake of the “events” that
occurred in Dörtyol. There were some 20,000 more Armenians in the Amanus region, com-
prising the kazas of Yarpuz, Islahiye, Bahçe, and Osmaniye. They were, however, deported
somewhat later. These Armenians were above all concentrated in the northern part of the
sancak, in the northern part of the kaza of Yarpuz, around Hasanbeyli, and in the Bahçe
district located in its northern extremity. There were a great many fewer of them in the
eastern kaza of Islahiye and the western kaza of Osmaniye.80 Many were working, as we have
seen, on construction of the series of tunnels being dug through the mountainous Amanus
region, yet even they were not spared. On 7 and 8 July 1915, all of those employed on the
tunnel construction sites from Hasanbeyli, Intilli, and Bahçe were deported with their fami-
lies and their houses were immediately turned over to Muslim muhacirs.81 A report drawn
up by three ranking Armenian employees of the Bagdadbahn provides a rather complete
inventory of the exactions that the officers and çetes of the Special Organization perpe-
trated against the Armenian populations of the region.82 The Armenians underscore in
particular the role played by a captain in the gendarmerie who had been sent from Adana,
a certain Rahmi Bey, but also that of local officials: Vehib Rumi Bey, the kaymakam of
Bahçe; Nusret Bey, the kaymakam of Islahiye; Fetih Bey, the kaymakam of Osmaniye; Ali
Mumtaz, the director of the Department of State Property in Bahçe; and Mustafa Effendi,
a tax collector in Bahçe.83
Hasanbeyli seems to have been the first locality affected by the deportations. Our wit-
nesses note that some 60 men were arrested and tortured there, after which eight of them
were brought before the court-martial in Adana.84 They further observe that Colonel
Hüseyin Avni came to oversee the July operations in person, probably after accomplishing
his mission in Hacın and Sis.85 We have no documents proving that the presiding judge at
the Adana court-martial was the head of the Special Organization for the entire vilayet of
Adana. It should be pointed out, however, that this judge was present during the deporta-
tions and personally oversaw them in all the districts of the region. It was doubtless in the
Amanus district that his obscure role appeared the most clearly, for it was there that he had
the leaders of the squadrons of çetes under his command.
We have a list of these çete leaders, district by district. In Hasanbeyli: Haci Ömeroğlu
Osman; the brothers Akca and Hasan Bey; Hanefioğlu Nuri; Kayipoğlu Halil; Mustafa Effendi;
Cani Bekir; Abdurrahman Effendi; Abdıcioğlu Mustafa; Hasanoğlu Nuri; Alikehyaoğlu Kara
Mehmed; Kol Hoca.
In Bahçe: Mehmed Effendi; Kadi Effendi, a judge; Haci Ali; Berber Ali; Mustafa Effendi,
a tax collector; Ömer Effendi; Said Effendi, a member of the Emvali Metruke; Farsah Ali;
Hüseyin Effendi, a “procureur” in the Tobacco Régie; Kel Hüseyin, a Régie official; Haci
Rıza; Yaşar Bey, the commander of the gendarmerie in Bahçe; Tekenoğlu Mustafa Çavuş;
Musa Onbaşi; Kara Itli Mehmed Ali; Çil Ahmedoğlu Kara Mehmed; Halil Onbaşi; Abuş
Effendi; Haci Effendi; Ali Çavuş; Kara Osman; Ökleş Ahmedoğlu Hasan; Haci Ömer and
Mehmed Ali; Çakoloğlu Haci Mehmed; Arnavud Haci Yusuf; Tahsildar Burdu; Tahsildar
Haci; Kurt Ökleş; Nasir Effendi; Colak Ali; Alioğlu Şükrü; Çavuş Hüseyinoğlu Mehmed;
Molla Hasanoğlu Abdüllah; Süleyman Effendi, an official in the census bureau; Küçük Haci
Ahmed and his son; Ali Calali; Bikir; Ağil Ali; Fattuhzâde Ali.
In Islahiye: Mustafa Ağa; Hurşid Ağa; Süleyman Ağa; Balanoğlu Mehmed Ağa;
Balanınoğlu; Çerçi Oğlu; Amirşınoğlu Mustafa; Eşbaşzâde Mehmed; Hasan; Alişoğlu
Mehmed; Sarı Kadı; Ahmed Effendi; Murad Ağa; Şeyh Ağa; Kesacık Ibo; Hasan Ağa;
Mehmed Effendi, a judge on the court in Islahiye; Şih Ca. In the rural zones: Haydar Kehya;

Akçe Kehya from Kişniz; İsmail Ağa from Kaltan; Salman Çavuş from Folan; Milla Haliloğlu
from Arıklı Kaşlı; Ömer Effendi; Miktat Ağa.
In Osmaniye: Fetih Bey, the kaymakam; Haci Hüseyin; Fettuhoğlu Ahmed; Haci
Kehyaoğlu Haci Kehya from Adana; Çalıkoğlu Haci Ahmed; Çalikoğlu Süleyman; Mubaşir
Kadiroğlu Tahak; Mubaşir Kadiroğlu Ağa; Polis Ömer; Semerci Kör Ahmed Çavuş; Mehmed
Effendi; Kürd Hüseyin; Hamisli Deli Mehmedoğlu Deli Mehmed; Mulazim Haci Ali Ağa
from Adana; Mubaşir Kadir Ağa from Adana; Ahmed Çalikoğlu; Arabacı Haci Oksen
Effendi; Arapoğlu Mehmed Ali; Topal Haci Ahmed; Topal Haci Küçük Onbaşi; Haliloğlu
Torun, an officer in the gendarmerie; Kızıl Ağa, a member of the deportation committee in
his city; Mehmed Effendi from Yozgat; It Berber Küçükoğlu; Dolamoğlu Haci Effendi; Kürd
Haci Ali Ağa; Ibisinoğlu Musa; Çunakı Kara Hasan; Haci Ökleş; Divilim Hocaoğlu Hoca
Effendi; Kara Yağitoğlu Mehmed; Ince Arap; Şaban Çavuş; Topal Haci Mahmudoğlu Dide;
and Ahmed Effendi.86
After the Mudros armistice, none of the criminals who had been active in Cilicia or
Syria was brought to trial. The investigation opened there on 21 September 1915 on orders
from the interior minister supposedly did not bring to light a single abuse warranting court
proceedings.87 Asım Bey,88 who was named to conduct the investigations of the fourth
investigative committee and charged with inspecting the provinces of Adana, Aleppo, and
Damascus, was a Laz from Şoppa said to be close to the CUP leadership. It is perhaps for this
reason that his mission more closely resembled a local inspection of the demographic effects
of the deportations than a judicial investigation of possible crimes. Thus, Asım explained to
Talât that he had first gathered information about the number of Armenians deported and
“whether there was anyone who had complaints on this score.” He observed that the sum of
the number of deportees from the vilayet of Adana recorded in the official registers (47,258)
and that of the remaining Armenians (18,000) did not match the figures in the “registers of
1915.” In other words, the censuses had obviously underestimated the number of Armenians
in the vilayet, unless the disparity was to be attributed, he wrote, humorlessly, to “an extraor-
dinarily high birthrate since 1915 and the postponement of the deportation of certain indi-
viduals.” According to the local authorities, the latter hypothesis was the more plausible of
the two. It was to be explained, Asım wrote, by the
multiple, frequent orders issued by your Ministry, the Ministry of War, the General
Directorate for Military Equipment, and the Imperial Command of the Fourth Army,
to the effect that the families of soldiers and the relatives of Armenians overseeing
the construction and operation of the Baghdad railway be maintained where they
were, along with family members of the owners of factories working for the military
authorities, people involved in providing the army with food and supplies, people com-
missioned by the railroad company to cut and transport timber, as well as the families
of parliamentary deputies.89
This listing of the categories of people provisionally exempted from the deportation is
corroborated by survivors’ accounts, confirming that the population of the vilayet of Adana
was treated with relative clemency in comparison to those of other regions. It also shows how
preoccupied the capital was by the demographic transformations brought about at the local
level once the deportation plan had been carried out.
The same report notes the existence of “the families of three hundred soldiers, one thou-
sand five hundred Catholic and Protestant exiles, Armenian workers in the factories produ-
cing goods for the military authorities, as well as the indispensable craftsmen in the kaza of
Tarsus”; of “six households, comprising the families of five soldiers and that of an artisan”
in the kaza of Cihan; of “a few craftsmen and woodcutters and their families, as well as four

hundred employees working on the Intilli construction site on special orders” in the kaza
of Islahiye; of 725 “people in the usual categories” in Kozan/Sis; of 38 in Karsbazar; of 863
in Hacın, including the families of soldiers, craftsmen, and converts; and of 228 in Feke, to
which it is necessary to add people in other classes, comprising a total of 868 Armenians,
“plus one living” in Dörtyol.90 If the estimation of the number of Armenians allowed to
remain here and there in the vilayet is most certainly too low, it nevertheless indicates,
once again, the authorities’ desire to limit these exceptions to people indispensable to the
army. Thus, for the city of Sis (in the kaza of Kozan) alone, the extremely precise Armenian
sources produced by the Catholicosate mention 4,000 deportees as opposed to 2,530 left in
place91 – that is, almost four times more than the figures given for the entire kaza by the
judicial inspector Asım. The fact that an administration attached to the Catholicosate was
maintained in Sis does not by itself suffice to explain both the singular generosity from
which the inhabitants of the former Armenian capital benefited or the considerable disparity
between the Ottoman government’s figures and the Catholicosate’s. The most likely explan-
ation would appear to be that certain officials in the almost exclusively Armenian city of Sis
forwarded underestimations to the government in Adana – in other words, that it proved
possible to bribe these officials into distorting the real figures. While general conclusions can
hardly be drawn from this one documented case, it seems more than probable that the fact
that part of the Armenian population of Cilicia was allowed to stay home, and that another
part of it was deported to the least deadly zones, resulted from buying off local government
officials on a broad scale.

Chapter 22
Deportations in the Sancaks

of Ayntab and Antakya
A
rmenians had been living in this region wedged between the Taurus and Amanus
mountain chains since the tenth century, their arrival here coinciding with the
creation of military themata occupied by Armenian soldier-colonists. In 1914, 44,414
Armenians lived in the sancak of Ayntab, which was administratively subordinate to the
vilayet of Aleppo. More than 36,000 of them lived in the kaza of Ayntab alone, while another
8,000 were to be found in the sancak of Kilis.1
Thirty-six thousand of Ayntab’s 80,000 inhabitants were Armenians from diverse reli-
gious backgrounds of whom 4,000 were Protestants. The community maintained several
churches and 25 schools with a total enrolment of 5,000. Another several hundred young
men and women attended Central Turkey College, which had been founded in 1876 by
American missionaries and included a medical school as well as a hospital. The Armenian
population of Ayntab, which had been Turkish-speaking since the mid-eighteenth century,
had partially recovered its mother tongue thanks to the intense development of education
encouraged by the Constantinople Patriarchate down to 1915; this held for the youngest in
particular. The Armenians of Ayntab, an especially active population, were employed above
all in trade and the crafts and held a key position in the economic life of the city.
The second kaza in the sancak, Kilis, boasted 8,000 Armenians. Almost all of them were
concentrated in the seat of the sancak, also called Kilis, which lay on the road to Aleppo.
In the early twentieth century, Kilis was a thriving town, famed for its production of tinned
copper tools, textiles, and rugs.2
A well-informed Armenian witness reports that on the eve of the war a Türk Yurdu club
was created in Ayntab by the parliamentary deputy Ali Cenani. Its main task was to orches-
trate harassment of the Armenian institutions, promote the confiscation of farms on various
pretexts, and generally promote Turkism.3 The same source says that at the beginning of
the war the local Young Turk club launched, a furious campaign against French and British
organizations, and then conducted an anti-Armenian propaganda tour in the villages at the
beginning of the spring. The Ittihadists also recommended that Turkish debtors not settle
their debts to Armenians and cease cultivating land belonging to them, for, “before long,
there will not be a single Armenian in Ayntab.” It appears that the city’s mosques produced
the same sort of discourse.4
Like the rest of the vilayet of Aleppo, the sancak of Ayntab was not one of the areas
originally included in the deportation plan. Ayntab’s Armenian inhabitants, like Aleppo’s,
were to have been left in their homes. While various factors, especially the presence of large
numbers of foreign witness and a sharp debate within the institutions of the CUP itself, can
explain such a decision in the case of cities such as Istanbul, Smyrna, or Aleppo, it is hard to
find reasons for this choice in the case of the Ayntab and Kilis Armenians. These two groups

were, to be sure, isolated in a Turkish-Arab environment, but they nevertheless represented a

non-negligible concentration of Armenians. The administrative autonomy that the neighbor-
ing sancak of Marash was granted in early spring 1915 would seem to indicate that the CUP
had from the outset planned to spare the Armenians of the vilayet of Aleppo, forcing the
most hard-bitten Unionist circles to resort to various artifices in order to include the zones
that had been exempted in their program. According to our principal Armenian witness, the
leaders of Ayntab’s Ittihadist club, backed by the parliamentary deputy Ali Cenani and the
former kaymakam of Kilis, Fadıl Bey, repeatedly appealed to the capital to obtain the deporta-
tion of the Armenians of these regions. However, the mutesarif, Şükrü Bey, and above all the
military commander, Hilmi Bey, are said to have put up stiff opposition to such schemes.5
These Unionists, who seem to have been lacking in experience in organizing provocations,
are supposed to have been urged by their colleagues in Marash to send telegrams to Istanbul
announcing that Armenians were making preparations to “attack mosques, kill Turks, rape
women, and plunder and burn down Turkish homes.” The affair, however, reached the ears
of the higher-ups, including the military commander Hilmi, who requested that the head of
the Fourth Army, Cemal Pasha, sanction such provocations. Cemal sent Fahri Pasha to the
area to look into the matter – that is, to establish whether the accusations leveled against the
Armenians were true. Police searches of the Armenian neighborhoods failed to provide con-
firmation of them.6 Armenian sources also indicate that a ranking member of the Teşkilât-ı
Mahsusa, Çetebaşi Ali Bey, arrived in Ayntab in late April with a squadron of çetes, who
committed the first murders outside the city. Partial police searches were conducted on 1 May
1915, and some ten men were arrested and brought before the court-martial in Aleppo. The
head of the local branch of the Banque Ottomane, Dikran Kherlakian, had no choice but to
flee the city after receiving threats from Ali Bey.7 Around the same time, on 3 May 1915, the
Ayntab Armenians saw a first convoy of 300 deportees comprising only women and children
from Zeitun pass by the city. In the next weeks, it was followed by caravans made up of several
hundred deportees each, from Zeitun, Marash, Elbistan, Gürün, Sıvas, and Furnuz.8 The first
systematic arrests and police searches came on 12 May: around 200 people were arrested in
the space of three days,9 although the vali of Aleppo, Celal Bey, succeed in obtaining the
release of most of those apprehended.10 Two Americans from Ayntab furnish a few details
about the caravans of deportees who arrived from the north and passed through the city,
though it had been hard to approach them or provide them with relief. Miss Fearson notes
that the Armenians managed to create a relief committee for the deportees, while Elvesta
Lelie points out that J. Merril and Dr. Hamilton made great efforts, along with the American
hospital’s nurses, to aid the exiles, many of whom, children included, were suffering from seri-
ous knife wounds.11 The deportees were stationed 15 minutes from the city in a place known
as Kavaklık, near a copious spring that they could approach only if they paid the gendarmes
guarding them “a quarter of a mecidiye per glass.” At night they were attacked and pillaged,
according to an Armenian witness, while young women were raped or abducted to fill the
city’s harems with the active complicity of gendarmes and government officials.12
The sight of these convoys regularly punctuated life in the city of Ayntab until late July –
that is, until the CUP’s responsible secretary in Aleppo, Cemal Bey, arrived in the city. This
Ittihadist cadre had apparently come with the mission of convincing the notables to request
that Istanbul issue a deportation order. A meeting called on 29 July by the local Young Turks
confirmed the reception of a deportation order emanating from Istanbul. At the meeting,
a list of the first Armenians to be sent off was drawn up.13 The German consul in Aleppo
confirmed this information, informing his superiors the next day that the order to deport the
Armenians from the coastal zones of the vilayet of Aleppo, Ayntab, and Kilis “had just been

Deportations: Ayntab and Antakya 607
issued.”14 The American representative passed this news along to his ambassador a few days
later, adding that the order also applied to Antakya, Alexandretta, and Kesab.15
Manifestly, the mutesarif and military commander resigned so as not to have to carry
out16 the deportation order that was posted up and announced by the town crier the morn-
ing of 30 July.17 The first convoy, made up primarily of notables and the members of the
deportee relief committee,18 left the same day by the city’s western exit. A member of the city
council, Nazaret Manushagian, was attacked and murdered there by the men of the Special
Organization. The second convoy was methodically pillaged by çetes less than a day’s march
from Ayntab.19 Every day, from 100 to 300 families were put on the road; at the same time,
the city’s Armenian neighborhoods were transformed into huge bazaars. As elsewhere, assets
were sold off at laughable prices. These who tried to deposit valuables with the American
mission were intercepted in the street and relieved of their property. The authorities requi-
sitioned all non-Turkish schools and all churches; they confiscated the stocks of the stores;
they rented the most beautiful houses “at extremely low prices” and attributed the others
to Turkish families. The Armenian cathedral was transformed into a warehouse for “aban-
doned” property and then converted into a stable after all the objects deposed there had been
sold off.20 To facilitate certain transactions, the main beneficiaries of these acts of despolia-
tion saw to it that the director of the Ayntab branch of the Deutsche Bank, Levon Sahagian,
was rapidly deported. Sahagian would later be killed at Der Zor.21
Apart from the first two groups, which were sent toward Damascus, all the Armenians
deported from Ayntab were sent toward the Akçakoyun railroad station, where they were put
in a transit camp surrounded by barbed wire while waiting to be loaded into stockcars and
transported to Aleppo, and then sent on foot to the region of Zor.22 The American consul,
Jackson, notes that nine trains passed through Aleppo between 1 and 19 August. Several of
them were carrying thousands of Armenians from Ayntab, who had been put on board the
trains in Akçakoyun, where they were pillaged by villagers in what he described as “a gigan-
tic plundering scheme as well as a final Blow to extinguish the race.” Jackson observes that,
unlike the other convoys, those that came from Ayntab included men, women, and children
over ten.23 In a communication dated 1 September, the vali of Aleppo, Bekir Sâmi, also
informed the interior minister that there were several thousand deportees from Kilis in the
Katma train station and thousands of families from Ayntab in the Akçakoyun station.24
Only after the Apostolic Armenians had been expelled did the authorities issue the order,
on Sunday, 19 September, to deport the few hundred Catholics of Ayntab who had initially
been spared.25 By late September, three-quarters of the Armenian population had already
been deported. It is noteworthy, however, that the Protestants were still exempt, a circum-
stance that did not fail to irritate Ayntab’s Turkish notables.26 Indications are that the cen-
tral authorities intended to spare the Armenian Protestants temporarily in order to liquidate
them more effectively when they deemed the situation more favorable. The very personality
of the new interim mutesarif, Ahmed Bey, hand-picked by the interior minister, provides
an initial indication in this regard: the new vali had been a high-ranking police official in
Istanbul,27 who, moreover, arrived in Ayntab with the parliamentary deputy Cenani, the
CUP’s representative in the region. Ahmed promptly organized a second wave of deporta-
tions to Der Zor, on the principle that “if one is guilty, all are guilty.”28 The first measure
he took, around mid-October, was to mobilize the males between 16 and 20 who were still
to be found in the vilayet and assign them to a labor battalion that was put to work on the
Bagdadbahn construction site in Rajo.29 He also saw to it that the homes of Protestants
were subjected to police searches, which happened immediately after the 13 December 1915
arrival of Ğalib Bey, who had played a leading role in carrying out massacres in Urfa.30 The
first Protestant affected by this measure was Dr. Movses Bezjian, a respected pharmacist and
former parliamentary deputy; his house was searched from top to bottom, and even the land

around it was plowed up.31 Ğalib and the mutesarif had, however, to confront the hostil-
ity of the new military leaders, Yusuf and Osman Bey, who were opposed to deporting the
Protestants. Ğalib, who had arrived with 500 çetes and mountain cannons that on his orders
had been positioned on the heights overlooking the city, threatened to shell the Armenian
neighborhoods that were still inhabited. This argument carried the day.32 The Protestants
were ultimately deported via the Akçakoyun railroad station, in falling snow, beginning
on 19 December 1915, the day after Dr. Shepard was buried.33 According to Miss Fearson,
the mutesarif’s son personally participated in plundering the convoys of Protestants, which
departed under the missionaries’ gaze, along with all the teachers and medical personnel in
the mission. The American resident of Ayntab notes that the deportees paid “exorbitant
sums” in order to be sent south of Damascus – that is, somewhere other than Der Zor.34 It is
obvious that by December Ayntab’s Protestants had had ample time to learn what it meant
to be “expedited” to Der Zor and did not hesitate to mobilize all the means at their disposal
in order to be deported by way of the Homs-Hama-Damascus route instead.
As far as the seizure of Armenian assets is concerned, Armenian sources state that the
authorities forbade the deportees to sell their real estate before being expelled.35 The new
director of the local branch of the Banque Ottomane, Leon Maher, seems, moreover, to
have played a big role in confiscating Armenian property. After encouraging businessmen to
deposit their most valuable assets, such as silver, gold, jewels, account books, and acknowl-
edgements of debt in his bank, he created a company together with Turkish partners and
purchased these assets at one-fiftieth of their real value, thus amassing a personal fortune.36
The method used “officially” to gain control of real estate is illustrated by the case of the
Kenderjian brothers, Minas and Hovsep, who had been living in Adana for years but who
owned a vast farm in Ayntab. Summoned to the city, they were deported most probably
after being invited to consign their property deeds to the state or a private individual. The
mutesarif, Ahmed Bey, is supposed to have expressed his surprise over the fact “that two hun-
dred Muslims can work, while a Christian reaps the fruits of their labors”;37 the remark was
most assuredly inspired by the doctrine of the “national economy,” according to which assets
were to be transferred to Turkish entrepreneurs. It appears, in any case, that the notables of
Ayntab wanted to make sure that they could use the Armenian deportees’ property as they
saw fit however the war went. Thus, the members of the Ittihadist club and the local notables
took a direct hand in the liquidation of around 15,000 Armenians from Ayntab who were
deported to Der Zor. They organized, for that purpose, an executive committee made up of
Dabbağ Kimâzâde, Nuribeyoğlu Kadir, and Hacihalilzâde Zeki, who went to Zor to make
certain that the Armenians had indeed been put to death38 so that they would not have to
worry about returning their property to them.
The deportation of the Armenians was not without consequences. To provide minimal
services and meet the army’s needs, the authorities decided to exempt three main classes
of Armenians from the deportation.39 The first, comprising 370 people, was made up of
craftsmen employed in a factory that was responsible for furnishing the army with clothing,
shoes, and ironware. In the second were 65 to 70 doctors, pharmacists, dentists, goldsmiths,
tinsmiths, kettle-makers, and bakers, accompanied by their families, whom the city needed
to meet its daily needs but who did not live among the Turks.40 Only 30 to 35 households,
christened “soldiers’ families,” were in the third category of those exempted from the depor-
tation. Of course, in the case of Armenian draftees, the term “soldier” could only apply to
workers in the amele taburis no older than 18, which held the number of possible exemptions
to a minimum.
Thus, a total of around 2,000 people were allowed to remain in Ayntab either throughout
the war or for a few months, depending on circumstances.41 From January to July 1916, the
mutesarif continued to deport small groups of Armenians to the south on various pretexts

while sending bakers by force to Urfa and Birecik, since bakers were in very short supply in
these cities after the massacres that took place there.42 The case of the auxiliary primate
Father Garabed Kizirian, an aged paraplegic who was expedited to Zor for celebrating a
marriage, is symptomatic of the local authorities’ attitude toward those exempted from the
deportation. When the priest’s daughter came to see the mutesarif in order to beg him to show
her father mercy, he answered: “Such is the punishment that I inflict on anyone who thus
tries to increase the numbers of a people whom I am doing my best to wipe out. Armenian
sources indicate that the priest died while being deported and that his daughter made a
Turkish officer a very happy man.43 In fact, the authorities proved much more lax in Ayntab
than in other regions in dealing with deportees from the north who passed through their
city. Many women and children naturally tried to take refuge in the city or were “adopted”
by Turkish families, yet were not systematically rounded up. As a rule, the authorities con-
tented themselves with conducting occasional raids, sending those rounded up to the south.
The city’s Armenians nevertheless had to take a great many precautions and show extreme
discretion in organizing relief for their needy compatriots.44 Finally, it should be noted that
muhacirs from Rumelia were not settled as systematically in Ayntab as in Zeitun and else-
where. Nevertheless, no fewer than 500 such families were settled in the city’s Armenian
neighborhoods in late fall 1915.45
The only information we have about the fate of the worker-soldiers from Ayntab bears on
two amele taburis, comprising, respectively, 800 young men and 900 men between the ages
of 30 and 45. Both of these labor battalions were sent to an area beyond Urfa and wiped out
in the latter half of June 1916.46
In the end, according to Armenian sources, around 12,000 Armenians from Ayntab sur-
vived the war and deportations. Survivors were especially numerous among those deported
by the Homs-Hama-Damascus route.47 The deportations organized in the sancak were super-
vised by a Sevkiyat komisionı (Deportation Committee) headed up by the mutesarif and com-
prised Bilal Hilmi, a judge; Haci Fazlızâde Nuri Bey, the leader of the squadrons of çetes (400
men); Mollaşeyhzâde Arif, the mufti of Ayntab; Şeyh Ubediyet; and Haciağazâde Ahmed.
Besides Ahmed Bey, the second mutesarif, those chiefly responsible for the deportations
and pillage were Mustafa Effendi, the president of the municipality; Besim Bey, the head
of the Treasury; Bilal Hilmi Bey, a judge; Kâzım Effendi, an official in the Census Office;
Eyub Sabri Bey and Haci Yusuf, secretaries in the Department of Finances; Kemal Bey, a
commander of the gendarmerie; Bilazikzâde Arif; Bulbul Hoca Effendi, the former mufti;
Mehmed Effendi, the Şeyh of the bazaar; Habibzâde Mustafa, an ulema; Batamzâde Mehmed,
an ulema; Fahreddin Hoca, the first secretary of the court; Major Bekir Bey, the commander
of the regiment of Kızılhisar; Kâsim Bey, a member of the general staff; Hakkı Bey, regimen-
tal secretary; Hamid Bey, a municipal physician; Kerim Bey, a judge; Kâsim Bey from Urfa,
a magistrate; Emin Effendi, the director of the Agricultural Bank; Izrapzâde Vahid Effendi,
a secretary of the Evkaf (religious charitable institutions); Mahmud Effendi, the municipal
treasurer; Şahin Hafız Effendi, the director of the Turkish orphanage; Talıpzâde Arif, the
head of the mutesarif’s cabinet; Fevzi Effendi; Körukci Hafızzâde Mustafa and Haci Sabitzâde
Ahmed, police lieutenants; Muşluzâde Mehmed, a sergeant in the gendarmerie; Necip
Effendi; Bazarbaşi Mehmed and Emin Effendi, officials in the Tax Department; Nalçaci Ali,
an official in the Correspondence Office; Abdallah Agha, a court official; Haci Halil Effendi,
a commander of the gendarmerie; Haci Halil Effendi Oğlu, prison warden; Ömar Şevki, a
lawyer; Ahmed Effendi, an imam from the nahie of Kozanlı; Şeyh Mustafa Baba, an imam
from the nahie of Alaybey; Şeyh Mustafa Babaoğlu, a çete; Hafız Ahmed Effendi, muhtar of
Alaybey; Ali Cenani Bey, a parliamentary deputy from Ayntab; Rıza Bey, a brother of Ali
Cenani’s; Dayızâde Sadıkoğlu Hasan Sadık, a Unionist leader; and Taşcizâde Abdallah, the
president of Ayntab’s Committee of Union and Progress.48

As for the 6,000 Armenians of Kilis whose fate was closely bound up with that of their
compatriots from Ayntab, it must be pointed out that on the eve of the deportations the
second in command of the Fourth Army, Fahri Pasha, also went to Kilis. There he held
talks with the Armenian notables, guaranteeing the safety of their lives and property and
yet, on the evening of the same day, he held “a secret meeting,” in the Mevlahane, with
Unionist leaders and local notables, during which the deportation of the Armenians was
approved in principle, with the blessing of the CUP’s responsible secretary in the vilayet of
Aleppo, Cemal Bey.49 Two days later, the leading Armenian personality in the city, Kevork
Keshishian, was arrested on his farm and jailed in Kilis after being publicly humiliated.50
It should be emphasized that the deportation of the Armenians of Kilis began on the
same day as it did in Ayntab, 30 July 1915. The convoys were initially led toward the Katma
railway station, where a primitive camp had been hastily set up. Thus, the convoys from Kilis
found themselves submerged in the flood of the hundreds of thousands of deportees from
the four corners of Asia Minor who passed through this camp, most of them on foot, a few
by rail. Around 300 people, essentially craftsmen, were allowed to remain in Kilis for some
time, “charged with meeting [local] needs.” They were eventually deported in turn.51 The
church was stripped of all its Christian symbols and ritual objects. Real estate was seized after
its owners were killed under the supervision of the local Unionists, so as to make all protest
impossible.52
During the war Kilis earned a name for itself because of the beauty of the Armenian
women abducted from the convoys of deportees and placed in the bordello reserved for Kilis’s
Unionists and soldiers passing through the city.53 Armenian survivors from Kilis compiled
a list of the 107 people who were chiefly responsible for the crimes committed in the course
of the deportation and were the primary beneficiaries of the despoliation of Armenian
property.54
The Deportations in the Sancak of Antakya

The sancak of Antakya/Antioch took in, roughly speaking, the whole of the southern part
of the Amanus mountainous region and the Mediterranean coast from Alexandretta to the
mouth of the Orontes River. On the eve of the First World War, the 31,000 Armenians of the
region were concentrated above all in the two mountainous regions just mentioned, as well as
in a few towns, beginning with Alexandretta and Beylan. In the prefecture, Antioch, there
were just over 200 Armenians, but there were also six little towns as well as several small
villages to the west, in the foothills of Mt. Moses (Musadağ), in which 8,500 Armenians
lived – Yoğunoluk, Hacihabibi, the two neighboring hamlets of Trzhnik and Karaçay, Bitias,
Nor Zeitun/Şalihan, Kıdırbek, Vakıf, Kebusia/Körderesi, and the little port of Çevlik, which
served the villages of Mt. Moses as their outlet to the sea. It was in this mountainous region
that, beginning in late July 1915, the Armenians resisted the attacks and shelling of the
Turkish troops for 40 days, and were then saved thanks to a spontaneous intervention by
French warships.55
On the other bank of the Orontes, in the mountainous regions around Mt. Cassius
(Cebelakra) in the western part of the kaza of Şuğur, lay a second cluster of nine Armenian
villages located around the little town of Kesab. In 1914, nearly 9,000 Armenians lived in
these localities: Kesab (pop. 4,760), Karaduran (pop. 1,505), Ekizoluk (pop. 560), Kulkene
(pop. 525), Kayacık (pop. 119), Eskiyören (pop. 245), Çakalcık (pop. 140), Çinarcık (pop.
350), and Duzağac (pop. 532). Mt. Cassius, a mountain refuge par excellence, offered another
advantage: it extended into the Mediterranean and thus offered access to a well-protected lit-
tle harbor that was inaccessible from the coast. The relative security offered by these moun-
tains was counterbalanced by the fact that these villages were all but isolated from the rest of

the world and lived in virtual autarchy. Communications with Antakya and Latakiye were
maintained thanks only to narrow mule paths.56
Although there were more than 14,000 Armenians in the kazas of Iskenderum/ Alexandretta
and Beylan, there were only two important colonies, found in the principal towns of the two
kazas, Alexandretta and Beylan, as well as a number of scattered rural communities. There were
some 2,000 Armenians in the city of Alexandretta, but the kaza also boasted several Armenian
villages: Nargellik (pop. 180), Kışla (pop. 60), and Fartınlı (pop. 200). In the interior, on the
road between Alexandretta and Aleppo, Beylan had an Armenian population of 1,800 on the
eve of the war. There were a few Armenian villages in the vicinity of the town: Atık (pop. 231),
Kırıkhan (pop. 176), Kanlıdere (pop. 127), Güzeli (pop. 121), and Söukoluk (pop.174).57
As we have already pointed out,58 the Armenians in these coastal areas of the vilayet of
Aleppo were initially to have been exempted from deportation. Ultimately, however, in late
July 1915, the authorities issued an order to deport them as well.59
On the morning of 9 May, regular troops and the gendarmerie invested the Armenian
villages of Musadağ. Their mission was to conduct searches of homes, churches, schools, and
all other places in which arms might have been stashed. The operation was apparently set
in motion after Muslims from villages in the area informed on their Armenian neighbors. A
few hunting rifles aside, however, the searches produced no tangible results, apart from the
fact that they intensified the already existing suspicions of the Armenians.60
A witness of, and participant in, the events that occurred in Musadağ, Dikran Andreasian,
a Protestant minister in Zeitun who came from Yoğunoluk, reports that when the order
to deport the villagers from the region was issued on 30 July, many, such as Harutiun
Nokhudian, a Protestant minister from Bitias, thought that it would be “folly” to resist it.61
Thus 332 families from Kebiusia/Körderesi (pop. 240), Yoğunoluk (2), Hacihabibli (80), and
Bitias (10) submitted to the order and were conducted somewhat later to Antakya, where
they were subsequently deported to Der Zor on the route running parallel to the Euphrates.62
What the minister from Zeitun does not say, however, is that after finally returning to his
native village, Yoğunoluk, on 25 July, thanks to the intercession of American missionaries
from Marash, he informed his compatriots of the way that Zeitun had been emptied of its
population.63 This information apparently had a crucial impact on the Armenian village
leaders’ decision to withdraw to positions on the mountain with the villagers who chose to
go with them – the 868 families or around 4,200 people who took to the maquis beginning
on 31 July.64 According to Reverend Andreasian, the Armenians who had decided to put up
resistance had some 120 modern rifles and also old hunting rifles, enough to arm, at best,
half of the men (there were 1,054 men over 14 years of age among them).65 All these peo-
ple immediately began organizing the defense of the mountainous area, notably by digging
trenches at strategic points and naming a “Defense Committee.”66 After the week’s reprieve
that they had been granted by the authorities had expired, 200 regular soldiers launched a
first attack on them on 8 August. Although the assault was pursued for six hours, the attack-
ers were unable to break the Armenians’ defense. Two thousand troops were sent to the area
from Antioch over the next few days, setting up a bivouac on the mountain about 600 meters
below the Armenian lines. The defense committee immediately decided to launch a surprise
attack during the night, which threw the soldiers into a panic and caused heavy loss of life.
The attackers also captured some arms and ammunition.67
At this point, the authorities adopted new tactics. According to Andreasian, around
15,000 men from the surrounding villages were armed and positioned around the moun-
tainous area defended by the Armenians, creating a hermetic siege. Then, on Tuesday, 10
August, after the Armenian positions had been pounded by artillery, a second assault was
launched.68 It was at this point, Andreasian reports, that the besieged Armenians considered
the possibility of opening a path on which they could make their way toward the coast and

escape by sea. Before they had been completely surrounded, they had sent a messenger to the
outside world, bearing an appeal written in English by Andreasian, which declared that as a
result of the “policy of annihilation which the Turks are applying to our nation,” the inhab-
itants of Musadağ had withdrawn into the mountains, where they were under siege.69 Two
immense white flags, one bearing the words “Christians in distress: rescue” and another bear-
ing a red cross, were fabricated and hoisted on the mountaintop to make them visible from
the sea below. On the morning of 10 September, a French battleship, the Guichen, sighted
this appeal for help from the besieged Armenians of Musadagh, who sent a delegate to the
ship. In the next 24 hours three other cruisers, including the Jeanne-d’Arc, arrived in the area
and set about bringing more than 4,000 villagers on board. It took no fewer than 36 hours to
complete the operation, and another two days to make the journey to Port Said, Egypt.70
The military exploits of this Armenian resistance aside, it must be pointed out that the
unlooked for rescue of the inhabitants of Musadağ obviously owed a great deal to the geo-
graphical position of these Armenian villages not far from the coast. Furthermore, we can-
not ignore the fact that the decision to resist was made only after the leaders of the resistance
had clearly understood that the authorities planned to send them to their deaths. In other
words, the villagers of Musadağ were among the rare Armenians who had no doubt about
the authorities’ real intentions toward them, which is what brought them to fight at all costs.
The late date on which the authorities chose to deal with this region, as well as the laxity
they exhibited in the case of Reverend Andreasian, who had witnessed the events in Zeitun,
also help explain why the standard precautions that they took in order to mask their real
intentions did not suffice here to convince the Armenians to submit to deportation, as they
did elsewhere. The 1 August arrests of the Armenian notables of Antakya, a town with
which Musadagh had close relations, only reinforced the arguments of the partisans of armed
resistance.71
According to Mardiros Kushakjian, when rumors that the Armenians of the region were
to be deported began making the rounds – Reverend Andreasian had arrived the day before –
a meeting of the Armenian leaders of the villages of Musadağ and Kesab was immediately
convened in Antioch on 26 July. The leaders of the villages on the right bank of the Orontes
suggested to their neighbors of the left bank, the villagers of Kesab, that they collaborate
in organizing a common defense effort if the information in their possession proved true.
The notables of Kesab, however, rejected this suggestion and decided to submit to whatever
orders the authorities might issue. They wished to demonstrate the loyalty that Armenian
political and religious leaders had demanded that they show under all circumstances since
the outbreak of the war.72 Thus, the entire population of Kesab was deported – however,
toward Homs and Hama – in the first half of August 1915, as was that of Alexandretta, by its
kaymakam, Fatih Bey (who held his post from 14 April 1913 to 15 November 1915), and of
Beylan, by its kaymakam, Ahmed Refik Bey (who served from 28 February 1915 to 21 January
1916).

Chapter 23
Deportations in the
Mutesarifat of Urfa
T
he ancient city of Edessa was long a political and cultural center of the first import-
ance. A sort of bridge between Mesopotamia and Asia Minor, it was inhabited by
very diverse populations. The Armenians and Syriacs who lived here still shared early
in the twentieth century an attachment to the Near Eastern cultural heritage, which they
zealously propagated. The Armenians arrived in the region of Edessa very late – that is, early
in the eleventh century. On the eve of the First World War, the mutesarifat of Urfa, which
had been detached from the vilayet of Aleppo in 1908, boasted nearly 42,000 Armenians,
25,000 to 30,000 of whom lived in Urfa and its environs. The city itself lay in a vast, fertile
plain, except for the Armenian quarter, most of which rose, level after level, up the slopes of
Mt. Telfedur in the northern part of the city. Overlooking the lower part of the Armenian
quarter was the Cathedral of the Holy Mother of God, the archbishopric, and the Armenian
middle school.
Commercial activity in Urfa, the economic center of Upper Mesopotamia, was then
largely dominated by the Armenians, who were also active in certain craft guilds, such as
those of the stonecutters, architects, boot-makers, copper tinners, goldsmiths, rug weavers,
and blacksmiths. The fertility of the surrounding plain, irrigated by the Berik, made it pos-
sible to cultivate immense vineyards and orchards, as well as cereals and cotton. There were
many thriving industries centered on weaving, the production of cotton prints, and dying.
On the eve of the 1915 massacres, the Armenians of Urfa appeared more than ever as the
dynamic element in the region. Nothing suggested at the time that these law-abiding citizens
would be transformed into resistance fighters when they received the deportation order and,
simultaneously, the news of the murder of 1,500 young recruits from the city who had had
their throats cut in small groups.
There were only a few Armenians in the northern plain of Mesopotamia, in Garmuc, an
hour and a half northeast of Urfa (pop. 5,000), Mankush (60 households), Tlbaşar (100 fami-
lies), and in the nahie of Bozova, in Hoghin and Hovig, whose Turkish-speaking inhabitants
were winegrowers or raised silkworms.1
Indelibly engraved on the memories of the Armenians of Urfa were the deliberate destruc-
tion of their cathedral by fire on 28 and 29 December 1895, which caused 3,000 deaths, and
the massacre of 5,000 more Armenians in the city.2 They nevertheless participated in the
general mobilization in the months immediately following the Ottoman Empire’s entry into
the war and unflinchingly provided the contributions to the war effort that the authorities
demanded of them. As elsewhere, Armenian businesses were subject to outright plunder; as
a rule, it had precious little to do with the army’s needs, serving above all the interests of
a few officers and civil servants.3 According to one survivor’s report, while the Armenians
feared a massacre like the one that had occurred in 1895, it occurred to none of them in this

period that the government would this time implement a program of an entirely different
scope and kind. Thus, in spring 1915, when the court-martial in Bitlis demanded that two
young men, Mgrdich Najarian and Kevork Shadarevian, be remanded to it, the Armenian
authorities were convinced that there had been a “misunderstanding.” Aram Sahagian notes
that the news that the Armenian elites of the capital had been arrested surprised the people
of Edessa, who were shocked when a convoy of women, children, and old men from Zeitun
arrived in their city in late April on their way to Zor via Ras ul-Ayn.4 The Danish missionary
Karen Jeppe, who had tried to provide the deportees relief, notes that the sight of them pro-
foundly revolted the Armenians of Urfa, the younger generation in particular. All had tried
to help the deportees from Zeitun, notwithstanding the fact that it was absolutely forbidden
to approach them.5 As the weeks went by, the Armenians of Urfa hid thousands of depor-
tees from the north in their homes. The primate, Ardavast Vartabed, had tried in vain to
obtain permission from the mutesarif to provide the deportees with assistance.6 An Austrian
engineer then vacationing with his family in the vineyards of the Urfa region reports that
“bandits lay in wait for an Armenian convoy” between Urfa and Arabpunar, swooping down
on it when it passed by. He also notes how those guarding the convoys of deportees took
bribes in exchange for letting men enter a khan or camp in order to “appropriate” deported
“women or girls.”7
From May to October 1915, Urfa was effectively transformed into a transit center for con-
voys of deportees. In this period, the city experienced a number of alarms. On 27 May, the
police began to carry out systematic house searches in the Armenian neighborhoods, offi-
cially because they were looking for weapons and evidence of a possible conspiracy.8 These
initial measures, similar in every respect to those we have seen elsewhere, seem to have
been triggered by the appointment of a new mutesarif, Ali Haydar, a Young Turk9 who had
probably received orders to speed up the operations. Ephraim Jernazian, then serving as the
minister of Urfa’s Protestant Syriacs, received a request from the mutesarif and the police
chief, Şakir Bey, who was also the son-in-law of the parliamentary deputy Mahmud Nedim,
to translate Armenian, French, and English documents confiscated from the Armenians
into Ottoman Turkish. Together with a Syriac who also knew English, İbrahim Fazıl, at the
time the head of Urfa’s school system, he was ordered to go to work for a newly created mili-
tary committee.10 According to Jernazian, the authorities were trying to find compromising
evidence of Armenian involvement in a plot against state security, but the documents sub-
mitted to him were of no great interest.11 In the wake of this first major offensive mounted
by the authorities, several meetings with the principal Armenian leaders were held at the
archbishopric under the chairmanship of the primate, Ardavast Kalenderian. A large sum
was collected and put at the prelate’s disposal, so that he could, if necessary, bribe gov-
ernment officials. This gives some sense of the means the city’s notables had considered
using in order to parry an eventual threat.12 They engaged in sharp debates with Mgrdich
Yotneghperian, then wanted by the authorities, who tried to persuade the assembly to organ-
ize a revolt if the arrests continued. However, a majority of the notables present as well as
the political parties refused to take that option into consideration. Mgrdich, his brother
Sarkis, and Arush Rastgelenian accordingly took it upon themselves to prepare for a rebel-
lion.13 According to Jernazian, a written order to carry out a second wave of arrests the fol-
lowing day arrived at the court one week after he took up his post as a translator – that is,
around 3 June. Targeted were the Armenians’ political leaders. Jernazian thereupon warned
Antranig Ferid Bozajian, the local leader of the ARF and director of the Armenian schools,
to leave town without delay. Bozajian, however, said that he was not in danger since the local
Young Turks were his friends.14 Around 4 June, in the morning, the police surrounded the
Monastery of Saint Sarkis located near the entrance to the city, where Bozajian and Kaspar
Rsdigian, a Dashnak teacher, had their homes. They proceeded to arrest these two men and

Deportations: Urfa 615
seize archival documents. Police commander Şakir Bey notably gave Bozajian’s notebook to
Jernazian and asked him to translate it. On the minister’s own admission, this document
“contained everything the Turkish government wanted” – that is, a list of all local ARF
members and the outline of a plan to defend the Armenian quarter that had been drawn
up after the 1909 massacres in Cilicia.15 This discovery left the translator “in a cold sweat.”
He went to see the Armenian primate Ardavast Kalenderian that very evening in order to
suggest that he bribe Şakir Bey or burn down the room in which the notebook was kept. The
first of these two options was chosen; two notables went to see Şakir and İbrahim Fazıl, who
accepted the offer.16
Massive arrests began on 8 June. Sixteen notables and high-ranking officials were appre-
hended: Garabed Izmirlian, the president of the diocesan council; Soghomon Knajian;
Khosrov Dadian, the city’s treasurer; Arush Sarafian; Arush Kaghtalian; Kevork Donavakian;
Kevork, Nerses, and Hovhannes Yotneghperian, Mgrdich’s brothers; Aghajan Der Bedrosian;
and Hagop and Nazar Kulahian; Sarkis Ejzaji; Yezekiel Boyajian; Garabed Kataroyan; and
Kazanji Kambur. Mgrdich Yotneghperian, disguised as a Bedouin, succeeded in making his
way into the prison where these men were being held and suggested carrying out an operation
to free them, but all refused, fearing that such an action would bring on a general massacre.17
In a 14 June letter, Francis Leslie, a missionary acting as the American consul, confirmed that
“the reign of terror has begun in this city” and also that the police and gendarmerie had con-
ducted violent house searches in the Armenian neighborhoods, looking for arms; that certain
notables had been brought before the court-martial and others had been tortured with red-hot
irons; and that, in all, 100 “of the best citizens of the city” were in jail by mid-June.18
The 16 notables arrested on 8 June were tortured and then deported to Rakka on the 13th;
their families joined them there a few days later.19 While some of them were brought back to
Urfa around 26/27 June, the others were liquidated one hour from Rakka in a place known as
Cır Tosun.20 The news reach Urfa in short order and a second meeting was organized at the
archbishopric, called this time by the ARF. The only item on the agenda was how to organize
a self-defense effort. Mgrdich Yotneghperian again suggested that they wait no longer, for it
seemed clear to him that the authorities were trying to weaken the Armenians gradually by
arresting the men. The ARF members present, however, decided not to take any action until
the deportation order was published and to prepare for all eventualities.21 Yotneghperian’s
analysis of the situation had not been wrong: on 25 June, in the space of two hours, some 100
Armenians were arrested. Involved this time was businessmen, craftsmen, members of the
professions, and so on.22
According to Kate Ainslie, who left Marash on 14 June, “the man” who deported and
killed the Armenians in Dyarbekir was transferred to Urfa in mid-June “with the evident
purpose of letting him continue his work there.”23 The missionary does not give the name of
this “man.” It might well have been the parliamentary deputy Pirincizâde Feyzi, who played
a pivotal role in the crimes committed in the vilayet of Dyarbekir together with the vali
of the province, Reşid. Ainslie’s observation indicates, in any case, that the leading bodies
of the CUP were growing impatient and had decided to send experienced men to Urfa. It
is true that Mgrdich Yotneghperian and the few dozen men loyal to him came and went
with impunity, in particular laying their hands on arms stockpiles; the authorities proved
unable to apprehend them.24 The tension at the time was running at so high a pitch that
the primate Kalenderian suggested to Yotneghperian that he leave the city and not return
until calm had been restored. The fedayi and his men withdrew to a place near Garmuc, an
Armenian village in the vicinity of the city. There they were discovered and surrounded on
6 July, but managed to flee through the army’s lines. The troops relieved their frustration on
the inhabitants of Garmuc: by way of reprisal, the mayor, Kevork Nersesian, was massacred
and the village was razed.25

The next stage, the confiscation of weapons, began on 10 July, when the mutesarif sum-
moned the Armenian primate and gave him 48 hours to turn over the arms in the possession
of his flock. According to Armenian sources, the community limited itself to handing over a
few old hunting rifles, which were then piled up in the courtyard of the cathedral. An artil-
lery officer, Mihran Herardian, suggested that the Armenians not repeat the mistake they
had made in 1895: after turning in their weapons, the Armenians of Urfa had been mas-
sacred.26 In this strange face-off, in which each party was aware of the other’s intentions, the
tactics adopted by the authorities nevertheless persuaded certain Armenian circles to submit.
The debate between these circles and the partisans of a self-defense effort remained sharp,
despite the many arrests that continued without let up. The primate went so far as to try to
bribe the authorities into freeing those arrested. The mutesarif responded by summoning
him on 26 July and immediately imprisoning him. Thus, Kalenderian joined the hundreds
of Armenians who had been arrested in the course of the preceding weeks and subjected to
tortures that drove some of them, such as the gunsmith Nazar Tufenkjian, to suicide. Using
all the means at their disposal, the authorities tried to make these men confess where they
had hidden their weapons. Yet, according to the Danish missionary Karen Jeppe, none had
talked.27 This failure notwithstanding, the local authorities put the next stage of their plan
into practice. On 28 July, they sent all the prisoners to Dyarbekir. Among them were the
primate; Soghomon Kenajian; Garabed Izmirlian, the very wealthy president of the diocesan
council and a member of the regional council; Giragos Tertsagian; Kevork Cherchian, a
craftsman; Kevork Yotneghperian, a blacksmith and Mgrdich’s brother; and the businessmen
Hagop Kulahian and Harutiun Der Khorenian.28 These men were massacred on 30 July on
the road to Dyarbekir in a place near Urfa known as Şeytan Deresi.29
The fact that two high-ranking officers of the Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa, Lieutenant-Colonel
Halil Bey [Kut], Enver’s uncle, and Çerkez Ahmed, had come to Urfa from Dyarbekir was
probably not unrelated to these massacres.30 According to an Armenian witness, Halil had
promised the primate just before the latter’s arrest to save the lives of most of these men in
exchange for 6,000 Turkish pounds. He pocketed the money and proceeded to organize the
liquidation of the prisoners in question.31 Thus, it seems that, after carrying out the cam-
paign to extirpate the Armenian population of the vilayet of Bitlis in the first half of July,
Halil and his expeditionary corps of çetes headed to regions to the south in order to conduct
similar operations. Moreover, Çerkez Ahmed, an accredited CUP killer whose role in Van
we have already seen,32 personally attended to liquidating the two Armenian parliamentary
deputies, Zohrab and Vartkes, who arrived in Urfa from Aleppo on 1 August.33 Received
with all the honors by their colleague the deputy Mahmud Nedim, who invited them to din-
ner, the two Armenian leaders were approached by Mgrdich Yotneghperian, who proposed
to help them flee. Zohrab answered: “Our flight would make the situation of the population
even more difficult.”34 Like many of Urfa’s notables, the two deputies were apparently more
concerned about the safety of the population than their own future. On 2 August, Zohrab
and Vartkes were put back on the road, escorted by Şakir Bey, the police chief, and killed by
Çerkez Ahmed and his men in a deep gorge lying two hours from the city, Şeytan Deresi, at
virtually the same spot where Urfa’s Armenian elite was put to death.35 There can be abso-
lutely no doubt that the two close acquaintances of the Young Turk leadership were executed
on orders from the capital.
The next operation conducted by Halil and Çerkez Ahmed is just as symptomatic of the
special missions entrusted to the Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa. On 10 August, a battalion of the Special
Organization, under Halil’s orders, set out to execute the 1,500 Armenian and Syriac worker-
soldiers in two amele taburis working in Karaköprü and Kudeme, in the vicinity of Urfa. After
surrounding the camp in Karaköprü, the çetes tied these men up, lined them up in front of
ditches that had been dug in advance, and shot them.36 When they attacked the camp in

Kudeme the next day, however, a number of worker-soldiers defended themselves with their
tools or their bare hands. Some even managed to seize their executioners’ weapons and take
up positions on a promontory, where they put up a three days’ resistance before committing
suicide. Two survivors from these amele taburis, the brothers Sarkis and Krikor Daraghjian
of the Sanderchonts family, were able to return to Urfa and inform the population about
the massacres that had been perpetrated in Karaköprü and Kudeme.37 Obviously, the news
of these crimes reinforced the dedication of those who advocated resistance. According to
Jernazian, Cemal Pasha, who also had authority over the autonomous mutesarifat of Urfa,
which lay within the limits of the vilayet of Aleppo, was not in favor of such violence. Shortly
thereafter, he had Çerkez Ahmed brought before a court-martial and executed for his crimes.
To overcome the obstacle embodied by Cemal, the “fanatical members of the Ittihad” – it
seems reasonable to suppose that Halil took this initiative – appealed to the interior min-
ister, who decided to detach the region of Urfa from Aleppo and attach it to the vilayet of
Dyarbekir.38 The same witness, who, let us recall, was employed by the local court-martial
and heard and saw the orders that came down from the capital, notes that after this decision
a meeting of all Urfa’s Turkish notables and officials who had come from Istanbul was held
at city hall. He also points out that one of the participants, who did not know him, told him
that an “secret order from Constantinople” indicating that the government had decided “to
get rid of all the Armenians [...] because the Fatherland is in great danger” had been read
out during the meeting and that the mayor had forced those attending to add lists of their
Armenian friends to the “official register” as proof of their loyalty.39 It is possible that Urfa’s
Armenian notables had opposed all attempts at rebellion only after receiving assurances
from their Turkish friends that they would be spared. They were doubtless hoping to spare
the Armenian population the fate of their compatriots from other regions. But it is also not
inconceivable that a number of Turks from Urfa sought to spare their Armenian friends
because they shared the same financial interests or had received bribes. It was presumably in
order to overcome this passive resistance, the intensity of which is hard to evaluate, that the
CUP took matters in hand and sent people of confidence to the area in August.
Jernazian says in his memoirs that he had hoped at the time that the “Armenians of Urfa
did finally realize that appeasement and peaceful compliance had brought only increased
oppression and gradual elimination of leaders and Young men.”40 Indeed, as the facts piled up,
they persuaded even the most cautious that “all hope of survival was lost ... The choice was
between ignominious exile and murder or an honorable death through active resistance.”41
On 19 August, while Mgrdich Yotneghperian and his right-hand man, Harutiun
Rastgelenian, were busy reorganizing the defense of the Armenian neighborhoods, hard hit
by the arrests of large numbers of men, they were discovered and encircled in a house in Urfa.
The assault launched on the two banned men by Çerkez Ahmed and the warden of Urfa’s
prison, Bakır Çavuş, marked the commencement of hostilities. The two Armenian resistance
fighters managed to vanish into thin air after killing their guard and forcing Çerkez Ahmed
and his çetes to flee.42 The next day, according to Franz Eckart, several hundred Armenians
were massacred by çetes who had invested Urfa.43 Dr. J. Vance, leaving the American hospital
to go to the city, saw many Armenian corpses in the streets and observed that a first series
of deportations toward Mardin had been set in motion.44 The American consul Jackson
was given similar information by his vice-consul in Urfa, Francis Leslie, who had not yet
observed resistance on the part of the Armenians.45
Contrary to expectations, at a time when the situation favored systematic deportation
or the beginning of resistance in the Armenian neighborhoods, it seems that an order from
Istanbul called a sharp halt to the developments in progress. According to Jernazian, this
order was motivated by the “great need” of the army, which only Armenian craftsmen could
meet.46 We do not know, however, whether this “great need” was that of Cemal’s Fourth

Army or of the Third Army commanded by Mustafa Kâmil. It was not until 29 September
that the church bells in the Armenian quarter all began pealing: since the December 1895
massacres, their use had been outlawed, which explains why the Armenians chose this sym-
bolic signal to announce the beginning of the insurrection in Urfa. The insurrection was to
last for 25 days. In the preceding weeks, Mgrdich Yotneghperian had reorganized the defense
of the Armenian neighborhoods and redeployed his men, arms, and ammunition thanks
especially to the girls and women, who transported materiel under their chadors.47 After
months of preparations aimed at decapitating Urfa’s Armenian community, the authorities
were surprised to encounter resistance. Between conscription, the liquidation of the elites,
the massacre of the worker-soldiers, and the first deportations having largely emptied the
city of its vital forces, only a few hundred men capable of fighting remained in Urfa.48 The
surprise here came from the girls and women, who participated directly in the fighting, to say
nothing of their role in the logistical organization of the self-defense effort. This “last battle
of despair,”49 as Karen Jeppe describes it, mobilized everyone’s energy to a single end, resisting
until the last fighter had fallen.
Ali Haydar, the mutesarif, gave an old Syriac a message to take to Mgrdich Yotneghperian.
In it, he referred to the “regrettable events” that had recently occurred, blaming them on the
“gendarmes” – that is, the çetes – who had not “gone about fulfilling their duties properly.”
He also promised that he would guarantee the Armenians’ lives and property if they surren-
dered.50 This discourse, of a species that might be called the Ittihad’s trademark, obviously
did not have the intended effect on Yotneghperian, whose considerable lucidity and solid
tactical sense would be shown by events to come. Rather than throwing up barricades before
the main entries to the Armenian neighborhoods, he decided to leave the entries to them
unguarded. He asked the military leaders of these neighborhoods – Kevork Alahaydoyan
for the Father Abraham neighborhood, Sarkis Yotneghperian for Pos Paghents, Harutiun
Rastgelenian for Masmana, Vagharsh Mesrobian and Harutiun Simian for the neighbor-
hood in which the American institutions were located in Tlfıdur, and Movses Siujian for the
Samsat Gate – to station their fighters in the houses that looked down on these entries.51
The next morning, thousands of the city’s inhabitants, armed with sabers and rifles distrib-
uted by the authorities, attacked the three main Armenian neighborhoods. It seems that the
mutesarif had activated the traditional springs of religious fanaticism, inviting the Muslim
population to punish the unbelievers: at the head of the advancing columns, clerics invoked
God’s blessings. The defenders, after letting the attackers penetrate the Armenian neigh-
borhoods to a considerable depth, threw homemade bombs down on the crowd. The result
was a general panic during which around 450 people fell victim to the explosives or, in the
case of most of the casualties, were trampled underfoot by the throng.52 On 1 October, the
authorities adopted new tactics. Drawing from the lessons of their first failure, they decided
to focus their assault on a single point, the neighborhood around the Catholic church, and
to carry it out at night. Yotneghperian apparently learned of this plan beforehand, because
he set up a veritable trap around this church. After letting the attackers take control of the
building and its vast courtyard, the defenders sent grenades and heavy gunfire raining down
on them, causing new casualties.53 The next offensive came on 3 October. That morning,
a Kurdish chieftain from Suruc, Süleyman Beg, arrived with 600 men from his tribe. The
first shells, launched from the citadel, fell on the Armenian quarters, paving the way for the
assault that was launched on the Father Abraham neighborhood by these more battle-steeled
Kurdish fighters as well as newly arrived units of the regular army. Probably convinced that
the shelling had shattered the Armenian positions in these sections of the city, the attack-
ers sought, above all, to invest the houses. Positioned on the rooftops, the Armenians again
used grenades to disperse the intruders.54 The German Captain Wolffskeel, a member of the
Fourth Army’s General Staff, reported in a 1 October letter to his wife that he had been sent

to Urfa to “restore order” and that he had personally commanded the attack that day, com-
ing up against a “defense very well prepared.”55 On 4 and 5 October, the Turkish forces con-
tented themselves with trading a few gunshots with the Armenians, probably because they
were awaiting the announced arrival of 6,000 men equipped with modern German cannons
under the command of the inevitable general Fahri Pasha.56 As Hilmar Kaiser emphasizes,
Eberhard Count Wolffskeel von Reichenberg was the “only German officer know to have
served in Ottoman uniform and directly participated in the killing of Armenians.”57
In fact, General Fahri Pasha’s forces arrived in Urfa only on 6 October and did not
launch their first assault until the morning of the 8th, after the Armenian neighborhoods
had been heavily shelled. According to Captain Wolffskeel, the efficaciousness of the bat-
teries of cannon under his direction enabled the Turkish forces gradually to reduce the
defensive perimeter. Fighting was now limited to a few pockets of resistance.58 It is true that
the Armenians did carry out a number of spectacular operations, such as the 6 October
attack that a commando made up of six men in Kurdish dress launched on the batteries of
cannon before they were brought into the city.59 But their fate was already sealed. In no
hurry, Fahri Pasha put his cannons in place and then sent a message to Yotneghperian, in
which he expressed his admiration for the insurgents’ exploits but added that they should
now surrender. An exchange even took place on the front lines between the two men, who
were protected by their respective positions. To the promises of Fahri, who went so far as
to propose to promote Yotneghperian to the rank of captain, the Armenian responded by
listing all the crimes that had been committed in the course of the preceding weeks, such
as the massacre of the worker-soldiers, and by reaffirming that he could not put the least
faith in the word of the high-ranking Ottoman officer. “You know,” he concluded, “that we
will fight to the last man.”60 After this first failure, Fahri tried to convince F. Eckart and
J. Künzler to act as go-betweens. He also gave Francis Leslie a few hours – until noon on
8 October – to evacuate the American mission together with the 14 foreign nationals to
be found there.61 Leslie and his companions’ situation was indeed ambiguous, to say the
least. In the view of one side, they were the Armenians’ hostages; in the view of the other,
they were friends protecting the hundreds of women and children who had taken refuge
behind the mission’s walls. It is entirely possible that Leslie pretended to be a hostage of the
Armenians in order to justify staying put, doubtless in the hope that his mission would be
spared thanks to his status as the consular agent of a neutral country. It is also reasonable
to suppose that General Fahri was not happy about the existence of this potential sanctuary
for Armenians, even if only women and children were involved. According to an anony-
mous American missionary, Leslie never considered leaving his mission.62 J.B. Rebours is
more precise: he observes that the American mission, in which “a number of women and
children” had taken shelter, was a direct target of shelling.63 Rebours affirms, in other words,
that the mission was one of the main targets singled out by General Fahri, whose prob-
able objective was to force the foreign nationals to leave the premises. Captain Wolffskeel
von Reichenberg, who met Leslie when the American decided to leave the mission on 15
October, observes that “the Turks” suspected him of complicity with the Armenians, yet
believed that Leslie was “surely innocent.”64 On 30 October – that is, a week after the end
of the fighting – it was officially announced that Leslie had committed suicide.65 There are
legitimate grounds for the suspicion that Fahri Pasha and the local authorities liquidated
one of the main and best-informed witnesses to the events that had unfolded in Urfa since
the beginning of the crisis.
On the insurgents’ side, Mgrdich Yotneghperian was wounded during an 9 October offen-
sive that was, however, successfully beaten back.66 On 11 October, Franz Eckhart came in
hopes of convincing the Armenian leader to lay down his arms. He was sharply rebuffed
and even accused of collaboration.67 At this point, Fahri set out to destroy the Armenian

neighborhoods by methodically subjecting them to heavy shelling. On 13 October, after

they had been pounded for 24 hours, the Turkish troops launched a violent assault, gain-
ing control of a number of Armenian positions. A second general offensive launched on
19 October left most of the Armenian neighborhoods in the assailants’ hands.68 By the
evening of 23 October, after 25 days of fighting, all the Armenian positions had been taken
by the army.69 Most of the defenders had either died in combat or committed suicide, begin-
ning with Mgrdich Yotneghperian, who shot himself in the head after the last bastion fell.70
A few survivors, such as Sarkis Yotneghperian, Mgrdich’s brother, were hanged in front of
the konak. Reverend Soghomon Akelian, whose rope broke twice, exclaimed: “All the acts
of your state are like this rope – rotten.”71 Elvesta Leslie, the American vice-consul’s col-
laborator, openly accused Captain Wolffskeel, who had commanded the artillery, of having
participated in the massacres.72 She also noted that a number of women and children had
been locked up in the city’s hans, where many of them died of hunger or typhoid fever; that
soldiers, officers, gendarmes, and civilians had come to the hans to carry off girls, as in a
slave market; and that, after being put on the road, the others died like flies, with only a
few managing to hide in Arab villages.73 Wolffskeel informed his wife, more soberly, that
after the fall of the city, “the unpleasant part began again, though.” “The evacuation of the
inhabitants and the courts-martial” and that what he had seen, “having nothing to do with
me,” was “not very pleasant.”74 He also noted that all industrial and craft production had
come to a complete standstill in the city of Urfa.75 On the testimony of Father Hyacinthe
Simon, a convoy of 2,000 women and children from Urfa passed through Mardin on 20
October, followed by another comprising 3,500 people on 28 October. Their official destina-
tion was the Mosul region.76 It is, however, impossible to determine the number of people
massacred in the neighborhoods that the army invested from 13 October on, and quite as
impossible to establish the number of those who were really deported to the deserts of Syria
and Mesopotamia.
While a commission responsible for liquidating Armenian assets was established rather
late, in December 1915,77 it seems that its task was facilitated by the fact that the Armenians
had taken care to burn all their property in the final days of the siege,78 leaving very little to
the authorities in the way of booty. Jernazian observes, moreover, that the defenders threw
gold coins on the pavement and dared the soldiers to come plunder them.79 This speaks vol-
umes about the fury that had taken possession of the Armenians and their awareness of their
desperate plight. Franz Eckhart, a member of Urfa’s Deutsche Orient-Mission and the direc-
tor of a carpet factory, was a particular target for diverse criticisms from the Armenian sur-
vivors. He was notably accused of having agreed to let Armenian entrepreneurs and families
deposit property in his home and then denouncing them to the authorities so that he could
appropriate their assets. Others charged him with collaborating with Captain Wolffskeel
during the siege, and also with having kept part of the sums in gold sent from America,
Germany, and Switzerland to assist the deportees who had taken refuge in the city.80
Throughout the events described here, Urfa had continued to serve as a city of transit
for tens of thousands of deportees. In mid-June, around 2,000 deportees from Zeitun had
passed through Urfa, whom the city’s inhabitants had undertaken to assist.81 In the following
weeks, Armenians in a state beggaring description flooded into the city. They were put in
particular in a large khan located at the exit from the city on the road to Aleppo, which all
the caravans had to take; the courtyard of this khan was slowly transformed into an open-air
morgue.82 A few of these deportees managed, after the fall of the Armenian neighborhoods,
to hide in the city, but they were later dispatched southward after a surprise roundup organ-
ized in June 1916 by the local authorities.83 The others left Urfa, often falling victim to the
squadrons of çetes who had taken up permanent quarters near Şeytan Deresi. Finally, it was

reported that several thousand Armenian worker-soldiers from the Bagdadbahn construction
sites84 passed through Şeytan Deresi in July 1916 and were liquidated a short distance away.
In addition to the civil and military officials already mentioned, the list of people involved
in the anti-Armenian persecutions in the region85 includes Şeyh Savfet; Kurkcizâde Mahmud
Nedim, a parliamentary deputy; Ömer Edip; Arabistan Haci Ali; Fesadizâde Haci Halil; Haci
Kâmil Delizâde Haci Mustafa; Jdedavizâde Mehmed; Jdedavizâde Ömer; Hüseyin Fehmi, a
captain in the gendarmerie; Halil Ağa Hakim; Şakir Bey, the police chief; Rasdgelmezâde
Hüseyin; Haci Esad Effendi; Beyazbeyzâde Haci Bey; Ali Effendi, from Severek; Basmacizâde
Hasan Çavuş; Basmacizâde Halil Effendi; Parmazkşxzzâde Şeyh Muslim; Kalaboyunda
Arabizâde Reşid; Karalökzâde Haci Mehmed; Kazaz Irvanzâde Haci; Kazaz Haci Muslimzâde
Haci; Haci Kâmilzâde Küçük Haci Mustafa; Barutcuzâde Haci Imam; Barutcuzâde Muslim;
Gustonunoğlu Ömer; Isa Effendi; Arabizâde Mehmed; Kemanci Alizâde Kadri, a police lieu-
tenant; Hacijomazâde Haci Mehmed; Keklik Emin; Saatcizâde Mehmed; Binbaşizâde Halil;
Haci Saidağazâde Mehmed; Parmaksuz Mehmed Ali; Dişi Kurukun Halil; Dişi Kurukun Şeyh
Muslim; Haci Kaplamazzâde Yahya; Musurlu Haci Alizâde Hasim; Musurlu Haci Alizâde
Halil; Kiriscizâde Haci Ahmed; Hocazâde Çenesiz Halil; Hocazâde Çenesiz Abdurrahman;
Lutfi Bey, the commander of the gendarmerie; Gökoğlu Halil, a Kurdish chieftain; Birecikli
Bakher; Imam Effendi, the chief prosecutor; Zazanunoğlu Mehmed; Dellal Küçük Ahmed;
Jurnalluzâde Kamer Usta; Nacar Maheninoğlu Haci Reşid; Nacar Maheninoğlu Haci
Mustafa; Tekayid Yuzbaşi Juman; Yağlıci Haci, the president of the city government; Haci
Hasan Zedenzâde Haci Muslim; Sofizâde Osman; Molla Osmanzâde Mehmed Çavuş; Arab
Alizâde Mehmed; Haci Karaazzame Yusuf; Bozuntuzâde Sanduk Emini Kadri; Osro Kuçizâde
Fuad Bey; Haci Mumbarekzâde Mustafa; Alay Bey Zâde Mahmud; Gendarm Haci Nadir
(who was responsible for burning down the cathedral in 1895); Police Nuri; Haci Fazlazâde
Fazla; Ateşbeyzâde Ali Tahir, a çete chief; Haci Isazâde Hato; Dimmozâde Baklor Agha;
Ali Ballizâde Ibrahim Kurdo; Bedirağazâde Halil Ağa; Haydarzâde Arif; Güllüzâde Hoca
Ibrahim; Güllüzâde Hoca Abdüllah; Şekerci Eyup Effendi; Şekerci Mehmed Emin; Bekir
Hatibinoğlu Nazif; Nebi Bey Zâde Hüseyin Pasha, from Suruc; Kurkcizâde Nediminoğlu
Celal; Çibukci Hasan; Hacializâde Celal, the malmüdürü who appropriated abandoned
property in Suruc; Haci Çaderzâde Salih Bey, a Kurdish chieftain; Haci Kâmilzâde Haci
Bey; Ğaribbeyzâde Gesto Osman; Ğaribbeyzâde Mustafa; Mehmed Kasey; Salih Bey, a Kurd;
Güllüzâde Mustafa; Namuk Agha, a Kurd from Samsat; Zeynel Bey, from Kahta; and Siza
Bekir Ağa, from Çiba.
The Kazas of Birecik and Rumkale

Halfway between Ayntab and Urfa, on the banks of the Euphrates, the seat of the kaza of
Birecik boasted, in 1914, an Armenian community 1,500 hundred strong. Birecik, on the
Euphrates, was an obligatory way-station to Mesopotamia. A few kilometers to the west, on
the road to Ayntab, the roughly 100 Armenians still living in Nisibin were mere vestiges of
the ancient Armenian presence here. The northern kaza of Rumkale was inhabited by 1,500
Armenians who lived primarily in Eneş, Cibin, and Rumkale (the Armenian Hromgla),
which had served as the seat of the catholicos between 1151 and 1292.86 According to
information communicated to the American consul Jackson by an American missionary,
the biggest group of Armenians – that from Birecik – was deported in mid-August after
being invited to convert, and that it was subject to the same “methods” used in Dyarbekir.87
The Armenians of Eneş, and probably of Cibin and Rumkale as well, were also deported in
mid-August, after the last men had been liquidated88 under the direction of the kaymakam,
Midhat Bey, who held his post from 22 August 1913 to 24 February 1916.

PART V
The Second Phase of the Genocide


Chapter 1
The Aleppo Sub-Directorate for

Deportees: An Agency in the Service of
the Party-State’s Liquidation Policy
T
hroughout the process that culminated in the liquidation of the Ottoman Armenians,
the chances of escaping the common fate were extremely rare, if not nonexistent. As
is well known, a few Armenians escaped with their lives thanks to diplomats rep-
resenting Bulgaria, then an ally of the Ottoman Empire; again, certain notables deported
on 24 April 1915 were saved thanks to one diplomatic or political intervention or another.
But the common lot of the several hundred thousand deportees who ended up in Syria or
Mesopotamia was to help fill the dozens of hastily established concentration camps man-
aged by the Sub-Directorate for Deportees that was created in Aleppo in fall 1915. This was
an organization of an official character, subordinate to the Directorate for the Settlement
of Tribes and Emigrants (Iskân-ı Aşâyirîn ve Muhâcirîn Müdîryeti), which answered in turn
to the Ministry of the Interior. The IAMM’s mission was to organize the deportations, but
also to turn Armenian assets over to muhacirs – in other words, to settle muhacirs in the
Armenians’ places. It was the IAMM that coordinated, for example, the deportations of
Muslim emigrés from Rumelia or Çerkez from Palestine to areas in Asia Minor that had been
emptied of their Greek or Armenian inhabitants.1 Thus, the IAMM was the agency charged
with enacting the Ittihadist Central Committee’s policy of “demographic homogenization.”
Its official name indicated that its mission was to settle uprooted Muslims, but it was also –
indeed, primarily – responsible for uprooting the Armenian population and coordinating
its deportation, a term whose meaning we now know varied with the areas in which the
deported Armenians lived. Thus, when we observe the chronology of the Muslim popula-
tion movements carried out on in authoritarian fashion on the IAMM’s orders, it appears
that this process was virtually parallel to, and synchronized with, the ethnic cleansing of
the Armenians from regions to which the muhacirs displaced by the IAMM were to be
sent.2 The Directorate’s link with the CUP was marked by the very nature of its mission of
Turkifying the country, and also by the choice of its director, Muftizâde Şükrü [Kaya] Bey, a
Young Turk cadre close to Mehmed Talât3 whom the CUP sent as a delegate to the vilayets of
Adana and Aleppo in summer 1915,4 like a number of his colleagues from Istanbul who were
sent to the provinces when the situation called for urgent intervention and implementation
of the policy decided on by the Ittihad’s central organs.
The countless telegrams dispatched by the interior minister himself concerned the rules to
follow in handling the Armenian deportees. These rules had most assuredly been elaborated
by the services of the IAMM. An order transmitted on 23 May 1915, for example, states that
the deportees could be settled in the vilayet of Mosul, with the exception of the northern part
of the vilayet, which bordered on the province of Van; it adds that the localities “in which

the Armenians are to be settled” have to lie “at least twenty-five kilometers from the Baghdad
railway or its branches.”5 A 7 July directive extends the zones where the Armenians were sup-
posed to be “taken in” to the “southern and western parts of the vilayet of Mosul,” localities in
the sancak of Kirkuk “at least eighty kilometers distant from the Iranian border, the southern
and western parts of the sancak of Zor at least twenty-five kilometers from the boundaries of
the vilayet of Dyarbekir, including the villages in the Euphrates and Kabur basins, all the vil-
lages and towns in the western part of the vilayet of Aleppo, as well as regions to the south
and east, with the exception of the northern zone of the vilayet and the Syrian lands, and
the sancaks of the Hauran and Kerek, except for territories fewer than 25 kilometers from the
railway. Here, then, are the regions in which the Armenians should be scattered and settled
in a proportion equal to ten percent of the Muslim population.”6
An account by Johann H. Mordtmann, a diplomat employed in the German embassy in
Constantinople who was responsible for keeping track of Armenian affairs, of his 30 May
1915 exchange with İsmail Canbolat, director general of State Security in the Interior
Ministry, illustrates the Ittihadists’ approach to homogenization of the country. Mordtmann
notes that Canbolat Bey had a map on his desk showing how far the deportations already
initiated had progressed. This proves that the deportation plan was coordinated at the high-
est state levels and also attests its systematic dimension, which was in no sense “justified by
military considerations.”7
Muftizâde Şükrü Bey, generally given the title of Director General of the Deportations
(Sevkiyat Reisi Umumisi), was also named to the post of special CUP delegate8 so that he
could organize the dispersion of the deportees who reached Syria. This establishes the direct
role that the CUP played in conducting these operations, as well as the tight ties between
the Unionist Central Committee and certain administrations of which it gained control by
appointing its cadres to them.
That said, the chronology of the deportations indicates that there was a lag between the
operations carried out in May and June in the eastern provinces and those targeting the
populations of western Anatolia and Cilicia, which were expelled in August and September
1915. The methods employed in each of these regions explain, moreover, why the propor-
tion of deportees from the eastern provinces who reached the gates of Syria was distinctly
lower – on the order of 10 to 20 per cent – than that of Armenians from western Anatolia,
which was around 80 to 90 per cent. It is, consequently, obvious that between early June,
when the first deportees from the east arrived in Syria (with the notable exception of the
deportees from Zeitun), and September, the central authorities had found reason to establish
a structure, which they had not necessarily envisaged at the outset, for managing the streams
of deportees. The mission entrusted to Muftizâde Şükrü Bey probably had no other purpose,
like the arrival of Bahaeddin Şakir in the vilayets of Adana and Aleppo in the course of sum-
mer 1915.9 The authoritarian terms employed in a telegram that Dr. Şakir sent Cemal Pasha,
a telegram which was referred to by Cemal’s chief of staff, even authorize the hypothesis that
the chief of the Special Organization had acted for a time as the true director of deportations,
profoundly irritating the master of the region, Cemal.10 As we have seen elsewhere, interfer-
ence by the CUP and its representatives spawned a certain antagonism with local civilian
and military authorities. In Aleppo, Şükrü Bey found himself confronted with the ethically
motivated reticence of the vali, Celal Bey, who was rapidly transferred to Konya, as well as
his successor, Bekir Sâmi, who had been transferred from Beirut to Aleppo and remained
in his post only from 24 June to 25 September 1915. In other words, the mere presence of a
director of deportations in Aleppo did not suffice, as it had in the provinces from which the
deportees originated, to manage what appeared by summer 1915 to be an increasingly vast
task. It was necessary to create an organization such as the Sub-Directorate for Deportees.
Such was the task with which the party charged Şükrü Bey.

Aleppo Sub-Directorate for Deportees 627
Witnesses of the day mention two Sevkiyat müdürü (director of deportations) in Aleppo –
Ahmed Eyub Sabri, who had been sent by Istanbul in June 1915,11 and Abdüllahad Nuri.
However, while Sabri bore the same title as Nuri, it seems that he did not dispose of an
infrastructure worthy of the name with which to carry out his task. Indications are that this
infrastructure was only put in place after Nuri was appointed to head the Sub-Directorate
of Deportees in fall 1915. Nuri, who was the brother of the State Secretary in the Justice
Ministry, the Young Turk parliamentary deputy Yusuf Kemal,12 told the kaymakam of Kilis,
when he assumed his functions, that he was “in touch with Talât Bey” and had received
“liquidation orders from Talât in person.”13 The deputy-at-large, Avedis Nakashian,14 empha-
sized in the accusation that he brought against Nuri in July 1920 that this man, “whose
task consisted in sending all the Armenians to the deserts of Meskene and Der Zor,” had
committed “a deliberate crime” in dispatching them to the area and was well aware of what
awaited them there.15 In a 31 November 1915 note, the Austrian Ambassador reported that
“Noury Bey, the former secretary general of the Mahsoussé,” had told him: “A general direc-
torate of emigration has been created in Aleppo; its mission consists in dealing with the
dispatch of all the Armenians to Mesopotamia ... This flows from an irrevocable decision of
the Committee of Union and Progress. After finishing with the Armenians, we shall begin
with the mass expulsion of the Greeks.”16 This definitely establishes the direct part that the
Central Committee and the Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa, from which Nuri came, played in organ-
izing the concentration camps. Moreover, when one examines how these camps functioned
in Bab, Munbuc, Ras ul-Ayn, Der Zor, and so on, it appears that çetes from the Special
Organization were directly involved in liquidating deportees, showing that the activities of
the Special Organization and the Sub-Directorate for Deportees were intertwined. We can
also observe intertwining functions in the case of Colonel Hüseyin Avni, the commander of
the gendarmerie of the vilayet and presiding judge of the court-martial in Adana, who was
also the central coordinator of the deportations in the northern regions of his vilayet and a
çete commander.17
In other words, it was only after Muftizâde Şükrü arrived in Aleppo that a veritable sub-
directorate of the Sevkiyat was put in place there. In this sub-directorate, Eyub Sabri took
on the role of Nuri’s assistant, as the German consul Rössler gives us to understand.18 It
seems reasonable to assume that Nuri also had something to do with the fact that the valis
Celal Bey and, after him, Bekir Sâmi, were transferred elsewhere, even if it is obvious that
Mehmed Talât himself chose to appoint his brother-in-law, the former vali of Bitlis, Mustafa
Abdülhalik, to Aleppo. Abdülhalik assumed office on 17 October 1915.19 That date roughly
corresponds with the appointment of Nuri to head the Sevkiyat.20

Chapter 2
Displaced Populations and the

Main Deportation Routes
I
n a late note dated 4 February 1917, the Austrian Ambassador in Constantinople relates
the confidences of an inspector of the Ottoman Army, Namik Bey, who had completed a
tour of the vilayet of Sıvas “during the recent expulsions and massacres of the Armenians.”
In his report, which was simply deposited in the archives of the Office of Inspection – that is
to say, buried in silence – Namik Bey wrote:
Seven hundred thousand Armenians in a most pitiable state passed through Ak-Kyschla
[Kışla] on their way into exile in the sancak of Zor. Bands, with the kaymakam of Azizié
at their head, literally stripped them of all they had as they passed by. There was not a
single Turkish house in the vilayet of Sıvas that was not holding young girls who had
been wrested from their parents as well as property belonging to the Armenians.1
This account bears, of course, on the deportees from regions in northern and northeastern
Asia Minor whose convoys converged near Akkışla, around 80 kilometers southeast of Sıvas;
it provides a rough indication of the size of the deportation flows, but can in no case be taken
as a basis for determining the number of deportees who in fact reached Syria or Mesopotamia.
The role of the slaughterhouse sites such as the one near Malatia in Fırıncilar, the function-
ing of which we have examined, the massacres perpetrated en route by squadrons of the
Special Organization or simple villagers, as well as the conditions of transportation, which
claimed many victims, make precise calculations impossible. The examination of the local
context undertaken in the fourth part of this study does, however, allow us to estimate the
proportion of deportees who arrived “in their areas of relegation.”
Of the approximately 740,000 Armenians from the vilayets of Trebizond, Angora, Sıvas,
Mamuret ul-Aziz, and Erzerum, around 40,000 of them succeeded in fleeing and crossing the
Russian border. We also know about the fate reserved for the tens of thousands of men who
were mobilized and for the most part gradually liquidated, as well as the systematic massacres
to which males over 10 or 12 were subjected. Finally, we know that in many regions some or
all of the deportees were liquidated in slaughterhouse sites near their point of departure: for
example, the Armenians of Trebizond were drowned off the coast of the Black Sea, those of
Yozgat had their throats slit in Boğazlian, and those of the Erzincan region were massacred
in the Kemah Gorge. Given the distances that these people had to travel on foot and the
harassment to which they were subject en route, we can evaluate the proportion of those
who reached the deserts of Syria by way of Urfa or Birecik at 20 per cent (about 130,000
people, essentially women and children). In a 16 October 1915 report entitled “Armenian
Exodus from Harpoot,” the American consul Jesse B. Jackson describes with precision, day
after day, the trajectory of a convoy of 3,000 deportees that was put on the road on 1 June

1915 in Harput and integrated on the fifteenth day of its ordeal into a much larger caravan of
18,000 people (including only 300 men) who had come from Sıvas, Agn, and Tokat. On their
sixty-fifth day on the road, after being systematically harassed by the çetes of the Special
Organization, the deportees arrived in Ras ul-Ayn, where the last survivors were put on the
train for Aleppo. Arriving in the Syrian metropolis on the seventieth day, the caravan now
included only 35 women and children from the Harput convoy and 150 women and children
from the main group – that is, fewer than 1 per cent of the deportees.2 This, however, is no
doubt an extreme case that should not be generalized to all the convoys that took the same
route. The proportion of survivors was sometimes slightly higher: of a convoy of 400 people
that came from Arğana Maden, 32 arrived in Aleppo; three of a group of 250 people expelled
from Çımışkadzag in the Dersim area reached Aleppo.3
The second deportation route concerned approximately 425,000 Armenians from the
vilayets of Dyarbekir, Bitlis, and the southern part of the vilayet of Van, some of whom
were sent to Ras ul-Ayn in Syria by way of Dyarbekir and Mardin, while others were mas-
sacred locally or were able to flee. It is easier to evaluate the number of deportees in this
case. We know that fewer than 20,000 people were deported from the region of Van and
that fewer than 50 per cent of them reached their destination, while some 55,000 villag-
ers from the vicinity of the city of Van were killed in April 19154 and some of the others
reached Russia or were massacred en route. We have seen that in the vilayet of Bitlis a few
thousand Armenians, primarily natives of Sasun, escaped the deportations and massacres
carried out by the army and local Kurdish tribes in the plain of Mush and the region of Siirt.5
At the very most, 60,000 people from Bitlis were sent southward; fewer than half arrived in
Mesopotamia. This route was, in fact, taken essentially by the Armenians of Dyarbekir, the
number of deportees from which, as we have seen, turned out to be substantially higher than
the Armenian Patriarchate’s population statistics indicate: the Patriarchate put the number
of Armenians in Dyarbekir at 106,000, whereas the official Ottoman government figures put
the number of deportees from this vilayet at 120,000.6 Thus, we arrive at a total of 150,000
deportees who reached the gates of Syria or Mesopotamia.
The third deportation route, which followed the trajectory of the Bagdadbahn, concerned
around 330,000 Armenians from Thrace, Constantinople, the Dardanelles, the mutesarifat
of Ismit, and the vilayets of Bursa, Konya, Aydın, Kastamonu, and the western part of the
vilayet of Angora. (Armenians from the other part of that vilayet, including Yozgat, were
massacred in the region or sent down the first route by way of Malatia.) We have seen that
these deportees were dispatched by rail or on foot toward Syria by way of Konya as far as the
last station of the railroad, Bozanti.
Finally, it should be recalled that around 200,000 Armenians from the vilayet of Adana
and the northern districts of the vilayet of Aleppo – with the exception of those allowed to
remain in their homes – were, beginning in June 1915, sent by rail or on foot toward Syria in
succeeding waves that followed one of two main routes. The first, taken by both deportees
from the west and Armenians from the vilayet of Adana, led toward Bahçe; the second was
taken by deportees from various regions who converged on Ayntab and proceeded toward
Kilis. The deportees who followed this third route, because they traveled by rail or lived in
the immediate vicinity of Syria, sustained relatively few losses en route. The losses they did
suffer were due mainly to epidemics and famine, which raged notably in the transit camps of
Konya and Bozanti, as well as to massacres perpetrated in Dörtyol, Zeitun, and Urfa. Thus,
it seems reasonable to suppose, making allowances for the women and children abducted on
the way, that around 600,000 Armenians concerned by the third deportation route arrived
in Syria.
In other words, around 880,000 Armenians found themselves – in early summer 1915
in some cases, in fall 1915 in the others – “resettled” in Syria. This represents more than

Displaced Populations 631
40 per cent of the Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire on the eve of the First World
War. Of the remaining 1,100,000 Ottoman Armenians, around 300,000 were not deported
or managed to flee. This means that in fall 1915, during the first phase of the genocide,
nearly 800,000 Armenians, the great majority from the eastern provinces, had already been
liquidated or, in the case of a few thousand women and children, were being held in families,
in harems, or by tribes.
The Arrival of the First deportees and the Establishment

of the First Camps North of Aleppo
Between the deportations undertaken in the Armenian provinces in April-May 1915 and the
creation of the Sub-Directorate for Deportees and its network of concentration camps from
September 1915 on, a non-negligible flow of exiles reached the northern part of Mesopotamia
and Syria over the course of the summer. Of course, no basic structures had been set up in
advance to receive them. It seems, indeed, that the Interior Ministry gave thought to the
problem of providing for the survivors only when it discovered that they were utterly disor-
ganizing the strategic route by which the southern front communicated with Asia Minor.
The growing numbers of rotting corpses on the sides of the road and the ensuing typhus
epidemic that spread rapidly among the local populations also alarmed the prefects and sub-
prefects, who were assailed by complaints from all sides. Thus, it became absolutely necessary
that the ministry “disinfect” the region and take the measures required to establish a degree
of order amid the reigning anarchy. The man concerned by these developments above all
others, Cemal Pasha, wrote in his memoirs: “I was furious when I learned that the exiled
Armenians were to come to Bozanti on their way over the Taurus and Adana to Allepo; for
any interference with the line of communications might have the gravest consequences for
the Canal [of Suez] Expedition.”7
In fact, the first arrivals were the corpses that came floating down the Tigris or the
Euphrates, depending on the regions concerned. By 10 June 1915, the German consul in
Mosul, Holstein, was already wiring his ambassador to the effect that
614 Armenians (men, women, and children) expelled from Dyarbekir and conducted
toward Mosul were all killed during the voyage by raft [on the Tigris]. The keleks arrived
empty yesterday. For several days now, corpses and human members have been floating
down the river. Other convoys of Armenian ‘settlers’ are currently en route, and it is
probable that the same fate awaits them, too.8
The situation was still worse on the Euphrates, as a report by the German consul in Aleppo,
Rössler, attests:
The aforementioned presence of corpses in the Euphrates, which has been observed in
Rumkale, Birecik, and Jerablus, continued for twenty-five days, as I was informed on
17 July. The bodies were all tied together in the same way, in pairs, back to back. This
systematic arrangement shows that it is a question, not of random killings, but of a gen-
eral extermination plan elaborated by the authorities ... The corpses have reappeared,
after an interruption of several days, in ever greater numbers. This time, it is essentially
a question of the bodies of women and children.9
Thus, while the Euphrates made it possible to get rid of the corpses encumbering the north-
ern provinces at small cost, they created problems for the local authorities in Syria and
Mesopotamia. Certain authenticated documents mentioned during the trial of the Young

Turks, which confirm the information given by the German consul, show that this method
was not to the taste of Cemal Pasha, the commander-in-chief of the Fourth Army, who
had authority over the whole region. In a 14 July 1915 telegram to the vali of Dyarbekir,
Reşid, the minister of the navy, complained about the fact that corpses were floating down
the Euphrates. Two days later, Reşid wired back: “The Euphrates has very little to do with
our vilayet. The corpses coming down the river have probably come from the provinces of
Erzerum and Harput. Those who drop dead here are either thrown into deep abandoned
caves or, as often happens, cremated. There is rarely any reason to bury them.”10
Late in July, convoys of deportees from the regions to the north began reaching their
destinations. On 27 July, Rössler stated:
Recently, Armenians from Harput, Erzerum, and Bitlis passed through Ras ul-Ayn
(currently the last stop of the Bagdad[bahn]). Reports about the Armenians from
Harput indicate that the men were separated from the women in a village a few hours
south of the city. They were massacred and their bodies were laid out on both sides of
the road down which the women later marched.11
On 30 July, Rössler, again, evaluated the number of deportees who had arrived in Aleppo
at 10,000, putting the number of those who had reached Der Zor at 15,000.12 In a 24 July
report, M. Guys, the retired French consul, reported “the passage of thousands of people, all
Armenian Gregorians, through the city of Aleppo itself.” He further noted that
after a stay of two or three days in places set aside for them, these unfortunates, most of
them boys, girls, women, or old men (the young men were assigned other destinations,
where they are ostensibly to fulfill their military obligations), are ordered to leave for
Idlib, Mârra, Rakka, Der Zor, Ras ul-Ayn, or the Mesopotamian desert, places that, it
is generally assumed, are destined to become their tombs.13
In late May 1915, the first improvised camp for Cilician deportees from Zeitun, Dörtyol,
and Hasan Beyli materialized north of Aleppo, in Bab.14 The bulk of the convoys, however,
arrived in July and August:
Thousands of widows, without a single adult male, arrived in Bab; they came from the
regions of Armenia by the Munbuc road, in an appalling state, half naked. They were
supposed to go to Aleppo. A number of the first arrivals told us that they were natives
of Kirg, located in the vilayet of Van. These people, as well as the ten to twenty groups
who arrived after them, were in convoys made up of from five hundred to three thou-
sand individuals, including hapless children in an indescribably miserable state.15
On 31 August, according to a precise evaluation made by Jesse B. Jackson, the American

consul in Aleppo, 32,751 deportees had arrived in Aleppo by rail alone; 23,675 of them were
adults and 9,076 were children.16
The Network of Transit and Concentration

Camps North of Aleppo
Before arriving in Aleppo, the convoys passed through transit camps. Which one they passed
through depended on the route they took. Thus, the deportees from Western Anatolia or
Thrace who arrived by the third route in late summer and fall 1915 stayed in the camps of
Konya and Bozanti before being sent on to Osmaniye, located in the foothills of the Amanus

mountains in the easternmost part of the Cilician plain.17 A transit camp had been set up
in a place known as Kanlıgeçit near the Mamura railroad station. In the months of August,
September, and October 1915, it received, on average, several tens of thousands of deportees:
“Many of them were starving, many sick, and the sanitary conditions can be imagined ... One
moment the tents were all in place, the next moment all could be seen was a mass of fleeing
people. Some were pierced by the bayonets and killed, families were separated and lost each
other, babies and old people were abandoned.”18 This improvised camp was regularly emptied
of its population between July and December 1915, on orders from the Sub-Directorate for
Deportees, which in this way pushed the survivors toward Islahiye, on the eastern slopes of
the Amanus mountains. The Sevkiyat müdürü went to Kanlıgeçit to supervise evacuations in
person: “He instructed a large number of policemen and hundreds of militiamen to surround
this miserable throng of practically moribund people and, under threat of whip and club,
ordered them to set out for Islahiye.”19 According to Yervant Odian, who passed through the
camp in October, of the 40,000 deportees sent to Islahiye on the other side of the Amanus
mountain chain, only half arrived.20 However, according to reports by Paula Schäfer and
Beatrice Rohner, who spent several weeks working to provide the deportees of Mamura with
food and medical care, the camp again held “thousands of tiny low tents, made of thin mate-
rial” between mid-November and mid-December.21 Around 40,000 deportees seem to have
found their final resting place there in the course of fall 1915.
To reach Islahiye and then the Syrian plain, the deportees followed a route that obliged them
to cross the Amanus Mountains. According to Swiss missionaries, it was strewn with rotting
corpses. The survivors took the road that led over the mountain crests through Hasanbeyli,
then descended to the plain where the Bagdadbahn began again. Islahiye was the first con-
centration camp in the vilayet of Aleppo. “It is,” a German missionary said, “the saddest thing
I have ever see. Right at the entrance a heap of dead bodies lay unburied ... in the immediate
neighbourhood of the tents of those who were down with virulent dysentery. The filth in and
around these tents was something indescribable. On one single day the burial committee bur-
ied as many as 580 people.”22 Father Krikoris Balakian, who spent several months in the region
and visited the camp in fall 1915, reports that the Sub-Directorate for Deportees, taking the
lack of militiamen and means of transportation as an excuse, deliberately let the convoys that
arrived in quick succession throng the camps, making it impossible to provide the deportees
with the basic necessities and creating conditions that encouraged the spread of epidemics:
People arrived by the thousands in Islahiye; only a few hundred were marched off every
day ... There were days on which deportees in the tens of thousands of tents died, not
by the dozens, but by the hundreds, while no healthy people could be found to collect
and bury the dead ... The victims were, first and foremost, Armenian children ... The
area spread out before us looked like a battlefield. The plain just beyond Islahiye was
covered with countless earthen mounds, large and small. These were the graves of
Armenians, containing fifty or a hundred bodies each ... Some, unfortunately, were as
high as hills.23
We may estimate that 60,000 deportees died of starvation or typhus in the ten months that
the Islahiye camp was in operation, from August 1915 to spring 1916.24
The camps in Rajo, Katma, and Azaz, located some 20 kilometers south of Islahiye on
the road to Aleppo, were in operation only briefly in fall 1915, although a great many people
lost their lives there in that short span. In an 18 October 1915 telegram, the interim consul
in Aleppo, Hoffmann, informed his ambassador that the Director of Political Affairs in the
vilayet (of Aleppo) estimated that there were 40,000 deportees concentrated in the camps
of Rajo and Katma, and that other convoys “from Western, Central, and Northern Anatolia

were on the way. Three hundred thousand people have to continue their route southward.”25
The camp in Rajo lay approximately one kilometer from the railroad station. At this time of
the year, it was a vast marshland covered with tents. A deportee from Bandırma reported:
“Corpses piled up in the tents. People who did not have tents had taken up quarters under
the railroad bridge in order to protect themselves a little from the cold. A torrent caused by
the rains suddenly inundated the spot and swept them off: they all drowned. There were
bodies on all sides. Very few escaped with their lives.”26
The neighboring camp of Katma, which also lay close to the railroad, offered a similar
spectacle. Vahram Dadian, who arrived here on 6 September, observed that for every ten
deportees who left the camp for the south, “a thousand arrive.”27 The shortage of food and
the utter lack of hygienic conditions reigning in this tent city naturally bred disease, causing
considerable human losses. At the sight of this spectacle, our witness understood that, unless
he succeeded in leaving the camp in very short order, he would suffer the common fate – that
is, starve to death or be carried off by an epidemic.28 On 9 September, the catholicos, Sahag
Khabayan, visited the camp at Katma but confesses that all his attempts to intercede with
the authorities to improve the deportees’ lot were in vain.29
Witness accounts give the impression that the strategy of the chiefs of the Sevkiyat was to
let the deportees waste away in the camps so as to create conditions favoring the spread of
epidemics. Thus, convoys never left the area promptly after arriving: the people the Sevkiyat
chose to send further south were rather those who had already been sufficiently weakened by
a prolonged stay in the camp. Two months after the catholicos’s visit, on 8 November, Rössler
informed the German Chancellor, Berthmann Hollweg, that “the concentration camp in
Katma is an indescribable sight.”30 In a few weeks, the number of deportees there had indeed
soared, briefly reaching a maximum of 200,000 internees. These people were ultimately
“transferred, in the space of a few days, to Azaz, an hour’s march away.”31 The accumulation of
corpses and the general conditions prevailing in Katma no doubt convinced the heads of the
Sevkiyat to transfer the camp to Azaz in order to resume operations on a virgin site.
The concentration camp in Azaz remained in operation somewhat longer, until spring
1916, but with fewer deportees. When the camp was created, a survivor noted that he could
not say “with precision” how many tents had been pitched there, but that estimates ran
between 15,000 and 20,000, “a number that [he] did not find exaggerated, because ... with
the naked eye, it was impossible to see from one end to the other of this gigantic tent camp,”
in which dysentery was omnipresent, poverty “absolute,” and the dead “past counting.” A
survivor reported that
at night, [the population of the camp] was subject to attacks from people bent on plun-
der ... The ground beneath the sagging tents, made of whatever was to hand, was strewn
with the dead and dying. Many people were wasting away amid excrement, wracked
by hunger. Odor and death reigned everywhere. Some used the dead as pillows; others
stretched their dead over them as covers, to protect themselves as best they could from
the cold ... The gravediggers were unable even to remove all the bodies ... Every day, a
convoy was led away by force.32
According to Aram Andonian, 60,000 deportees perished in these two camps, carried off
by famine or disease, in fall 1915.33 Eyub Sabri, one of the chiefs of the Sub-Directorate for
Deportees, seems to have personally supervised the departure of convoys from these camps.
A witness describes one of Sabri’s interventions as follows:
I had never seen, anywhere, the methods that Eyub Bey used on the handful of con-
voys under his escort. Astride a horse, surrounded by his accomplices, he attacked

the tents, trampling the sick lying on the ground under his horse’s hooves ... This
was not enough to satisfy Eyub Bey; more exactly, galvanized by this spectacle, he
would occasionally take his revolver from its holster and empty it on the throng of
deportees.34
These camps were closed in late fall 1915 and the survivors were deported, for reasons
that did not escape the German consul, Rössler. “In November and early December [1915],”
he writes,
deportees were massed the length of the railroad between Adana and Aleppo, espe-
cially in Islahiye and Katma[-Azaz]. For military reasons, the authorities wanted to
remove them from this zone, so as to clear the army’s rear and protect it from epidem-
ics. They had begun to evacuate them to Ras ul-Ayn by rail, but, since what awaited
them there was death and also because the train could not transport both soldiers
and Armenians, the Armenians were finally conducted from Islahiye and Katma to
Akhterim by foot, and from there to Bab.35
In other words, it was complaints from the military that prevented the Sevkiyat from accom-
plishing its mission in the area.
The camp in Bab is a case apart. Even before the influx, beginning in late May 1915, of
deportees into the area, a transit camp had been set up a half-hour’s distance from the city; it
took in deportees who, until July, had been promptly scattered throughout the surrounding
Arab villages.36 The camp was run by the kaymakam, Şafi Bey, who held his post from 15
October 1914 to 27 March 1916, and the Sevkiyat memuri, Muharrim Bey. In August, when
the deportees’ numbers begin to increase, they were no longer allowed to settle in the Arab-
speaking villages in the vicinity, but were held in a concentration camp set up by Muharrim.
Established in a field of clay, the camp was transformed into a veritable lake whenever it
rained. “The tents were immersed in water and filled with snow,” remarked a survivor who
had arrived in the camp late in December 1915.37 In July and August, the population of the
camp had momentarily soared as a result of the arrival
of thousands of widows, without a single adult male; they came from the regions of
Armenia by the Munbuc road, in an appalling state, half naked ... These widows, as
well as the ten to twenty convoys that arrived in their wake, were in caravans compris-
ing from five hundred to three thousand individuals, including hapless children in an
indescribably miserable state who resembled human monsters.38
They pursued their route toward Aleppo and the Syrian deserts after spending a few days or
weeks in the camp. According to Andonian, it was in October 1915 that Bab acquired the
status of a transit camp for convoys arriving from the north. The first director of the camp
was a certain Jafer; he had soon been replaced by Şevket Bey.39
With the beginning of winter and the arrival of deportees from the camps of Islahiye and
Katma-Azaz, typhus broke out in Bab. Four hundred to 500 people died there daily. So many
deportees arrived every day that it was not enough to send convoys to the south to reduce the
camp’s population.40 The head of the Sub-Directorate for Deportees, Abdüllahad Nuri; the
director of the camp, Şevket Bey; and the new vali of Aleppo, Mustafa Abdülhalik, criticized
Bab’s kaymakam, Şafi Bey, for the slowness with which the deportees were being sent on to
the south. It was probably due to the fact that the kaymakam was extorting money from
them. The more determined director of the neighboring camp of Akhterim, Muharrim Bey,
needed only two and a half months to empty his camp.41

In the system created by the heads of the Sevkiyat, designed to push the deportees from
one camp to the next in stages, Bab and Akhterim were, in late autumn 1915, the last
stations on the way to Aleppo. After the evacuation of the camps of Mamura, Rajo, and
Katma, all the deportees who arrived from the north were crowded together there in sanitary
conditions that witnesses describe as something out of Dante; they led to massive loss of
life. Everything suggests that, in forcing the deportees to live in such dense human groups,
the chiefs of the Sevkiyat had no other intention than gradually to eliminate them, relying
on the effects of such massive concentrations and the action of nature. The system, which
was undeniably effective, nevertheless generated undesirable side effects similar to those
observed in the camps to the north. Epidemics spread throughout the region, affecting the
civilian populations and the army. We know, for example, that 20 to 30 Arab villagers were
dying daily of typhoid fever in Bab in winter 1915–16, despite snows that were unusually
tenacious for these southern zones. The chiefs of the Sevkiyat must therefore have received
categorical orders to improve the disastrous health conditions that they had themselves arti-
ficially created. To meet the emergency, Nuri appointed Muharrim to head the camp in
Bab and charged him with liquidating it. It took him several months to complete the task.
According to Aram Andonian, in January 1916, Aleppo decided to “completely cleanse the
whole province of Aleppo of its Armenians.” Even the first deportees, who had found refuge
in the villages of the region, were ferreted out “and sent to the slaughterhouses of Der Zor.”
It must, however, be added that Muharrim’s activity in Bab did not by itself suffice to imple-
ment this decision. Nuri Bey therefore appointed the military commander Süleyman Bey to
assist him, along with 200 muleteers, as well as the kaymakam of Munbuc, Nebih Bey. Nebih
“accomplished a remarkable feat in carrying out, in a week’s time, the order he had received
to send all the deportees of his region, Aleppo, to Meskene,” in his capacity as memurı maksus
(special delegate). The kaymakam of Kilis was also entrusted with a special mission. Thus, it
appears that, after granting the deportees the possibility of settling as best they could in the
villages of the region north of Aleppo, the authorities decided to send them further south to
Meskene, while preventing them from passing by way of Aleppo itself.42
At the very least, 50,000 to 60,000 deportees lost their lives in Bab between October
1915 and the beginning of spring 1916, according to an account by Father Dajad Arslanian,
who took it upon himself to bury the dead between late November 1915 and early February
1916.43 These figures are confirmed by both the camp’s chief gravedigger, a certain Hagop
(the gravediggers, recruited from the ranks of the deportees, were allowed to stay with their
families until the camps were shut down), who counted 1,209 deaths in two days, 11 and 12
January 1916, and the German consul, Rössler, who stated in a 9 February report that 1,029
people died in two days in the same camp.44
The deathtraps of Lale and Tefrice, located nearby on a secondary road that connected
Bab and Meskene without passing through Aleppo, were, in the words of one deportee, “a
veritable graveyard.” People who had, “generally speaking, a life expectancy of a few days at
best” were dumped here, “so that the destiny of these thousands of people would be accom-
plished far from the centers.” According to Hovhannes Khacherian, a native of Bardizag, a
scant 20 per cent of the people who passed through these camps ever reached Meskene.45
This type of intermediate camp was basically a stretch of wasteland that could be supervised
by only a minimal staff of a few militiamen or gendarmes. It made it possible to concentrate
the dying in one place, so that the authorities could avoid leaving too many corpses lying on
the sides of the roads. The information at our disposal indicates that these two sites, whose
activities were closely bound up with those of the camps in Akhterim and Bab, were in
operation from December 1915 to March 1916.
The last of the camps located north of Aleppo, Munbuc, is a very special case, because
its main function from the outset had been to serve as a place of internment for Armenian

clergymen, from the simple village priest to the primate of a diocese. Lying a few dozen kil-
ometers northeast of Aleppo on the road to Ras ul-Ayn, the camp was set up in fall 1915 on
Cemal Pasha’s express demand, for the purpose of isolating the clergymen from the general
population. At the high point of its activity, it was inhabited by as many as 1,000 kahanas
(married priests) and their families. It was ultimately evacuated in January and February 1916
by the kaymakam of Munbuc, Nebih Bey, who personally saw to transferring the interned
clergyman to Meskene, on the axis of the Euphrates.46 In 1917, only 70 to 80 Armenians were
still alive there, thanks to an Armenian patron who paid local officials regular bribes.
Yervant Odian, who found himself in this human flood in late November 1915, reports
that rumors then making the rounds among the deportees indicated that they should do
everything they could not to go beyond Aleppo and to avoid Der Zor and the camps in
Katma and Rajo at all costs.47 This indicates not only that information circulated among the
exiles, but also that some of them were still capable of escaping the fate that the Sevkiyat had
reserved for them. Despite local officials’ laxity, which was probably motivated by the bribes
they received, it was difficult to violate certain orders. For example, selling Armenians train
tickets to Aleppo was prohibited – an order that was scrupulously respected. It was impossible
to travel to the city clandestinely, Odian writes, for very thorough searches were carried out
in every railroad station. The deportees therefore had to go on foot, without ever entering
the city; it was even more difficult for them to stay in hotels, whose owners had received strict
orders not to accommodate them.48

Chapter 3
Aleppo, the Center of the Genocidal

System and of Relief Operations
for the Deportees
G
etting to Aleppo and finding refuge there was a life-and-death issue for many depor-
tees. They hoped to melt into the urban tissue of this big city and take advantage of
the aid that the Armenian community and foreign diplomats or missionaries living
there were able to extend them. As for the authorities, after the improvisations of the first few
weeks, during which thousands of deportees poured into the city, they quickly understood
that, if their extermination plan was to succeed, it was indispensable to mobilize all available
means to prohibit the deportees from entering the Syrian metropolis.
Around 5 June 1915, the American consul in Aleppo Jesse Jackson observed that several
streams of deportees from Marash, Zeitun, Hasanbeyli, Osmaniye, Bahçe, Adana, Dörtyol,
and Hacın were converging on Aleppo on foot and that 2,600 refugees to the city had been
allowed to remain there.1 When Kerovpe Papazian, the chief secretary of the archbishopric
of Adana and the catholicos’s representative with Cemal Pasha, passed through Aleppo on
his return from Aley in mid-June, he witnessed the arrival of the first deportees from the
north, basically of “women and children between the ages of eight and ten.” They camped
in the courtyards of the churches and schools and, above all, a monastery that belonged to
the Congregation of St. James in Jerusalem (the Hokedun). Catholicos Sahag went to great
lengths to ease the deportees’ lot, even writing to Kaiser Wilhelm on the advice of the
German consul, Rössler. Fifty to 70 people in Aleppo were dying of typhus or typhoid fever
every day, despite the efforts of the Armenian relief committee that had been formed under
the leadership of Sarkis Jierjian in order to provide the deportees with basic necessities and
medical care. These deportees were for the most part only in transit in Aleppo; the police
saw to it that they were rapidly expelled from the city.2 According to Rössler, these first
groups of exiles were dispersed in the villages to the east,3 probably on the initiative of the
vali, Cemal, or his successor. As late as the beginning of July, the American missionary Kate
Ainslie saw convoys arriving in Aleppo, notably groups of deportees from Hacın.4
The parliamentary deputy Krikor Zohrab’s correspondence with his wife during his one
month’s stay in Aleppo (from 16 June to 16 July 1915), where he was accompanied by Vartkes
Seringiulian, provided an omen of things to come in the region. Zohrab wrote, lucidly, “The
curtain is coming down.”5 While Zohrab was in Aleppo, Celal was transferred to Konya,
after having admirably resisted the orders he had received from the capital.
The pace of events quickened from this point on. More and more deportees were stream-
ing into the city every day. According to the American and German consuls Jackson and
Rössler, who were surely the two men who knew the most about the treatment to which the
Ottoman government had subjected the Armenian deportees, the authorities in Aleppo had

gradually lost control over the situation. Rössler further noted that the deportees were not
all treated the same way, but that the treatment they were meted out depended on where
they came from: the Cilicians received aid from the authorities, albeit irregularly, whereas
the Armenians native to the eastern provinces were denied all assistance.6 Under these con-
ditions, the cholera epidemic that broke out in the camps to the north reached Aleppo in
September, forcing the authorities to evacuate the deportees from the city at a rate of around
4,000 to 5,000 a week. They were loaded onto stockcars or freight cars and sent to Damascus
or the Hauran.7 In September 1915, Dr. Martin Niepage, a German teacher in Aleppo’s
Deutsche Realschule, observed:
I was told that there were large numbers of starving people in different quarters of Aleppo,
the miserable vestiges of what were called “the columns of the deportation” ... To see if
the opinion I had formed on the basis of this information was justified, I visited every
part of the city in which Armenians – what was left of the columns of deportees – were to
be found. In run-down caravansaries [khans], I found piles of putrefying dead bodies and,
among them, people still alive on the point of breathing their last. In other places, I found
piles of sick and starving people left to fend for themselves. Around our school were four
such khans, with seven hundred to eight hundred starving deportees in them ... Opposite
our school, in one of these khans, were the remains of one of these columns of deportees,
around four hundred emaciated creatures, among whom were some one hundred chil-
dren between the ages of five and seven. Most were suffering from typhus or dysentery. If
one enters the courtyard, one has the impression that one is entering a madhouse. If one
takes them food, it appears that they have forgotten how to eat. Their stomachs, weak-
ened by months of hunger, can no longer bear food. If one gives them bread, they put it
aside, indifferently; they lie there, quietly, waiting for death ... And what will become of
the unfortunates, now just women and children, who are being hunted down throughout
the city and its environs and driven into the desert by the thousands? They are pushed
from place to place until the thousands are reduced to hundreds, and the hundreds to a
little group, and this group is still driven elsewhere, until nothing at all is left of it. With
that, the purpose of the journey has been attained.8
Not until early November 1915 did the authorities deny the deportees access to Aleppo,
while also prohibiting them from taking trains to the south in the direction of Damas and
the Hauran. From this point on, they were systematically dispatched by foot or rail, either
“along the trajectory of the Bagdadbahn” toward Ras ul-Ayn or along the “trajectory of the
Euphrates” toward Der Zor.9 These radical measures were probably not unrelated to the
simultaneous arrival two weeks earlier of the new vali, Mustafa Abdülhalik, and Abdüllahad
Nuri, now at the head of a reinforced Sub-Directorate for Deportees. From now on, we no
longer have to do, as in the provinces of the interior, with a mere representative of the
Istanbul IAMM, even if he bore the title of Sevkiyat müdürü, but with a veritable admin-
istrative apparatus that proceeded to create the network of concentration camps along the
Euphrates. Preventing the deportees from taking the roads leading south, which had a repu-
tation for being less murderous because there were no concentration camps strung out along
them, and replacing those roads with the trajectories of the Bagdadbahn and the Euphrates
as destinations, were measures with the sole aim of more effectively destroying the depor-
tees. Moreover, in an 8 November 1915 dispatch to his embassy, the German vice-consul
in Alexandretta, Hoffmann, reported remarks made by Abdüllahad Nuri’s newly appointed
assistant Ahmed Eyub Sabri that left no doubt as to the policy the government had decided
to pursue: “You still don’t understand what we want; we want to eradicate the Armenian
name,” Nuri had said.’ ”10

Aleppo, Genocidal System and Relief Operations 641
Despite the hopes that Aleppo inspired in the deportees who wished to avoid being sent
to the camps to the east or southeast, it was difficult to access. The city was swarming with
policemen and undercover agents who were kept abreast of developments by a vast network
of informants, including Armenians such as Arshavir Sahagian.11 Once one had managed to
enter the city, however, it was always possible to find a hideout. In actual practice, the pres-
ence of thousands of Armenians living underground was the more readily tolerated in that it
provided a host of city officials, policemen, and even military personnel with an unhoped-for
source of income. What might be called “the rules of the game” were gradually established,
and it was very rare that someone who had been able to retain money or valuables was
unable to come to an understanding with local officials. Such, at any rate, was the situation
that prevailed until Abdülhalik and Nuri were named to their posts in October 1915. Their
arrival did not, however, suffice to put a complete stop to the self-interested benevolence of
local government officials. They had to wage no less than a ten-month struggle to call a real
halt to the stream of deportees who had succeeded in hiding in Aleppo.
The Official and Underground Armenian Information and Relief

Networks Operating in Aleppo and the Surrounding Region
Early on, at the initiative of the Catholicos Sahag II Khabayan, who had taken refuge in
Aleppo in late June, a Refugee Relief Committee was formed by eminent members of the
city’s Armenian community,12 which then numbered around 13,000 and had a reputation
for being well organized. Community members who had resided for at least ten years in the
Syrian metropolis had been exempted from deportation. The Refugee Committee’s activi-
ties consisted of taking in orphans and finding lodgings for deportees who had gotten as
far as Aleppo. Sahag II repeatedly met with Cemal Pasha, the master of the region, in this
period; on each occasion, he tried to bring him to take measures that would alleviate the
deportees’ suffering. The Armenian Protestant and Catholic churches organized their own
relief networks.13
Early in November, however, probably at the initiative of the new vali Abdülhalik, Sahag
II and his entourage were forced to move to Jerusalem.14 In the meantime, the arrival in
Aleppo of many deportees from Istanbul, such as Dr. Boghosian, who was appointed interim
municipal physician,15 made possible the creation of an underground network that gradu-
ally solidified its structures and extended its operations throughout not only Aleppo but
the whole of the surrounding region as well – indeed, it had connections that reached as
far as the capital.16 In addition to Boghosian, a psychiatrist, the group included experienced
militants such as Marzbed17 and Ghazar Charek. Above all, it could count on the help of
local notables, such as the brothers Onnig and Armenag Mazlumian, the owners of the
famous Baron Hotel and close friends of Cemal Pasha’s, a host of Armenian railroad offi-
cials18 whom the government could not do without, and widely respected individuals such
as the Protestant ministers Aharon Shirajian, who had come from Marash, and Hovhannes
Eskijian. A sort of division of labor sprang up among these men: some concentrated their
efforts on orphans (the two ministers), the others on saving and hiding young men and intel-
lectuals, gathering information, and setting up a network that distributed direct assistance
to deportees as far away as Der Zor. The benevolent attitude of the consul Jesse Jackson and
– with certain, easily understandable reservations – Walter Rössler facilitated the transfer of
the considerable sums that the network needed to help the deportees.19 The Swiss missionary
Beatrice Rohner and her colleague Paula Schäfer played an exceptionally important role in
organizing the relief operations and obtaining extensive financial aid. Both of them belonged
to the German missionary organization known as the Deutscher Hülfsbund für christliches

Liebeswerk. This, as well as the backing of Dr. Fred Shepard of the American hospital in
Ayntab, helped them secure resources that had been collected in the United States by the
American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions.20
Although the interior minister found out, late in July 1915, that two Armenian emissaries
sent from Aleppo to Der Zor were distributing money to the deportees there and had issued
orders for their arrest,21 many others were not discovered and accomplished their missions
without arousing suspicion. Thus, Marzbed masqueraded as a Kurdish animal trader from
Bitlis by the name of Haci Hüseyin. He traveled under this identity as far as the construc-
tion site of the Bagdadbahn in Intilli, where he was recruited as a financial controller by the
German firm.22 Educated in Germany and fluent in German, Marzbed/Haci Hüseyin very
certainly benefited from the protection of the Company’s German officers and took advan-
tage of his privileged status in order to travel without constraint and render his compatriots
untold services.
The writer Yervant Odian, for example, succeeded in making his way into Aleppo
thanks to the help of Pilig Arpiarian, a railroad official, and was then taken in hand by
Dr. Boghosian, who found him a hiding place in the city. There he was often in the company
of Reverend Kruzian, the director of an orphanage under the patronage of a German woman
and a friend of Cemal’s, who tolerated this Armenian institution. There he also met the one
man deported from Trebizond to have arrived safely in Aleppo, Gaydzag Arabian. When he
encountered problems, he turned, as a matter of course, to Onnig Mazlumian, whose Baron
Hotel, while frequently occupied by the general staff of the Fourth Army, was a haven for
intellectuals who had been swept up in the stream of deportees.23 One of the network’s
activities consisted in saving the lives of men of letters, out of an awareness that the “survival
of the nation” could be assured only if they were given priority over others.
Aram Andonian, who, protected by the Mazlumian brothers, had remained in hiding for
months, began to collect material bearing on the liquidation of his compatriots very early in
the day. Extensive use of this material has been made in the fourth part of the present study.
In the Baron Hotel, Andonian saw those chiefly responsible for the genocide strolling past
or dining at the expense of the hoteliers. Some did not hesitate to declare what had brought
them to Syria.
It was of course impossible that the energetic efforts of Mazlumian brothers, the Barons,
would go unperceived by the Young Turk government. When they were discovered, the two
brothers were exiled to Zahle, in the Bekaa Plain, in September 1916. Another personality
in the city, Dr. Samuel Shmavonian, who provided free medical care to the children in an
orphanage founded by Reverend Aharon Shirajian, was brought to trial and sentenced to 15
years in prison. After being regularly tortured, he was “set free,” but in such a state that he soon
succumbed to his wounds.24 His liquidation led to the elimination of certain sources of aid.
The repressive actions undertaken by the vali Abdülhalik did not completely cut off
the flow of refugees into Aleppo because of the sheer size of the city, which prevented the
authorities from controlling everything. Some managed to enter the city in secret; the more
affluent were able to bribe government officials. But the greatest number of deportees was
saved above all thanks to the solidarity network forged in Aleppo with the active support of
American diplomats and missionaries. This network worked so effectively that by late 1915
Aleppo had been thronged by 40,000 illegal deportees.25 The authorities, informed of the
support that foreign consular services were giving these pariahs, issued them strict instruc-
tions not to give any form of assistance to the Armenians. Notwithstanding this prohibition,
some Western diplomats and missionaries, particularly the Americans, unhesitatingly made
personal commitments to aiding the victims. The American missions were even able to col-
lect 100,000 dollars for the benefit of “disaster victims” in the Near East.26 The U.S. consul
Jesse Jackson administered this fund.

The most important task, however, was to hide the thousands of widows and children
who had taken refuge in the city. Many were placed with families, Christian families in gen-
eral and Armenian families in particular; the girls and women were most often employed as
domestics. But the food shortages affecting the city thwarted the development of this system,
which was also hampered by harassment from the authorities, who sought to block humani-
tarian activities benefiting the Armenians by all means at their disposal.27
The American consul subsidized the German Hülfbund and provided a monthly stipend
to the Relief Committee that had been founded by Aleppo’s Armenian prelacy. Jackson
notes that in the same period two Armenian notables from Aleppo interceded with Ahmed
Cemal, the commander of the Fourth Army, on behalf of their compatriots who had found
refuge in the city. They suggested that Cemal put these deportees to work for the army with-
out pay. The American consul does not say who these notables were, but Armenian sources
indicate that one of them was Dr. Altunian.28 Cemal Pasha accepted the suggestion and, in
the space of two months, six factories went into operation that employed more than 10,000
people, mostly women and girls.29 They spun wool and made clothes to meet the army’s
needs. As for the rare Armenian men in the city, they worked as blacksmiths, tailors, or
carpenters. Treated like slaves and working in abominable conditions, they received as their
sole recompense just enough food for subsistence.30
The typhus epidemic brought on by the massive numbers of Armenian deportees in
Aleppo naturally drew the attention of the commander of the Fourth Army and the German
officers on his general staff, especially when it began to affect their troops and precipitated
a veritable health disaster.31 Urgent measures were needed to get the better of this scourge.
Cemal consequently had no choice but to approve of plans to open a hospital, directed by
Dr. Altunian, for the purpose of treating the Armenian deportees.32
The other major problem was the catastrophic situation of the thousands of orphans
who had crowded into Aleppo and been abandoned to their fate. These children wandered
through the streets famished and ill. Some were adopted by local families, but most had to
go without assistance of any kind. One of them, Antranig Dzarugian, would later write that,
in order to obtain food, they formed gangs that attacked stores in the city, sometimes at
the cost of their lives.33 In this domain, the most important initiative taken in Aleppo was
beyond a doubt the 31 July 1915 creation of an orphanage by Reverend Aharon Shirajian.
The fact that an institution of this sort could be founded in a period when the authorities
were enacting their plan to liquidate the Armenians may seem paradoxical. However, the
orphanage was opened at a time when deportees were flooding into Aleppo and before the
appointment of Abdülhalik to the post of vali. Most importantly, the initiative was sup-
ported by the American and German consuls, as well as the German-Swiss mission. It was
because they interceded with Cemal Pasha that the institution was created.34 But its creation
was above all due to Shirajian’s courage and determination. A deportee from Marash who
had himself found refuge in Aleppo, he lost no time in organizing humanitarian action, gath-
ering up abandoned children, usually sick or dying, in a house located beside the German
consulate in the Akaba neighborhood that had been put at his disposal free of charge by
a Swiss businessman established in Aleppo, Emil Zollinger.35 Every day, children suffering
from cholera, typhus, trachoma, or dysentery, often reduced to skin and bone, arrived at the
orphanage, where Shirajian took in all of them without exception, while Dr. Shmavonian
treated them until his arrest. This improvised orphanage was in fact a modest building with
a straw-covered floor that served as a dormitory. Although children frequently died there, the
orphanage nevertheless rendered great services. In the following months, Shirajian enlarged
his institution by renting two more houses, thanks especially to Dr. Asadur Altunian, an
Armenian notable who was known to have friendly relations with Cemal. Altunian, the
director of a reputable hospital in which several high-ranking Ottoman leaders had received

treatment, had many relations on which he was able to call throughout the war in order
to protect Shirajian’s orphanage. Ranking Ottoman officials made a number of attempts
to have the orphanage shut down, and Shirajian himself was repeatedly imprisoned and
threatened with deportation. On one occasion, local government officials entered certain of
the buildings and removed 80 orphans, who were then expedited to the desert.36 Every time,
however, Altunian and the German consul both interceded with Cemal and succeeded in
saving the orphanage and its director.
Furthermore, throughout the war, Altunian’s daughter Nora provided the minister with
competent help in running the orphanage by organizing fundraising campaigns in the
Armenian community.37 When the number of children in the institution increased to the
point that this aid did not suffice to support all of them, the young woman went so far as to
appeal directly to Cemal, who thereupon ordered the army to furnish the orphanage with
the food and supplies it needed. But the most important act in the history of the orphanage
occurred no doubt when Cemal signed a decree ordering the local authorities to cease inter-
fering in its activities.38 It is, of course, unimaginable that a charitable institution of this kind
could have survived on Ottoman territory without the active backing of Aleppo’s Americans
and Germans. Zollinger, who, though a Swiss citizen, had served as a German consul in
Aleppo, played the role of a middleman between the Americans, Germans, and Swiss on the
one hand, and Shirajian on the other, making possible the transfer of significant amounts
of money to the orphanage.39 At war’s end, the number of orphans in the institution had
reached 1,500.40 One detail is symptomatic of the general situation: all Shirajian’s efforts to
introduce courses in Armenian into the orphanage were strictly forbidden by the authorities.
Their involuntary tolerance obviously had its limits.
Yielding to insistent demands from the German Hülfsbund’s Swiss missionaries Paula
Schäfer and Beatrice Rohner, Cemal authorized them, in late December 1915, to open
another orphanage in Aleppo. It, too, was destined to take in abandoned Armenian chil-
dren, albeit under the supervision of the local authorities. The need to improve health con-
ditions in the city was the main argument that the two missionaries had used to bring the
pasha round.41 Around 400 children found shelter in this institution. It had the backing
of the German consul, Rössler, and benefited from American financial support.42 It will,
however, readily be imagined that the German mission’s promotion of humanitarian actions
benefiting the Armenian deportees was perceived by the central Ottoman authorities as a
dangerous precedent to be stopped at all costs. It was probably with a view to putting an end
to this undertaking that the interior minister, Talât, sent two circular telegrams, dated 23
March and 3 April 1916, to the local authorities, “reminding” them that the Ottoman gov-
ernment alone was authorized to administer aid to the deportees and that, consequently, all
authorizations granted foreigners were illegal. The circulars called for punishing all govern-
ment officials who had broken this rule.43
The Aleppo Relief Committee also cared for a few hundred orphans in the school
adjoining the Church of the Forty Martyrs. These orphans were under the supervision of
K. Kruzian.44
The Transit Camps on the Outskirts of Aleppo

While the first deportees to arrive in Aleppo in summer and early fall 1915 were temporarily
settled in its caravansaries, as we have seen from November on, the vali Mustafa Abdülhalik
prohibited the convoys from entering the city and systematically redirected them down the
Euphrates or Baghdad railway toward Mosul. It was probably on his orders that the Sub-
Directorate for Deportees created the first transit camp an hour to the east of the city in
Sibil, a vast plain leading on to the Syrian Desert. This camp was put under the supervision

of Selanikli Eyub Bey, a çete leader and an assistant to the Sevkiyat müdüri. Cemil Hakim
Bey, the Sevkiyat memuri, administered it.45 Every day, a convoy arrived at the camp while
another left it, bound for Meskene and Der Zor. Hence there were always several thousand
deportees in Sibil.
An institution set aside for Armenians was nevertheless maintained in the city – the
immense caravansary in the Achiol neighborhood. In the courtyard of this caravansary,
christened Kaşıldıh, stood a number of huge tents that served as a prison. This camp was
reserved for both adult Armenian males who, miraculously, were still to be found in the
convoys arriving in Aleppo and people hiding in the city who the police or gendarmerie
had apprehended on one of their countless nighttime roundups. After being held for around
three weeks in these frightful surroundings, these men were also put on the road, under
heavy guard.46 So many people died in Kaşıldıh that, Rössler writes, “it was decided in mid-
October to create a new cemetery outside the city. However, before the authorities could
begin to bury the dead there, the corpses were dumped in it in one big pile and lay out in the
open for several days.”47
A second camp was set up near Aleppo, in Karlık, near a village in the city’s northern
outskirts. The camp lay skirted the railway. According to the American consul Jackson, an
average of 500 tents were to be found in Karlık at any given time. Two thousand to 3,000
deportees lived in them under appalling conditions, with virtually no water. One hundred
people died there every day.48
Yervant Odian, who spent time in Sibil in late November 1915, saw thousands of tents
there, occupied by Armenians from Bardizag, Rodosto, Adabazar, and Edirne, with a “small
number” of others from Harput, Dyarbekir, and Afionkarahisar.49 According to Odian,
Cemal had authorized 300 families to go to “Sham” – that is, toward Homs-Hama and
Damascus – to work as craftsmen in military enterprises. Tailors, shoemakers, tinsmiths, and
so on were in especially high demand. Of course, everyone tried to get his name on the list
of people setting out for the south, since that was the equivalent of a passport for life. This
administrative vezikat was so sought after that the vezikats made out to individuals who had
subsequently died were, as a Turkish book attests, negotiated at very high prices. Odian, who
had no skills as a craftsman, renamed himself Asadur and gave himself out as a native of
Bahçecik/Bardizag.
While waiting to leave the camp in his turn, Odian witnessed terrible scenes. He men-
tions notably a ditch dug on the edge of a camp into which every morning those who had
died the night before were thrown; the dead were first and foremost victims of the dysentery
epidemic that raged in Sibil in early December 1915. He also observes that Turks, Arabs, and
Jews from Aleppo who wanted children came to the camp to buy boys and girls from their
parents. Storms, the cold, and rain particularly decimated those who did not have tents; the
food shortage did in the rest. In this environment, ethical and moral standards went by the
boards. Mothers often opposed the sale of their children and did not always allow themselves
to be convinced by the prospective buyers, who argued out that they were going to die in
any case and that their children at least would be saved. Some of the mothers who initially
agreed to such sales went mad or became feeble-minded shortly after handing over their
progeny. The children in greatest demand were those between seven and ten years of age,
especially girls. Thousands of boys and girls were sold in this way by their parents.50 A few
lucky deportees from Harput were saved by Dr. Klejian, a municipal physician in Aleppo,
himself a Harput native, who took them into his home.51 To a certain extent, Aleppo’s Relief
Committee managed to alleviate the suffering of these Armenians in transit in the city by
mobilizing various methods to funnel them the financial aid that the Armenian Patriarchate
of Constantinople regularly sent the committee by different channels wherever the heads of
the camps were willing to take bribes – which is to say, virtually everywhere.52

In the camp in Mârra, a short distance to the west of Aleppo, there were, on average, 600
families of deportees at any given time in winter 1915–16 – that is, around 3,000 to 4,000
people – under the authority of Tevfik Bey, the kaymakam. Settled there on an express order
from Cemal Pasha, who also ordered that wheat be distributed to the deportees, these exiles
constituted an exemplary case of population “displacement”; the camp in no way resembled
the typical immense camps that were nothing but deathtraps. Despite Cemal’s orders, the
kaymakam organized a number of small convoys and dispatched them to the Syrian deserts,
probably as the result of an intervention by the Sub-Directorate of Deportees. It seems likely
that he did so, however, in order to frighten the other deportees and relieve them of sub-
stantial sums in exchange for a promise not to send them off, too. This particular situation
lasted only until the following spring, when Consul Rössler informed his ambassador that
“on 16 April, the Armenians ‘settled’ in Mârra and the surrounding villages were forced to
depart in the direction of Der Zor.”53
By preventing the deportees from passing by way of Aleppo, the authorities were probably
also seeking to hide their actions from foreign witnesses as best they could. We have seen, in
this connection, that thanks to the Armenian underground network the patriarch contin-
ued to be informed of the situation and could communicate the information he received to
diplomatic circles. Zaven reports that he regularly received news about Konya from Mesrob
Naroyan, thanks to Armenian railroad employees, and about Aleppo, albeit less frequently,
thanks to Catholicos Sahag II. For example, Sahag was able to forward to the patriarch, with
the help of Rössler’s wife and the dragoman of the German embassy, Hayg Taykesenian,
a precise description of the situation at the moment when the convoys stopped arriving
in Aleppo.54 Mehmed Talât complained, in a wire that he sent Mustafa Abdülhalik, his
brother-in-law, on 1 December 1915, that “[t]he American consuls are obtaining informa-
tion by secret means,” a statement that makes his denials that he knew about the conditions
under which the deportation took place still more dubious. “It is,” he wrote,
crucial to our policy of the moment to convince foreigners traveling in that area that
the sole purpose of this deportation is to change people’s places of residence. For this
reason, it is important, for the time being, to exhibit tactful behavior in order to preserve
the forms, and to apply the known methods only in localities where they are appropri-
ate. To this end, I firmly recommend that you arrest people who reveal information or
conduct investigations and bring them, on other pretexts, before a court-martial.
An interesting detail should be noted here: this document bears a marginal note by the Sub-
Director General for Deportees, Abdüllahad Nuri, to whom the telegram was transmitted.55

Chapter 4
The Camps in Suruc, Arabpunar, and

Ras ul-Ayn and the Zones of Relegation
in the Vilayet of Mosul
A
s the deportations came to an end, the Armenian deportees were grouped in several
centers along the eastern trunk of the Bagdadbahn. One of these centers was Suruc,
a small town of 10,000 inhabitants located a few dozen kilometers south of Urfa, ten
hours’ distance from the railroad. The families of some 30 Armenian craftsmen from Urfa
had been settled here in 1915. Apart from the men who had been mobilized, a dozen heads
of families had been murdered well before the convoys of deportees arrived; the women and
children had then been invited to convert.1
The Deportees of Suruc

A witness from Sıvas, G. Kapigian, related how he lived for three months in this primarily
Kurdish town, the seat of a kaza that was administratively attached to the mutesarifat of
Urfa. This convoy of yesir (prisoners of war) – the local population’s word for the Armenian
deportees – that arrived in Suruc on 5/18 September 1915 was stationed in a field located
near the exit from the city, where four big tents had been set up. Pitching the tents was more
or less all that the authorities had done to accommodate these yesir, many of whom were
ill. The municipal physician could only remind them that “we are not allowed to give sick
deportees medicine.”2 It was also impossible to send a telegram to a friend or family member
in the capital to request that he or she send money. The survivors in this convoy, who had
been pillaged on the way, had all but run out of resources and understood that they were
going to suffer the fate of a group of the few hundred women and children who had arrived
before them, whose corpses lay rotting behind the city’s khan as food for dogs.3 The khan,
consisting of miniscule cells, was in fact a deathtrap into which the authorities packed those
deportees who were devoured by lice and disease and had only a few hours to live.4 These
deportees were Armenians from Sıvas and Zara who had been brought to Suruc by way of
Fırıncilar, where Kapigian had crossed their path a few weeks earlier. Wryly, he expressed his
surprise over the magnificent “creation of the scientific spirit” that this “microbe incubator”
invented by the Young Turks represented.5 For Kapigian, there could be no doubt that an
institution like the khan in Suruc, which the authorities had christened a “hospital,” had
been conceived of as microbe factories for the purpose of killing their “patients.”6 Once still-
healthy deportees had been put in these houses of death, they rapidly lost their capacities and
sank into a physical and moral decline that could end only one way. The Interior Ministry’s
incessant requests for information from local government officials about how many depor-
tees had recently arrived, where they had come from, and how many were still alive were

doubtless motivated by only one desire – to evaluate the effects of these genocidal practices
and add to the ministry’s statistics.
The deportees’ camp had received two visits. One was from the municipal physician, a
Jew, who had explained to the camp’s inmates that the local authorities lacked the means
required to feed them and that they would have to continue to fend for themselves until they
reached Aleppo. A few days later, Kapigian encountered six Armenian women that the phy-
sician was keeping in his home. The other visit was from the commander of the gendarmerie,
who contented himself with touring the camp and picking out one or two young women for
his harem, which had already acquired respectable dimensions. The kaymakam himself was
holding five such women. Furthermore, many Turkish and Kurdish families helped them-
selves to children, especially little girls under ten.7 This phenomenon was so widespread that
it gives us reason to wonder whether this infatuation with young Armenians, with its biologi-
cal connotations, did not originate in a campaign conducted by the authorities.
The fact that the second caravan from Erzerum, comprising Armenians from throughout
the Erzerum region, arrived in Suruc in late November was itself a curiosity. Originally made
up of around 10,000 people who had been put on the road on 18 June 1915,8 the convoy
had, to be sure, been partially purged of its men, who were massacred after it passed through
Fırıncilar, in Kanlıdere, by the çete chief Zeynel.9 Yet, its members had reached Suruc after
suffering only a minimum of losses, in good order and even apparently good health, at least
in comparison with their kinsmen from the Sıvas region. This case, which proves that it
was not, in fact, impossible to “displace” Armenians populations without destroying them,
indicates what conditions were required to escape the common fate.
The first explanatory factor put forward by the members of the convoy was money: deported
very early, at a time when certain measures affecting the Armenians’ assets had not yet been
adopted by the central authorities, this group had benefited from a certain indulgence on the
part of the vali, Tahsin Bey, who had suggested to the deportees that they deposit their money
in the bank and take checks with them. In so doing, he had saved them from being looted
en route and made it possible for them to make use of their means as effectively as possible
in order to bribe the various government official and tribal chiefs whom they encountered
from one end of their journey to the other. Whereas the deportees who were carrying cash
were quite likely to pay and be massacred nonetheless, the Erzerum Armenians maintained
an ability to negotiate that stemmed from their financial independence.
The second decisive factor had to do with the means of transport that the deportees
were able to obtain upon setting out and keep until they reached Suruc. Thanks to their
horse-drawn wagons or ox-carts, they had been able to take with them what they needed
for the journey: bedding, tents, food and supplies. Above all, they had been able to avoid
travelling thousands of kilometers on foot, maintain minimal health standards, and avoid
epidemics.10 In other words, this group was never caught up, unlike the great majority of the
other convoys, in the spiral leading to physical and moral degradation. Kapigian observes
that the savoir-faire possessed by the men, who had experience in conducting the toughest
kinds of negotiations, provides the rest of the explanation for their success. Aware of the
danger awaiting them in the deserts of Syria or Mesopotamia, a delegation from the sec-
ond convoy from Erzerum paid the kaymakam of Suruc a “courtesy visit.” After conferring
with one another, these men had come to the conclusion that they would have to negotiate
the right to stay where they were with the local authorities. They were able to “convince
the kaymakam of their loyalty to the fatherland and provide him with testimonials of their
esteem for him” by tactfully offering him gifts out of range of prying eyes. The kaymakam
of Suruc could obviously not issue an “official order” allowing these exemplary individuals
to remain as long as they wished, but he could, for example, look the other way when these
families rented houses in the town – the more so as the populace also benefited from this

Camps in Suruc, Arabpunar, Ras ul-Ayn 649
unlooked for source of income. The kaymakam’s “benevolence” also profited deportees from
other regions who had managed to flee the camp in Arabpunar and take refuge in Suruc.
Late in December, they were even able to make use of the services of the local agricultural
bank in order to cash checks and found commercial enterprises.11 On several occasions,
particularly when the authorities set out to defeat the Armenians of the neighboring city of
Urfa, tensions rose somewhat in Suruc, and the roughly 15,000 Armenian deportees in the
city were threatened with expulsion to the desert.12 They even camped for almost one month
at a half-hour’s distance from the city. Many of them, however, were able to go back to Suruc
and its environs once the tensions had abated.13 In winter 1915–16, the local authorities
had to organize several convoys to the desert, probably in order to avoid sanctions that the
capital threatened to impose; they did not, however, empty the region of all its deportees.
Kapigian notes that a number of people from the poorest families fell victim to malnutrition
and disease. Thereafter, the interior minister demanded an exact count of the Armenians in
the region.14 Certain deportees tried to make themselves indispensable by creating a trade
school in which the young women of the city could acquire manual skills and learn to read
and write. Although these proposals were hard to reconcile with local social practices and
surprised a good many people, others, such as the mayor of Suruc, turned the occasion to
account, encouraging the initiative.15
As a result of pressure from the deportees, Suruc was transformed accordingly over
the months into a place of relegation that was more or less secure for a number of them.
According to Kapigian, of the nearly 700 Armenians who had set out from the region of
Sıvas, listed in his account by their family names, 120 survived until they were expelled from
Suruc for good.16 But even these vestiges of the convoys eventually attracted the central
authorities’ attention. A military inspector dispatched by the court-martial in Urfa came to
conduct an investigation in Suruc. The kaymakam and commander of the gendarmerie were
the first to be threatened, accused of having benefited from the Armenians’ generosity. The
deportation order was finally made public on 1 January 1916: it applied to the refugees and
the handful of (Islamicized) local families, who were ordered to set out for Rakka in five days
at the latest.17 Not even Erzerum’s businessmen were able to escape this ultimate roundup.
On Sunday, 9 January, the convoy, comprising a total of 1,851 people, was put on the road to
Rakka, guarded by gendarmes.18
The Transit Camp in Arabpunar

Some ten kilometers further south, near the Arabpunar train station, another transit camp
had been set up near a small lake.19 Around 25 September 1915, 15,000 deportees, most of
whom came from the vilayet of Sıvas, camped here under conditions that were precarious,
to say the least. Shortly thereafter, epidemics broke out, carrying off between 120 and 170
victims daily; Kapigian says that 4,000 people died here in six weeks. By mid-November, the
camp was empty. Some of its population had been sent to Ras ul-Ayn and on to Der Zor or
Mosul; others succeeded in hiding for a while in Suruc and villages in the vicinity.20
The Camp in Ras ul-Ayn

Located east of Urfa and south of Dyarbekir, in a particularly desolate region near the outer
limits of Syria and Mesopotamia, Ras ul-Ayn had been, before the Baghdad Railway went
in, a simple way station comprising 20 or so households of Chechens who had been settled
here by the Ottoman sultans after the 1877–8 Russo-Turkish War. In 1914, it was still the
modest seat of a kaza; the following year, it became one of the main concentration camps
for Armenian deportees. A remote spot far from the eyes of the curious, the village was

gradually transformed into a vast “resettlement” center in late summer and in fall 1915.
First, however, countless convoys from the Armenian provinces passed through it; the routes
they took converged near Urfa and Ras ul-Ayn. The first deportees to arrive here came
in mid-July; they were natives of Harput, Erzerum, and Bitlis.21 In approximately the same
period, the American consul in Baghdad, Charles P. Brissel, noted in a report that the vali
of Baghdad, when he had been the prefect of the sancak of Mardin, “began at and near
Mardin, persecutions against the Armenians and sent them to Ras ul-Ayn. There is a report
in Baghdad that the Armenians sent to Ras ul-Ayn were massacred some time after their
arrival at that place or en route to it.”22 Subsequently, many other convoys coming from
Urfa, where the first and second deportation routes intersected, also arrived in Ras ul-Ayn.
We have, however, less information about the operations conducted in this region than
about those in the camps in the western areas, for the diplomats who were stationed the
closest to Ras ul-Ayn, the German consul Holstein and the American consul Brissel, lived
in Mosul and Baghdad, more than 300 and 500 kilometers away, respectively, on the edge
of the Mesopotamian desert, while Rössler and Jackson found it extremely difficult to follow
developments from Aleppo. In his 13 August 1915 report, Rössler nevertheless revealed that
he had been “able to obtain precise information about another group that had left Adiyaman
[northeast of Urfa]. Of the six hundred ninety-six people who set out, three hundred twenty-
one arrived in Aleppo: two hundred six men and fifty-seven women were killed.”23 These
figures attest the harassment to which the deportees were subjected on this road, which con-
nected Malatia, a place of junction for the caravans of deportees, to Urfa and Ras ul-Ayn by
way of Adiyaman. In the same report, Rössler wrote: “A group from Sıvas which arrived here
[in Aleppo] on 12 August had been en route for three months and was utterly exhausted.
A few of them died almost as soon as they arrived.”24 The only outside account is provided
by an Austrian officer who spoke Turkish, Lismayer, who had for 20 years been working on
building the railroad in the area. For obvious reasons, his name is not mentioned by Rössler
or the missionary from Urfa, Jacob Künzler, who transmitted the information that he was
given by this engineer to Aleppo.25 However, Balakian, who met him several weeks later,
reveals his name when he mentions his account:26
It was in the last days of October [1915]. Lismayer had been busy constructing a narrow-
gauge railway between Sorğana and Ras-ul-Ayn when he saw a large column coming
from the north and slowly descending toward Ras-ul-Ayn ... This mass of people moved
slowly down the road, and only when it had drawn near did the Austrian realize that
the army was made up, not of soldiers, but of an immense convoy of women guarded
by gendarmes. On some estimates, there were as many as forty thousand women in the
convoy ... There was not a single man among them.27
Another engineer working on the Bagdadbahn, M. Graif, informed Dr. Niepage, a professor
in Aleppo, “that along the entire trajectory of the railroad leading to Tell Abida and Ras ul-
Ayn were piles of naked corpses of raped women,” while the German consul in Mosul, who
had traveled on the road between Mosul and Aleppo, “had seen, in several places on the
way, so many severed children’s hands that the road could have been paved with them.”28
Another German consul and military officer, Scheubner-Richter, reports in a 5 November
1915 travel account: “From Erzerum to Mosul, traveling by way of Hinis, Mush, Bitlis, and
Siirt, I saw that all the villages and houses once inhabited by Armenians had been sacked
and were completely empty. I did not see a single Armenian man who was still alive.”29
In the opposite direction, the Sub-Directorate of Deportees in Aleppo carried out the
orders it had received from the capital: beginning in November-December 1915, the trend
was reversed, and the deportees interned in the camps in Islahiye, Katma, and Azaz were

sent to Ras ul-Ayn so that the strategic route between Adana and Aleppo could be cleared
and decontaminated.30 “They had started evacuating them by rail to Ras ul-Ayn,” a survivor
writes.31 The city had, moreover, a very bad reputation,
based on the fact that all the unfortunate convoys from the interior provinces [that
is, those which took the road from Urfa] that had been dispatched in that direction
had, without exception, been massacred. The same fate awaited the deportees arriving
by the Konya-Bozanti route who had had the bad luck to be conducted to Ras ul-Ayn.
Arab gendarmes, government officials, and even a good part of the population sardoni-
cally gave them to understand the fate awaiting them. Some of them related episodes
from previous massacres ... It had become impossible to obtain information about the
first massacres in Ras ul-Ayn. The last fragments of the convoys from the interior who
had gotten that far had basically all been massacred. There were no witnesses left.32
On the account of J. Kheroyan, who in late October 1915 was appointed head of the con-
centration camp in Ras ul-Ayn under rather surprising circumstances, the camp contained,
10,000 tents when he assumed his post – that is, around 50,000 Armenian deportees – which
were set up on a height ten minutes from the village.33 As elsewhere, the deportees had
pitched their tents practically one next to the other for reasons of security. The kaymakam,
Yusuf Ziya Bey, who held his post until February 1916, proved to be above all a well-meaning
man; his benevolence was encouraged by the mutesarif of Der Zor, Ali Suad Bey, who had
authority over Ras ul-Ayn at the time. Ziya, who had control over all state officials, includ-
ing those employed by the Sub-Directorate for Deportees, even allowed those deportees who
could afford it to live in town. He also tolerated petty commerce at the local level and did
his best to protect the camp against Arab marauders, who had been used to taking what they
wanted from the deportees. For four months, from November 1915 to late February 1916,
the Ras ul-Ayn camp operated under almost normal conditions for this sort of structure, in
comparison to other institutions of the same kind. Convoys were, to be sure, regularly expe-
dited to Der Zor, but without excessive brutality. However, an impromptu visit by Cevdet,
the brother-in-law of Vice-Generalissimo Enver, seems to have had a very negative impact
on the camp in Ras ul-Ayn. When he arrived in Ras ul-Ayn, Cevdet, who was on his way to
Adana to assume his functions there, is supposed to have been shocked by the conditions the
Armenian deportees enjoyed in the camp: the death rate, at the time, was only 100 a day34
(around 13,000 to 14,000 people nevertheless lost their lives in the four months in which
the camp functioned “normally”).35 The importance of Cevdet’s intervention, said to be key
to explaining why the deportees of the camp in Ras ul-Ayn were liquidated, should not be
overestimated. The vali’s reputation as a bloodthirsty murderer, acquired in the Van region,
influenced Kheroyan’s judgement. Obviously, Kheroyan could not know that at the same
moment, as we shall see, Istanbul was setting the second phase of the genocide in motion, in
both Asia Minor and Syria-Mesopotamia.
It may, however, be affirmed that former vali of Van had something to do with the fact
that the kaymakam of Ras ul-Ayn was dismissed ten days after Cevdet passed through the
area. He was replaced by a dyed-in-the-wool Young Turk, Kerim Refik Bey. This measure was
a necessary precondition for carrying out the programmed events to come. Refik assumed
office in mid-March and immediately set about accomplishing the task with which he had
been entrusted – liquidating the deportees in the camp in Ras ul-Ayn. The preparations
began on 17 March 1916 and continued until 21 March, when the operation intended sys-
tematically to eliminate the 40,000 internees who were still present commenced.36 The
kaymakam received a great deal of support here from Adıl Bey, the Director of Deportees,
an “educated” native of Istanbul; the local Chechens, whose leader was none other than

the mayor of Ras ul-Ayn, Arslan Bey; and the vice-mayor, Arslan’s brother Hüseyin Bey.37
Officially, these irregulars were supposed to protect the deportees who were sent southward.
In fact, they carried out decisions made by the Sub-Directorate of Deportees. A few months
later, these irregulars would go on to play outstanding roles in the July 1916 massacres of
those deported to Der Zor.
Initial reports of the liquidation of the deportees in the camp of Ras ul-Ayn reached
Aleppo only in early April. The first dispatch from consul Rössler, dated 6 April 1916, refers
only to a massacre perpetrated by “Cherkez.”38 In his 27 April report, the consul was more
precise:
On the report of a perfectly trustworthy German who spent several days in Ras ul-Ayn
and the vicinity ... [e]very day, or nearly every day, three hundred to five hundred people
are removed from the camp, taken to a place around ten kilometers from Ras ul-Ayn,
and slaughtered. The bodies are thrown into the river known as Jirjib el Hamar ... The
Chechens settled in the Ras ul-Ayn region are playing the executioners’ roles.39
To form some idea of the dimensions of the carnage, one has to turn to the accounts left
by the handful of survivors. Thus, the camp’s director, Kheroyan, states: “There were only
a few hundred people left by 23 April [6 May]: the sick, the blind, invalids, and a few chil-
dren ... After each convoy was sent off, we counted hundreds of victims, for whom big mass
graves were dug.” Kheroyan concludes: “A few days after the departure of the last convoy, it
was announced, on the kaymakam’s orders, that the operations of the concentration camp
had been discontinued; he asked me to turn the registries over to him.”40 The luckiest sur-
vived for a few more days, getting as far as the region of Sheddadiye in the Kabur valley,
where they were killed.41
The Deportees “Relegated” to Mosul

The vilayet of Mosul was part of the zone officially set aside as a place of “relegation” for
the Armenian deportees. Because of its particular geographical situation on the edge of the
Mesopotamian desert, it was supposed to serve as a place of exile for the deportees who
followed the second deportation route – that is, Armenians from the vilayets of Bitlis and
Dyarbekir and the southern part of the vilayet of Van, along with the vestiges of the two
convoys that had set out from Erzerum. In other words, Mosul was the intended destina-
tion for deportees from zones in which massacres in situ had been especially frequent and
the percentage of survivors who had reached their official destination was extremely low.
Our main source of information about the region, the German consul in Mosul, Holstein,
counted barely 600 women and children from Siirt and Mardin in the city on 21 July.42
According to Patriarch Zaven, who spent the last months of the war in Mosul, the deportees
who arrived here after taking the route that led through Ras ul-Ayn and Cezire were the least
numerous,43 probably because those who followed that route fell victim to the squadrons of
çetes whom the vali of Dyarbekir, Dr. Reşid, had sent out to intercept them. The third and
fourth convoys from Erzerum, which arrived in Mosul by a more southerly route, suffered
far fewer losses, but there was not a single man among them, only women and children.44
According to Armenian sources, there were 1,600 deportees from Erzerum in the city of
Mosul in February 1916 and 2,200 more in the region.45
According to Holstein, 15,000 deportees had reached the region by the end of December
1915. A second wave of deportees, comprising Armenians from all the regions of Asia Minor,
the western part of it in particular, arrived in Mosul and the vicinity in spring 1916; it had
set out from Der Zor. Holstein reports that only 2,500 deportees, who, when Ali Suad was

still mutesarif, had been sent from Der Zor down the desert road running from Zor through
Suvar, Şeddadiye, Hassiçe, and Zamukha to Mosul, actually arrived in Mosul on 22 May
1916,46 whereas all those who followed under Salih Zeki’s administration were killed on the
way. In the same period, the American consul, Jackson, reported that there were around
5,000 deportees in Basra.47
The information provided by Holstein in a 4 May 1916 report produced in response
to a questionnaire from the Swiss charitable organization Schweizerisches Hilfswerk 1915
für Armenien, indicates that the death rate among the deportees was around 67 per cent.
Holstein puts the number of deportees from the regions of Erzerum and Bitlis who had landed
in Mosul, Kirkuk, or Süleymaniye at between 4,000 and 5,000. He also provides valuable
insights into the way these groups were handled. They were “[composed] mainly of women
and children [in] desperate plight.” “If one is to intervene usefully,” he added,
the deportees would, at the very least, have to have the right to remain once and for all
in a single place and not be tossed back and forth – as was and is still the case – from
one place to another, on the whim of the Turkish “special commissions” charged with
dealing with these questions, which settle them without the least scruple ... Aid of any
sort would only prolong their ordeal and postpone their miserable end for a few days
more.48
In other words, the authorities here applied methods of treatment similar to those employed
in the concentration camps: the exiles never stayed for long in any one place and were regu-
larly driven from one camp to the next. There is every reason to believe that this procedure
was designed to prevent the deportees from acquiring means of survival after familiarizing
themselves with their new environment.
The vali, Hayret Bey, the former mutesarif of Marash,49 who held his post from May 1915
to August 1917, together with his successor Memduh Bey, were the main architects of the
gradual destruction of these groups.50 Captain Nevzâde Bey, the military commander in
Mosul, and Colonel Abdülkadri Hilmi Bey personally took charge of executing the Armenian
worker-soldiers who were building a highway between Mosul and Cezire.51 Captain Nâzım
Bey, the commander of Mosul’s gendarmerie; Mehmed Kâmil, a Unionist journalist; and
Nuri Bey, the mutesarif of Kirkuk, were also implicated in these killings.52
In March 1917, when the British took Baghdad, several thousand Armenians were eking
out an existence between Mosul and Basra, scattered here and there in the countryside or the
towns. Patriarch Zaven, who went to Mosul shortly before the British captured the city, saw
Armenian women (from Erzerum in particular) and children begging in the streets. With the
help of donations received from the catholicos, Sahag Khabayan, he was able to ease their
lot and to feed and clothe them. Although the Chaldeans did not provide him with the least
assistance, the patriarch notes that the Jacobite Syriacs went so far as to put their churches
at the deportees’ disposal. Zaven also points to the active role that the police chief, Mehmed
Halid, a converted Armenian, played in the relief operations for the Armenians of Mosul.53
He further observes that the Yezidi population showed the deportees kindness and that a
Yezidi sheikh, İsmail Bey, regularly came to see him during his stay in Mosul; he adds that
the Yezidis of Sinjar took in and protected many Armenians.54 Finally, the patriarch notes
that 50 to 60 men who had so far managed to survive in Mosul were rounded up in a raid and
assigned to an amele taburi working on road construction. The deportees in the best situation
were women from Erzerum and Siirt employed as servants by German and Austrian officers
or local government officials.55
Shortly after Baghdad was captured in March 1917, Hali Pasha arrived with his general
staff. He was soon followed by Cevdet, who had been named commander of the area in

June.56 The two men, who had already collaborated closely in extirpating the Armenians
of the vilayet of Bitlis, seem to have been reunited in order to carry out a new opera-
tion of the same kind. According to information revealed during the April 1919 trial of
Nevzâde Bey, a former military commander, immediately upon arrived in the area, Halil
had launched a fierce repression campaign aimed not only at Armenian deportees, but
also at Jewish and Kurdish refugees living in Mosul. On the evidence given by several
officers, he had inaugurated the campaign by having five Jews hanged; their bodies were
then thrown into the Tigris. Colonel Abdülkadri Hilmi Bey is also supposed to have
directed fierce attacks on Armenian deportees in the Zakho gorge, located further to the
north.57
The most important of the criminals brought to trial was Nevzâde Bey, a former CUP
fedayi who according to chief prosecutor Reşad Bey had committed several political murders.
He was charged with having organized the massacre of the deportees in Mosul, “where he last
found himself,” as well as that of the Armenian soldiers in a labor battalion.58 On Şerif Bey’s
testimony, the dragoman of Mosul’s military governor, Nevzâde, who “was Halil’s favorite,”
made a fortune by pillaging the deportees before “exiling them to a remote place” and also
by imprisoning several merchants from the city who were “dreadfully” tortured every night.
A second witness, an officer by the name of Bekir Bey, told the court that Nevzâde was
notorious in Mosul for the atrocities to which he had subjected “thousands of Kurds who
had emigrated from Bitlis and Erzerum. He cut off their food supply, condemning them to
starve to death.” Be it added that the accused did not protest when the presiding judge of
the court asked if it was true that, acting in concert with Halil Pasha, he had confiscated
all food supplies arriving in the city and sold them for personal gain, dividing the profits up
with Halil.”59 In other words, Halil, who was obviously in command of these operations, did
not limit himself to attacking Armenian deportees, but also initiated a policy of eliminating
Kurds, inspired by the “Turkism” of which he was a partisan.
This repressive campaign peaked in September 1917, when Halil ordered his aide-de-camp,
Lieutenant-Colonel Basri Bey, to proceed to massacre the Armenian deportees scattered
throughout the Mosul region.60 Cevdet was apparently also deeply involved in this new liq-
uidation campaign, which began on 11 September 1917.61 According to reports gathered by
the Swiss historian S. Zurlinden as the events were unfolding, Halil had 15,000 Armenians
killed in two nights by Kurds and irregulars; they were tied together in groups of ten and
thrown into the Tigris.62 These details remind us that Halil, although he had donned a mili-
tary uniform, was still working for the Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa.
The Patriarch, Zaven Yeghiayan, who was held under house arrest in Baghdad from 9
October 1916 to early March 1917, notes that a few Armenian notables from Baghdad were
deported to Ras ul-Ayn and Der Zor in summer 1915, but that they were able to go back home
a few weeks later thanks to the intercession of Der Goltz. According to the patriarch, the
arrival of Ali Suad Bey as vali of Baghdad – he was replaced in Der Zor by Salih Zeki – in
early summer 1916 alleviated the suffering of the city’s Armenians.63

Chapter 5
The Concentration Camps along

“The Euphrates Line”
O
fficially, the “Euphrates line” constituted, as we have said, the principal region in
which the Ottoman authorities chose to “settle” the Armenian populations that
had been “displaced to the interior.” In theory, the assets confiscated from the
Armenians were to have been used to settle the new migrants in these desert regions of Syria
and Mesopotamia, inhabited by a few thousand sedentary Arabs and Circassians and thinly
sprinkled with tribes of Bedouin nomads.
Deportees were to be found on the Euphrates line from an early date. There were 15,000
of them there in early August 1915;1 by late September, the number had risen to 23,300,2
soaring to 310,000 by early February 1916.3 These exiles were split up between Meskene and
Der Zor. Throughout the period in question, this trajectory was synonymous with death
for all the deportees. Strung out along this line was a succession of camps: Meskene, Dipsi,
Abuharar, Hamam, Sebka/Rakka, and finally, the camps of Der Zor/Marât. The number of
those interned in them did not, however, significantly increase until the winter of 1915–16:
as we have observed, it was then, in January 1916, that the authorities decided to purge
northern Syria of its deportees. The camps of Mamura, Islahiye, Rajo, Katma, Azaz, Bab,
Akhterim, Munbuc, and Mârra, all located in the outskirts of, or at a relatively short dis-
tance from, Aleppo, were now shut down one after the next, and the survivors of these
camps were sent down the Euphrates line or the trajectory of the Bagdadbahn toward Ras
ul-Ayn.
The Camp in Meskene

The camp in Meskene was the first important way station on the line leading to Zor; it lay
at the point where the road from Aleppo intersects the Euphrates. Thinly inhabited at first,
the camp grew rapidly in winter 1916. When Hocazâde Hüseyin Bey, a Çerkez from Munbuc,
was named Meskene’s Sevkiyat memuri in January 1916 – he succeeded Muhtar Bey – barely
20,000 deportees were living in the camp. In the following weeks, its population jumped to
100,000.4 The Sub-Directorate for Deportees thereupon decided to add several officers to
its staff, including Naim Sefa, well known because he served as Aram Andonian’s inform-
ant, and another Çerkez from Munbuc named Ömer. After directing the camp for one year,
Hüseyin was relieved of his duties in December 1916, at a moment when the camp had
been virtually emptied of its internees. He was replaced by another Hüseyin, known as the
One-Eyed Man (Kör). Kör Hüseyin had already distinguished himself as a convoy leader in
the camp in Karlık on the outskirts of Aleppo, “where, with his brutality, he had acquired
a reputation for terror. He was a short, fat, powerfully built, one-eyed man, and extremely
depraved.”5

The camp in Meskene was one of the most deadly on the Euphrates line. Hüseyin Bey’s
official estimate of the number of Armenians who died there in 1916, carried off by typhus,
cholera, or hunger, was 80,000, “although the real figure was much higher than the well-
known çeles6 kept by the chief gravedigger [mezarcı başı] suggest.” Since the chief gravedig-
ger was illiterate, Andonian wrote, he “contented himself with cutting a notch on one of
his çeles for every body of which he took charge. Certain people learned from him that
the number of bodies that had been simply buried did not include those that had been
thrown into the Euphrates: approximately one hundred thousand people, at the very least.”
Andonian also indicates that there were only 2,100 people in the camp in Meskene in April
1916,7 most of them craftsmen who would be liquidated by Kör Hüseyin early in 1917. The
German consul, Rössler, confirms that “a Turkish army pharmacist who had been serving in
Meskene for six months told [him] that 55,000 Armenians were buried in Meskene alone.
A Turkish vice-commander had, moreover, cited the same figure.”8 These estimates of the
number of people buried in the city or drowned in the Euphrates indicate that the daily
death toll was as high as that registered in the other camps in the area north of Aleppo in
which deportees were interned. The American consul Jackson reports similar statistics in
a 10 September 1916 dispatch: “Information obtained on the spot permits me to state that
nearly 60,000 Armenians are buried there, carried off by hunger, privations of all sorts,
intestinal diseases and the typhus that results. As far as the eye can reach, mounds can
be seen containing 200 to 300 corpses buried pell-mell, women children and old people
belonging to different families.”9 Patriarch Zaven, who traveled through Meskene shortly
thereafter on 22 September 1916, saw, above all, “bodies and bones” there.10 Two reports by
Armenians from Konya indicate that the Sevkiyat’s “inspector general,” Hakkı Bey, a çete
chief from Istanbul, arrived in Meskene on 16 August 1916 and had 200 orphans rounded up
and “expedited” to Der Zor. Hakkı reminded the deportees that he was now their “second
god” – that is, that he had the right of life and death over them. Hardly had the order to
set out been issued then he took the lead of a squadron of çetes and proceeded to massacre
all the males in the convoy on the banks of the Euphrates.11 Hakkı embodies the symbiosis
between the leadership of the Sevkiyat and that of the Special Organization. Indeed, he does
it so clearly that one might well ask if the former was not merely an extension of the latter
adapted to the context of the camps and camouflaged as an organization of the Ministry of
the Interior.
According to a report by Karekin Hovhannesian, a native of Sivrihisar who had been
deported on 5 August 1915 and had arrived in Meskene in early December, some convoys
had been sent southward on şahturs – “two boats tied one to the other” that the deportees
had to rent from Arab boatmen at their own expense – whereas the others either traveled
down the right bank of the Euphrates through Dipsi, Abuharar, Hamam, and Sebka, or,
more rarely, the left bank of the Cezire. The latter trajectory haunted the deportees’ night-
mares, for it required that they trek along mountain ridges where there were no bodies
of water at all and where they were at the mercy of local nomads with a well-earned bad
reputation.12
Like many other way stations, Meskene was both a concentration camp and a transit
camp. Initially, the internees had been settled in a camp near the highway, in the high-
lands. Hüseyin Bey subsequently had them transferred to the bank of the Euphrates, while
the transit camp was left in the highlands, near the barracks and the craftsmen’s tents. In
theory, the internees were to be placed in this center, as in all the others, for just a few weeks
or even only a day or two, the time required to purge the convoys of their weakest members.
They were then supposed to be put on the road to the next station and so on, until they
reached Zor. But it was usually in the camp directors’ interest to keep the internees who were
capable of paying a kind of “fee” for the right to stay put. The longer these people remained

Concentration Camps 657
in a camp, the bigger the “fee” that the head of the camp collected. It was, moreover, by
no means rare for the camp directors to complain that their colleagues were keeping the
wealthiest deportees too long, those who still possessed means of payment requiring their
signature. Before Salih Zeki Bey was appointed mutesarif of Zor in June 1916, a certain laxity
was observable among the “officials” of the Sub-Directorate for Deportees for the reasons just
mentioned. Nevertheless, two to three convoys containing a few hundred people each were
sent toward Zor every week. They were basically made up of the least “interesting” deportees,
since Hüseyin Bey saw to it that his most affluent wards remained in Meskene until nothing
more was to be had from them.13
The Camp in Dipsi

Located five hours from Meskene, the camp in Dipsi lay on the right bank of a dry riverbed
“which was transformed, after storms or heavy rains, into an immense stream that flowed
into the Euphrates.”14 Transfers from Meskene to Dipsi were usually made by land under con-
ditions succinctly described by Krikor Ankut, a young intellectual from Istanbul who spent
more than a year in the area:
In mid-March [1916], we were transferred from Meskene to Dipsi. There were around
one thousand people on foot and some fifty carts ... Every step of the way, we came
upon corpses, the dying, or exhausted men and women who no longer had the strength
to walk and were waiting to die on the road, hungry and thirsty. On the road leading
from Meskene to Dispi, we had encountered wandering gravediggers, whose job was,
notably, to bury the dead. They were so utterly without pity that they buried the dying
with the dead so that they would not have to do their job twice over. We constantly
came upon the bodies of people whose heads had been bashed in. There were large
numbers of dogs; they fed on the corpses.15
In this period, the camp comprised, Ankut says, 2,000 tents, that is, around 10,000 to
12,000 people:
The tents all belonged, without exception, to poor people; not a one was presentable.
Each was inhabited by from two to ten sick people lying side-by-side and waiting
for death. This bank was known as the Hastahane [hospital]. All the unfortunates
who had been displaced from Meskene on foot or in wagons were brought to this
place called the Hospital and abandoned. They remained there, naked, hungry, and
thirsty, until death came and mowed them down. Every step of the way, we saw
corpses; there were so many of them that the gravediggers were unable to bury all the
dead. Absolute poverty reigned in this place, and had sunk to unprecedented levels.
Day after day, with the arrival of people from Meskene, the number of tents in the
Hospital increased. The poor people contented themselves with eating, unsalted, a
plant called ebemkömeci, which grew plentifully on the banks of the Euphrates in
springtime.16
It was understood that Dipsi was the place to which people from Meskene were brought
to die; it was run the same way that Suruc was. This camp remained in operation for only
six months, from November 1915 to April 1916, yet 30,000 people died there, according to
Ankut. Toward the end of April, some 20 “gendarmes” came to evacuate the camp for good
and all; they sent one last convoy to Abuharar, after burning the tents and those of their
occupants who could no longer walk.17

The Camp in Abuharar

In theory, the convoys dispatched from Meskene made a stop in Abuharar, after a trek of
approximately nine hours. The place known as Abuharar in fact amounted to no more than
two dilapidated caravansaries perched on the banks of the Euphrates. The concentration
camp had been set up on a stretch of land very close to the river. On average, 500 to 600
tents – or around 3,000 people – were to be found there, even though Abuharar was origi-
nally supposed to be a transit camp. The reason was that people who had means of some sort
could here too purchase the right to remain longer by bribing the sergeant in charge of the
camp, one Rahmeddin Çavuş, who sent deportees on only after relieving them of everything
they owned.18
The Camp in Hamam

Setting out from Abuharar, one had to walk another nine hours to reach Hamam by a route
one hour from the Euphrates on which there was not a single body of water. Hamam was
an unimportant village lying on a height located five hours before Rakka. The camp there
was used exclusively as a transit camp. It had been set up in a vast plain that stretched into
the distance before the village; convoys stopped here for one or two days. The camp was
run by a Çerkez named Isak Çavuş.19 By spring 1916, the camp had been totally emptied of
its inhabitants. A few families managed to survive by working on the construction of army
camps established on the Euphrates line from May 1916 on in anticipation of a new British
offensive on Baghdad.20 Patriarch Zaven, who traveled through Hamam during the night
of 23–24 September 1916, counted only 150 tents inhabited by deportees, for the most part
women from Marash and Ayntab.21
The Town of Rakka and the Camp in Sebka

By 1915, Rakka was already a fairly big town lying on a plateau located near the left bank
of the Euphrates, half an hour from the river. The first deportees to reach it, in fall 1915,
were Armenians from the regions of Sıvas (Zara, Kangal, Yenihan, Koçhisar), Thrace, and
Urfa, as well as female Armenian gypsies from Tokat whose men had been killed. A total
of 7,000 to 8,000 deportees were, at the time, able to find lodging in the town after bribing
the local authorities (the kaymakam and the commander of the gendarmerie) and the head
of the Sevkiyat, who ruled over the camp in Sebka on the opposite bank of the river. These
first Armenian arrivals provided the city with a non-negligible labor force, which was more
important in the view of the population and the local authorities than the instructions
received from Aleppo. In March 1916, while Krikor Ankut was living in Rakka, a military
inspector came to investigate the most flagrant cases of corruption.22 A new kaymakam, Deli
Fahri (“The Madman”), had been appointed but, in exchange for a handful of gifts that were
more than modest, he continued to protect the deportees, even when orders to deport them
arrived from Der Zor. Since Rakka, located on the left bank of the Euphrates, was officially
independent of Urfa, Fahri refused to carry out these orders, appealing for protection to the
mutesarif, who did not wish to knuckle under to ukases from Zor.23
Officially, Rakka was one of the zones of relegation for the deportees. In theory, then, they
should have benefited from the aid that the government had promised to give them to help
them resettle. In fact, the modicum of aid that arrived came, as we have seen, from relief net-
works created by the Armenians of Aleppo with the support of Swiss and American diplo-
mats and missionaries. Rakka nonetheless constituted, in many respects, a rather exceptional
case, in that a few thousand deportees were indeed resettled there, even if the authorities had

nothing to do with this. A deportee stated the matter very well: to gain admittance to Rakka
was to escape being sent to Der Zor and one’s death. Until June 1916, at least, this population
once again enjoyed, in some way, normal conditions of existence, and had the feeling that it
could continue to live in the town on a permanent basis.24
A very different situation prevailed on the opposite bank of the river, in Sebka. The con-
voys of the last survivors from Asia Minor, who had been marching for weeks, succeeded one
another there under much more appalling conditions. Our witness, Krikor Ankut, reports
that a number of new corpses were observed there every day and that famine drove some
people to cannibalism. In comparison, Rakka seemed like a paradise. All had sought to gain
entry to it by bribing the head of the camp or Sevkiyat officials. In March 1916, when Istanbul
decided to have done with the last deportees on the Euphrates line, the camp in Sebka was
definitively evacuated and its last denizens were sent to Zor. Rakka’s Armenian population
found itself facing a similar fate, but momentarily escaped it thanks to the kaymakam, Fahri
(who would soon be dismissed), and the populace, which did not wish to do without the
resources that the deportees had brought to their town. Some of the exiles, the neediest
ones, were recruited as craftsmen or assigned to help construct army camps on the Euphrates
line. The result was that there remained only about 8,000 to 9,000 Armenians in Sebka by
autumn 1916.25 On 25 September 1916, when the patriarch traveled through the area, he saw
only six families in Sebka, all of them from Karsbazar.26
Garabed Kapigian, who lived in Rakka for several months, provides very valuable details
about the Armenian deportees’ daily life in the city.27 Kapigian, who had arrived in Suruc
on 18 January 1916, together with somewhat over 1,800 other deportees, had had the good
fortune to end up on the right side of the Euphrates and to be in a convoy that included
Armenians from Erzerum who still had means at their disposal. He saw how on the opposite
bank convoys arrived from the north every day, while others were sent southward. He notes
in passing that those who could pay one pound gold were transported southward on rafts.28
At first, Kapigian’s group was invited to pitch camp three hours from Rakka. Erzerum’s
notables, however,29 rapidly secured permission to go to Rakka, where they made prepa-
rations to approach the kaymakam, Fehmi Bey, who agreed to allow the deportees from
Erzerum – and them alone – to settle in the town in exchange for 500 Turkish pound gold,
to be paid in cash. In other words, 400 deportees from Sıvas, Tokat, Amasia, Samsun, Bafra,
Niksar, and Suruc were not covered by the agreement and were therefore sent to camp in
Sebka on the opposite bank of the river, whence they were deported to Der Zor.30 It was with
bitterness that our witness observed this incident,31 which revealed certain character traits of
the men from Erzerum. Their lack of solidarity and their extreme parochialism found, under
the circumstances, unrestrained expression.
There were at the time 3,000 homes in Rakka, a large minority of which belonged to
Çerkez muhacirs who had been settled in an isolated quarter 20 years previously. When the
thousand and more Armenians from Erzerum entered the city, it had already been inhab-
ited for months by around 15,000 deportees who had been “recruited” by the kaymakam
Fehmi and the head of the local Sevkiyat, Abid Agha: every day, the two officials crossed the
Euphrates and brought back with them families willing to pay five to ten pounds gold per
head. This was “like a gold mine” for the two men, Kapigian observes.32 These Armenians
were from Thrace (Rodosto, Malgara, Edirne), Bythinia (Ismit, Adabazar, Bardizag, Bursa,
Bilecik, Bergame, Eskişehir), Angora, Konya, Isparta, Burdur, Sivrihisar, Nevşehir, Yozgat,
Kayseri, Everek, Tomarza, Marash, Ayntab, Birecik, Adana, Hacın, Antioch, Kesab, Dörtyol,
and Kastamonu and the surrounding areas – that is, from regions in western Asia Minor
whose inhabitants had suffered much less from massacres and pillage than their compatri-
ots from the eastern provinces. According to Kapigian, the local Arab population, particu-
larly Rakka’s notables, had given the Armenian deportees a good reception and had rapidly

grasped all the advantages that it could obtain from these unexpected arrivals. Kapigian
also emphasizes that the city’s businesses and crafts had benefited from the savoir-faire of the
newcomers, who were obviously prepared to work for a minimal salary. Availing themselves
of the services of the Post Office, Agricultural Bank, and Department of the Public Debt, the
deportees who had relatives in the capital received transfers of money from the capital that
redounded to the benefit of commerce in Rakka, as well as aid that was sent from Aleppo by
various channels.33 These overlapping interests did much to strengthen the bonds between
Arabs and Armenians; the appointment of three new kaymakams in short order did nothing
to change matters.
People’s situations within the community of deportees differed widely. Women raising
young children on their own were, of course, the most vulnerable: these undernourished
families did not have the means to rent lodgings and in some cases lived in the street. It is
in these circles, which could not maintain minimal health standards, that epidemics made
most of their victims. These people were regularly rounded up in the streets, transported to
the opposite bank of the river, and then sent to Zor.34 A few pharmacists and doctors among
the deportees, under the lead of Dr. Sarkis Selian from Arslanbeg, who had been appointed
municipal physician, and Harutiun Bakalian from Amasia, nevertheless managed to combat
disease and establish a basic health regimen. Our witness dwells in particular on the devotion
of Dr. Selian, who remained in Rakka until spring 1919.35 In this relatively peaceful desert
area, the deportees were not completely cut off from the rest of the world. They were author-
ized to carry on correspondence, albeit only in Turkish, and some even received newspapers,
such as the Istanbul daily Zhamanag36 – one of the rare papers in Armenian authorized to
appear during the war. In their day-to-day lives, deportees from the same localities usually
stuck together and accepted all forms of work that could help them earn enough to eat. For
example, a former teacher from the orphanage in Sıvas was employed as a porter, thus ensur-
ing the subsistence of both his family and his deceased brother’s.37
This Armenian society was in fact a disparate structure made up of specimens of the
Armenian communities in the provinces of Asia Minor and Thrace, speaking different dia-
lects and originating in all the different social classes. What they had in common was the
fact that they had all been torn from the environment with which they were familiar and
were living together in a world recomposed by the hazards of the deportations. Garabed
Kapigian’s subtle account leaves its reader with the impression that all were aware that they
were the last representatives of the society they had come from and had ended up in the
Syrian Desert, where they were barely separated from the road to death by the Euphrates.
As time went on, these peasants and city-dwellers came to know each other and established
congenial relations. In this nascent community, a few personalities clearly stood out – a
young Hnchak from Istanbul, Karnig Shahbazian, who had by some miracle gotten as far as
Rakka and taken up the jeweler’s trade; a resistance fighter from Urfa, Mgrdich Kiulahian,
who was adopted and given privileged treatment by the deportees.38
The marriage of the Istanbul party activist with a young woman from Erzerum no doubt
marked a new stage in the life of this community. Kapigian and the members of his house-
hold, where the bridegroom lived, acted as his parents and as such negotiated the condi-
tions of the marriage. At the same time, they brought the bride’s parents to agree that the
ceremony would respect practices customary in Sıvas. A village priest from Eskişehir, Father
Ghazaros, who was living in Rakka under his secular name, gladly undertook to celebrate
the match. The deportees were well aware of the symbolic dimension of this act. With the
help of Biblical references, they compared their situation with that of the Jews deported from
Babylon; the ruins of the ancient city were not all that far from Rakka.39
Another, more tragic human-interest story, which unfolded in spring 1916, is symptomatic
of the atmosphere prevailing in Rakka. In 1916, the waters of the Euphrates rose unusually

high; this, followed by a storm, led to the death on 18 April of a German officer who was
serving on a boat carrying ammunition and war supplies of other kinds to Baghdad. An
Armenian priest officiated at the religious ceremony, which culminated in a eulogy delivered
in German by Professor Sarkis Manugian, a teacher at the Sanasarian lycée in Erzerum,
before the stupefied German officers attending the funeral.40 One can readily imagine what
was going through the minds of both the Germans, who had been privileged witnesses of the
exactions perpetrated against the deportees on the other bank of the Euphrates and, from a
very different standpoint, those of the Armenians, who continued to wonder at the German
military’s apparent indifference to these crimes.
Kapigian, a careful observer, notes the spring 1916 arrival of four Turks in hunters’ uni-
forms. In his view, they were probably military men or delegates of the Ittihad sent to evalu-
ate the deportees’ situation. He finds support for his thesis in the fact that, during their
one-week’s stay, these men methodically visited the bazaar, which was mainly occupied by
Armenians, and also the cafes that the Armenians had opened.41 It is obviously impossible
to verify this hypothesis, but it is easy to imagine that the capital wanted a precise assessment
of the effects its policy was having on the deportees, as is shown by the many requests for
information transmitted to the local authorities by the interior minister.
Kapigian also confirms that the kaymakam, Fahri, was locked in a wrestling match with
the new mutesarif of Zor, Salih Zeki, throughout summer 1916. He also mentions the resist-
ance that Rakka’s Arab notables put up to the order to deport the Armenians from the city.42
He sheds a great deal of light as well on the antagonism that developed between the army
and the administration of the Sevkiyat around the question of the Armenian deportees – in
other words, between the ranking Turkish and German officers charged with defending the
Iraqi front on one hand, and the men of the Sevkiyat on the other, who, it was understood,
answered to the orders of the CUP and its paramilitary branch, the Special Organization.
At stake was obviously the Armenian deportees’ labor-power and savoir-faire, both of which
were indispensable to the military if it was to construct the basic structures it needed, espe-
cially the fortified stations stretching from one end of the Euphrates to the other, which were
to be used to stock ammunition and supplies. Rakka’s Armenians promptly grasped what was
involved and, in a period when the “grand massacres” of Der Zor had already begun (in July),
undertook to bribe the military commanders – and, simultaneously, the Sevkiyat memuri – in
order to make sure that they would be enrolled in the labor battalions.43 Needless to say, the
question was referred all the way up to the authorities in Istanbul. An “inspector general”
of the Sevkiyat, Hakkı Bey, who had been dispatched by the central authorities, arrived on
the Euphrates line in August 1916.44 Hakkı must have had orders from the very top of the
party-state, inasmuch as he succeeded in having his way with the military and personally
coordinated the systematic liquidation of all the concentration camps, from Meskene to as
far away as Zor. The operation was carried out in extremely violent fashion, as all witnesses
have noted. The special case represented by Rakka obviously did not escape the attention
of the “inspector,” who had probably got wind of the firm resistance shown by the local
notables. In November 1916, when the liquidation of the deportees who had been driven to
Zor was virtually complete, he went to Rakka and tried to convince the new kaymakam, Ali
Kemal, to hand the city’s Armenians over to him. The kaymakam cited the decree making
Rakka a zone of relegation for the deportees to justify his refusal to comply.45
A count of these refugees, carried out at the request of the mutesarif of Urfa, provides
interesting insights into the makeup of this population. Out of a total population of 8,000 to
9,000, there were a mere 400 Armenians from the vilayets of Sıvas, Harput, and Dyarbekir,
including 16 men aged between 16 and 60, as well as 45 boys under 15.46
The community in Rakka was fully abreast of the massacres perpetrated in Zor, which
claimed, as we shall see, 200,000 victims. They were informed of them thanks to reports

from Çerkez in Rakka, who went to take part in these orgies of violence, and also by the
survivors who had found refuge in the city. Shortly thereafter, the mufti invited the group
to convert “as a guarantee” of their collective future. A total of 30 families accepted the
offer. Dr. Levon Ohnigian, a native of Sıvas and former student of Garabed Kapigian’s, did
not hesitate to tell his teacher how much he had suffered after thus bowing to his fears.47
However that may be, the Armenian community in Rakka was allowed to remain in the
city, only to be then sucked into the serious crisis that affected the region when the fight-
ing with the British forces around Baghdad grew more intense. Like the local populace, the
Armenians too were victimized by the military requisitions that literally emptied Rakka
of its food reserves, precipitating a terrible famine. Large numbers of children were left to
fend for themselves as a result. The most generous deportees adopted them. Turkish and
German officers on their way to the Baghdad front also showed these children great gen-
erosity, but such occasional assistance was not enough to save their lives.48 The missionary
Elvesta Leslie, who traveled through Rakka in early spring 1917, observes that the deportees
there were dying like flies.49
In January–February 1917, the mutesarif of Urfa came to Rakka to recruit craftsmen; his
city, he said, was in desperate need of them. Seven hundred to 800 women and a few men
who had been reduced to dire poverty volunteered to go. One hour from Urfa, this convoy
was detained in a khan and invited to convert in order not to “offend” the religious sensibili-
ties of the Turkish population. Yet, even after this collective operation had been carried out,
the new arrivals were not well received. Had instructions been given to impose a boycott?
With the exception of a few specialists needed by Urfa and people who were recruited by
the city government and army, the Armenians were sent to Karaköprü to “build a road.”50 It
seems that this operation was a trick, the sole purpose of which was to eliminate a segment
of the Armenian deportees from Rakka.
The last event of note was the June 1917 mobilization of people of both sexes between the
ages of 15 and 60. Operation Yıldırim, the purpose of which was to defend the Iraqi front,
required massive supply transports via the Euphrates, which the military envisaged making
by şahtur, the well known “raft” used since antiquity for river transport. Apparently, no one
still knew how to make this kind of primitive vessel, and 2,500 deportees from Rakka were
sent to Birecik and Jerablus to accomplish the task. Five hundred more were sent to Meskene
for the same purpose. Among the remaining deportees, 600 were of draftable age.51 The last
of Rakka’s deportees were harassed by the new kaymakam; some fled to Aleppo. By October
1918, there were only 200 families left in Rakka.52
Der Zor, the Last Stop on the “Euphrates Line” and the
Culminating Point of the Second Phase of the Genocide
With the camps in Der Zor and its environs, we broach the final episode in the 1915–16
massacres, the culmination of the second phase of the genocide. This phase began after six
months of relative stability that might well have left the impression that the anti-Armenian
persecutions were over. Before the deportees in the Syrian Desert met their tragic end, Zor
had constituted the last stop for the Armenian survivors who reached it after crossing the
desert. Despite the killings that reduced the number of deportees in the groups moving
from one end of the line of the Euphrates to the other, camp after camp, tens of thou-
sands of deportees arrived in Zor. According to a German witness who related his trip there
to the German consul, Rössler, in early November 1915 there were already around 15,000
Armenians in this corner of the Syrian Desert in which “from one hundred fifty to two hun-
dred people die every day. This, incidentally, is what explains the fact that the city can absorb
the deportees, who continue to arrive by the thousands.”53 As a result of the attrition due to

the killings, but also of famine and epidemics, Zor by and large respected the orders to main-
tain a “reasonable” proportion of Armenians in the area. When the norms were exceeded,
the local authorities’ solution to the problem was to send small convoys to Mosul to restore
the balance. This situation lasted for as long as the influx of new arrivals was compensated,
as it were, by the more or less temporary placement of deportees in the concentration camps
in the Aleppo and Ras ul-Ayn regions. As a result, around 15,000 Armenians were able to
settle in Zor and even organize themselves there, while a transit camp was maintained, as in
Rakka, on the left bank of the Euphrates.
Aram Andonian states that before the war there existed in Zor an Armenian Catholic
church that served around 150 households, as well as to other churches belonging to Jacobite
and Nestorian Syriacs. He adds that, among the Syriacs, a local notable, Georges Sevkkar,
showed the deportees special generosity and mobilized all the influence he had to protect
them.54 What is more, Zor was set apart by the fact that its police chief was named Nerses
Kiurdian – a kind of anachronistic survival from times past. As in Rakka, the Armenians
had soon galvanized the local crafts and trade, encouraged by the mutesarif Ali Suad Bey,
whom most sources describe as a well-educated man with a benevolent attitude. Alongside
versatile people who were able to adapt rapidly to the new circumstances and find some sort
of occupation, there was also a considerable number of women and old people, accompanied
by children, eking out an existence under dreadful conditions in huts made of branches,
outside in city limits on the left bank of the Euphrates. When Salih Zeki was appointed to
succeed Ali Suad in July 1916, he judged that their situation was still too enviable:
The day he arrived, he toured the various neighborhoods, especially the one around
the market, where he was especially irritated to see that the Armenians were flourish-
ing. They had, in fact, created a veritable Armenia, and the market was largely in their
hands. Most were craftsmen, who were, generally speaking, active, offering an odd
contrast with the local population.55
Levon Shashian, a young Istanbul intellectual and comrade of Aram Andonian’s, with
whom Andonian had organized a communications network connecting the different con-
centration camps – the celebrated “human newspapers” constituted by the young orphans
who went back and forth between Meskene, Rakka, and Zor56 – organized a system for the
purchase and sale of the deportees’ assets. Thanks to it, the Armenians were not forced to
sell their property for next to nothing. Located near the town hall, Shashian’s little agency
was, above all, an office that handed out social assistance to the neediest. In exchange for
a few gifts, Shashian succeeded in winning the favor of certain influential personalities in
Zor, becoming an invulnerable figure who effectively served as the leader of the Armenian
colony.57 Thus, the Armenian deportees were in the process of settling permanently in this
small town in the Syrian Desert. However, as the course of events was to show, the Young
Turk government did not intend to allow them to put down roots there.
For lack of sources that might shed light on the CUP’s objectives, we have no choice but
to decrypt the strategy worked out and implemented by the Sub-Directorate of the Sevkiyat
through examination of its operations on the ground. The October–November 1915 estab-
lishment of the Sevkiyat’s operational structures in Aleppo, along with the creation of con-
centration camps, constituted the first stage of this plan. The aim was apparently to eliminate
the deportees by creating health conditions of the kind that bred disaster.
The second stage plainly came in January 1916, when the authorities decided to shut
down the concentration camps north of Aleppo and to begin expelling those interned there
down the line of the Euphrates.58 The third stage, the objective of which was the physical
elimination of the surviving deportees, was probably discussed and decided upon between

late February and early March 1916. A formulation used in a 22 February 1916 wire from
the interior minister,59 which the prosecution cited as incriminating evidence at the trial
of the Young Turk leaders, is one indication of this: “The text of the general communiqué
about the cessation of the deportation of the Armenians has given rise, in some places, to
an interpretation that has it that not a single Armenian more should be expelled from now
on. For this reason, a number of harmful individuals among the people in question have not
been sent away.” Marked by administrative formalism, this document is ultimately nothing
more than an order to resume expediting people to the south; it announces the second stage
in the plan. The Ottoman archives contain records showing that a total of 4,620 deportees
arrived in Zor on 20, 21, 24, and 25 February 1916.60 These figures give some sense of the rate
at which people were being expedited at the beginning of the operation designed to concen-
trate them in Zor. The first large-scale massacres perpetrated in Ras ul-Ayn from 21 March
on, which claimed 40,000 victims, represent the enactment of a decision that was necessarily
made earlier.61 The multiple deportation orders that in February and March 1916 affected
categories of Armenians who had previously been allowed to remain in their homes, such
as the families of soldiers, or Protestants, Catholics, craftsmen, and so on – we indicated the
regions involved in the Fourth Part of the present study – constitute another indication that
a decision had been made at the highest level of the party-state. The scope of the operation,
however, and the massive number of deportees to be displaced meant that much more time
was needed to complete the operations than had originally been anticipated: they went on
for eight months – that is, until December 1916.
According to information that a Turkish officer gave the German consul, Rössler, there
were in mid-April only 15,000 deportees in the city of Zor62 – that is, about as many as in fall
1915. This figure, however, probably fails to take into account those interned in the camp on
the left bank of the river. The mutesarif, Ali Suad, sought to respect the rules that allowed for
a maximum of 10 per cent of deportees in the various localities of the region. The German
vice-consul in Mosul informed Aleppo the German consulate that of the two convoys that
had left Zor on 15 April 1916 and taken two different routes, 2,500 people had arrived in
Mosul on 22 May, but that since then not a single convoy had,63 although 21 groups had set
out in that direction in summer 1916. In other words, only the convoys put on the road when
Suad was mutesarif reached their destination. The case of 2,000 people who left for Mosul in
mid-June and were brought back to Zor at the request of Salih Zeki, although that they had,
after a month’s march, reached the region of Sinjar, halfway to Mosul, would even seem to
indicate that the new mutesarif had been instructed not to let a single deportee escape.64
The liquidation in spring and summer 1916 of the concentration camps located on the
way to Zor of course led to an exceptional increase in the number of convoys arriving there.
The groundwork for this last stage was, moreover, plainly laid by an order that Talât Bey
sent to the prefecture of Aleppo on 29 June, to the effect that the last Armenians should be
expelled toward the line of the Euphrates.65 It was probably with a view to managing this con-
centration of people at Zor, then evaluated at around 200,000 deportees,66 that the interior
minister called on Salih Zeki, whose activities at Everek we have already discussed, to replace
the mutesarif Ali Suad in early July. The August arrival, on the line of the Euphrates, of the
Sevkiyat’s “inspector general,” Hakkı Bey, was also most probably an ancillary measure taken
by the central authorities in order to ensure that their orders would be properly carried out.67
Acting in the guise of a state official, this çete leader was, on reports by Artin Manasian of
Adabazar, Aram Manugian of Aslanbeg, and Hovsep Sinanian of Kütahya, the main organ-
izer of the deportations from Aleppo to Meskene and on to Zor. They accuse him of having
committed crimes against the convoys of deportees, set tents on fire, conducted Armenian
children under guard from Meskene to Zor to be burned alive, and, finally, of having organ-
ized the massacre of 1,500 children from the orphanage in Zor.68

Before going to Zor to assume his functions, Zeki spent several days early in July 1916 in
Aleppo (where he stayed in the Hotel Baron)69 in order to meet with the vali, Abdülhalik,
and the head of the Sub-Directorate for Deportees, Nuri. Thereafter, he went to Meskene.
According to Andonian, Zeki there met with the director of the camp, Hüseyin, and then
all the directors of the concentration camps set up along the line of the Euphrates as far
as Zor.70
According to Armenian sources, Zeki made a priority of liquidating the men still present
in Zor as soon as he arrived there, but clashed on this point with the military authorities,
who, like their counterparts in Rakka, were then recruiting able-bodied individuals to con-
struct the basic structures needed to implement Operation Yıldırim. According to informa-
tion gathered by Andonian, when Zor’s military governor learned that a first convoy of
18,000 people was about to be sent to Marât – that is, toward the killing fields in the Kabur
valley – Nureddin Bey sent a telegraph to his superior, General Halil Pasha, requesting per-
mission to create a battalion of worker-soldiers without delay. One thousand two hundred
family heads volunteered for the battalion. Assembled in Salihiye in the northernmost tip
of Zor, they were supposed to leave for Hamam to join the recruits from Rakka. It seems,
however, that Zeki refused to obey the military men’s orders. Significantly, he had these
recruits locked up in the hospital in Salihiye and then issued orders to send them to Marât
with their families – in other words, to massacre them. A second attempt to recruit soldiers
among the deportees in Zor, which involved 550 young men between the ages of 21 and
30, failed in much the same way. Assembled in the barracks in Kışla, also to be found in
the Salihiye quarter, these men were left without food or water for seven days; the survivors
were finally sent in chains to Suvar by the direct desert route. On the way, Chechen çetes
recruited by Zeki in Ras ul-Ayn killed them in small groups, despite an attempt at resist-
ance.71 Cast in the guise of recruitment campaigns, these two operations probably had no
other purpose than to liquidate all the adult deportees in Zor while eliminating all risk of
resistance. It cannot, however, be ruled out that the military authorities had indeed wanted
to make use of this labor-power, but came up against contrary orders from the Minister of
the Interior.
After getting rid of these men, Zeki surely drew the lessons of these initial massacres,
coming to the conclusion that he would need additional recruits to finish the job. In the
course of a short trip to Ras ul-Ayn, he recruited 100 more Chechen çetes from the ranks
of those who had taken part in the massacre of the inmates of the camp in Ras ul-Ayn a
few months earlier.72 With that, the genocidal apparatus had been set in motion. As soon
as some 10,000 deportees had been concentrated on the other side of the Zor Bridge, Zeki
organized their expulsion to Marât, another camp lying five hours to the south at some
distance from the Euphrates. As a general rule, the gendarmes there put the deportees
entrusted to them in the hands of Zeki’s Chechens, who set about selecting the people
who still possessed financial means: these people were methodically stripped of their prop-
erty and killed on the spot, so as not to risk leaving these resources to the Bedouins who
had been charged with accomplishing the final liquidation of these convoys deeper in the
desert. Marât was a camp in which the deportees were sorted out and put in new groups. Big
convoys were broken down into groups of 2,000 to 5,000 people and gradually expedited to
Suvar, a place in the Kabur Valley at a two days’ march by the desert route. In Suvar, the
last surviving men were separated for good – that is, killed in the surrounding area – from
the women and children. Thereafter, continuing to sort and divide, the authorities grouped
people together on the basis of their place of origin.73 Women and children, after spending
around ten days on a scanty diet in these desert areas, were put on the road to Sheddadiye,
where they were, as a rule, killed behind the hill that looked down on this Arab village.
A total of 21 convoys were dispatched from Zor, six big ones and 15 smaller ones. The first

convoy, comprising around 18,000 people, left the camp near the Zor Bridge around 15
July 1916, bound for Marât. Only one group of women escaped the common fate: led off to
Haseke, north of Sheddadiye, they were turned over to the local tribes, probably as booty.74
These operations were carried out by the Chechens; there were not, however, enough of
them to liquidate tens of thousands of deportees. Zeki therefore called on the services of
nomadic tribes living in the region lying between Marât and Sheddadiye, “especially the
Beggaras, who lived between Zor-Marât and Suvar, the Ageydids, who wandered between
Suvar and Sheddadiye, and the Jeburis, established in Sheddadiye and its environs; he daz-
zled them with the prospect of plunder.”75
Zeki had not only to contend with the problem of managing the convoys that came from
the north and, generally speaking, camped on the other side of the Zor Bridge, but also faced
the urgent task of clearing the city of Der Zor of the thousands of deportees who had been
living there for months. To be sure, he had already gotten rid of their leader, Levon Shashian,
and most of the heads of families, but there remained a large number of women and children
who had entered fully into the city’s social and economic life. Andonian provides a summary
of the way Zeki went about his work:
[Zeki] had the town criers announce that the city was full of rubbish, which could cause
epidemics; that the regions of Sheddadiye and Ras ul-Ayn been set aside as settlement
areas for [the deportees]; that they would no longer face privations there; that those
who had money could build homes there; and that the government would provide for
the poorest. The town criers also announced that on such-and-such a day, the people
living in such-and-such a neighborhood would have to set out, and should accord-
ingly make the necessary preparations for their journey. He first expelled the natives
of Zeitun from their homes, assembling them in the street in a pouring rain. On the
other side of the [Zor] bridge, Chechens had been gathering like ants, but no one knew
anything about that, for they had been subject to close surveillance and not one had
the right to leave [his neighborhood]. Zeki had also brought a group of Chechens into
the city and charged them with guarding his residence. One or two weeks later, Arabs
informed the Armenians that the Chechens had been mobilized to liquidate them.
In the space of around two weeks, all the Armenians in the city were gradually trans-
ferred to the area on the other side of the bridge. Only Armenian women who had
married a Muslim or were working as maids in Muslim homes were allowed to remain
behind. The local Arabs had a considerable number of Armenians in their homes and
could have taken in still more. Thanks to extremely thorough searches, however, these
Armenians were discovered. [Zeki] promulgated an order to the effect that no Arab
had a right to more than one [Armenian] woman as a wife or domestic; those who had
more would be brought before a court-martial. The others were registered. The domes-
tics were simply given passes guaranteeing them safe conduct, while those who had
married received documents identifying them as Muslims. Thereafter, whenever an
Armenian women was spotted at market, she was immediately arrested and subjected
to a serve interrogation.76
In this way, Zeki managed to expel a large proportion of the deportees who had settled
in Zor. He did not, however, manage to empty the city of all its Armenians. Those who
remained were harassed for several weeks.
In a 29 July 1916 dispatch, the German consul Rössler states that Zeki had taken rather
swift action. “On 16 July,” Rössler wrote, “we received a wire informing us that the Armenians
had been ordered to leave the city. On the 17th, all the clergymen and notables were thrown
into prison ... Those who were left behind are now to be liquidated tin their turn. It is quite

possible that this measure is bound up with the arrival of a new, pitiless mutesarif.”77 Late in
August, the interim consul, Hoffmann, reported that
on the official version of events, they were conducted to Mosul (a route on which
only a small minority has any chance of arriving at its destination); the general view,
however, is that they were murdered in the little valley lying southwest of Der Zor,
near the spot where the Kabur flows into the Euphrates. Gradually, all the Armenians
are being evacuated in groups of a few hundred people each and massacred by Çerkez
bands recruited especially for that purpose. A [German] officer received confirmation
of this information from an Arab eyewitness who had only recently been present at a
scene of this sort.78
These dispatches, however, represent no more than bits and pieces of what actually hap-
pened; only first-hand accounts by survivors can give a true picture of the events. We have
published a volume of such accounts.79
It is worth pausing over the liquidation, under dreadful conditions, of the 2,000 orphans
living in Zor and of a few hundred others whom Hakkı Bey had brought together on the
Meskene-Zor line. A witness has described the conditions under which these children had
been living in the “orphanage” in Zor:
Their miserable plight was beyond description. They walked about, for the most part,
barefoot and naked, the burden of fatigue on their shoulders, and lacking even the
spirit to run away and beg for a crust of bread in the vicinity. The arms and legs, as
well as the reddened shoulders of many of them were covered with untold wounds that
had become horrible sores. Since the wounds had not been treated, these sores were
devoured by worms that the poor little children pulled out with their fingers. Before
throwing them to the ground, however, they hesitated, standing stock still in order to
observe the fat bodies of these worms that wrapped themselves around the tips of their
fingers. They gazed at them as if they had the feeling that it was a terrible waste, as if
they would have liked to eat them: they were so hungry ... They endured, for a while,
a great many hardships in this hell that had been christened an orphanage, and were
then ... packed off in carts and put on the road.80
Long protected by the mayor of Zor, Haci Fadıl, these children survived on the strength of
their wits – scavenging something to eat, for example, from garbage and animal excrements –
before being sent to Suvar. There, some of them were blown up in their carts with dynamite
in an utterly uninhabited spot in the desert, while others were put in natural cavities in the
ground, sprinkled with kerosene, and burned alive. “Zeki Bey found a legal reason for send-
ing them off,” Andonian writes,
He had the müdir of Zor, a Turk, write a report indicating that, given the increase in
the orphans’ numbers, there was a danger that they would spread contagious diseases.
Only two children survived this massacre. One of them, thirteen or fourteen years
of age, was a boy from Rodosto [Tekirdağ] by the name of Onnig who had not died
of smoke inhalation because he had managed to withdraw to a remote corner of the
cavity and then make his way to the surface. This boy was able to return to Zor on his
own, but was so sick and had been so badly traumatized that he lived for only another
three or four months. The other survivor was a girl from Şabinkarahisar named Anna,
the sister of an army officer. She escaped death under the same conditions and was able
to flee all the way to Urfa.81

Investigations conducted after the Mudros armistice revealed that it was the police chief,
Mustafa Sidki, who supervised the slaughter of these children from the orphanage in Zor on
9 October 1916, followed on the 24th of the same month by that of some 2,000 more orphans
whom Hakkı had rounded up in the camps to the north. Here they had been tied together
in pairs and thrown into the Euphrates.82
According to information gathered by Aram Andonian, 192,750 people fell victim to the
massacres in Zor in the five months that it took Salih Zeki to cleanse the region, from July to
December 1916.83 The indictment of the Young Turk leaders, read out at the first session of
their trial on 27 April 1919, states that 195,750 people were murdered in Zor in 1916:84 82,000
people were liquidated between Marât and Sheddadiye and another 20,000 were liquidated
at the fort of Rav near Ana under the supervision of Lieutenant Türki Mahmud.85 A report
drawn up by the Information Bureau of the Armenian Patriarchate in Constantinople indi-
cates that, in addition to the mutesarif of Zor, Salih Zeki Bey, a Çerkez, the Young Turk deputy
from Zor, Muhammad Nuri; Şükrü Bey, Zeki’s assistant; Tiki Mahmud, the local chief of the
Sevkiyat; Muhammad, a mufti; Hasim Hatar, a magistrate; Ali Saib, the mutesarif’s secretary;
Muhammad El Kheder, the müdir of Hındin; Abdüllah Pasha; Ayntabli Mustafa Sidki, the
police chief; Bedri and Mahmud Abad, police lieutenants; Salaheddin, the military com-
mander; and Muhammad el Senia, an officer in the gendarmerie, were mainly responsible
for organizing the liquidation of more than 195,000 Armenian deportees. They were aided
and abetted by several notables from Zor: Yasin, the son of the mufti Muhammad; Hasan
Muhammad; Halif Abdüllah; Helal el Kerzat; Halid Tetarye; Hamad; Mustafa Natar; and
Yapusli Abdüllah. The çete chiefs who directed the massacres were Yeas Yekta (a Chechen
from Heczet), Süleyman Sadullah (from Fevren), Muhammad Gaza (from Murad), Şeyh
Süleyman (from Sıvad), Rebban Lefe, and the şeyh of Yegidar.86
Patriarch Zaven traveled through the city of Zor on 27 September on his way into exile.
He was lodged in the town hall and received with a degree of respect by Salih Zeki. There,
he even encountered a dozen priests from western Anatolia, apparently the last surviving
Armenian men in Zor.87 On the other hand, further south in Miadin, where Zaven arrived
on 29 September, he observed that all the Armenians had been expelled, as had all those in
Abukemal, where he had encountered (on Sunday, 1 October) only a boy from Aslanbeg, a
blacksmith from Adabazar, and a few bakers who had been allowed to stay behind because
they were indispensable. The next day he discovered, first in Kayim and then in Nehiye,
six worker-soldiers from a battalion of 150 Armenians and 100 Greeks, most of them from
Afionkarahisar and Kütahya, who were constructing a road to Ana. He learned that, two
months earlier, the 1,600 Armenians there had been deported to Der Zor. Eight bakers,
blacksmith, and masons and their families had, however, been allowed to remain behind,
along with three female “servants” of the kaymakam’s from Urfa, and two wagon-drivers from
Ayntab and Tarsus.88 In other words, a number of the Armenians who had been sent toward
Mosul had thronged into these localities before being wiped out in summer 1916.
In the following months, however, the authorities brought deportees of the Hama-Homs-
Damascus line back into the region. Odian, who spent more than a year in Hama, was
himself deported to Zor by way of Aleppo early in 1917. On his way there, he observed that
1,500 Armenians were still living in Meskene;89 they were presumably deportees from Rakka
who had been working for the army. Further south, in Hamam, he met Hayg Goshgarian, a
bookseller and the editor of the humor magazine Gigo, as well as Sahag Mesrob, who had just
arrived.90 In Zor, these men were recruited as street repairmen, although they were rather
more accustomed to wielding the pen.91 The Armenian presence in Zor had by then been
reduced to a young woman from Adabazar who had escaped the massacres in Marât and
been taken to wife by a gypsy with whom she exhibited a monkey and bears, and 100 ema-
ciated Armenians held in the konak in Zor and awaiting their departure for Ana.92 Odian

and his companions, who were relegated to Miadin somewhat later, where 100 survivors
of the massacres in Marât were also living, somehow eked out an existence in this village
in the midst of the desert.93 In May 1917, the government had Odian brought to Busara, a
few dozen kilometers south of Zor. He later wrote that one year earlier the little town had
boasted as many as 8,000 to 10,000 Armenians; they had been massacred at Suvar and
Sheddadiye by the Chechen çetes, although a few Armenians were still left there. The müdir,
for example, was holding a young woman, a little girl, and a 14-year-old adolescent from a
well-to-do Bursa family that had been massacred; all three had been sold by Chechens.94
Odian, who did not know Arabic and was little used to this country way of life, was hard
put to find a place in this society. Like many others, he had gotten wind of the benevolence
with which the Yezidis of Sinjar treated Armenian refugees and dreamed of going there.
Notwithstanding the risks involved, he set out on this long journey, which would lead him
down the banks of the Euphrates to Baghdad disguised as an Arab beggar. Promptly robbed
by two Bedouins, who took money and tobacco from him, he was thereafter stripped of all
his clothes and forced to return naked to Busara, where this intellectual found himself liter-
ally dying of boredom.95 His second attempt to escape his bitter fate led him, on 31 August
1917, to Zor, where his friends Sahag Mesrob and Hayg Goshgarian were still living. With
their help, he found work in a military enterprise in which some 20 Armenians from Ayntab
worked manufacturing uniforms. Around 400 women, primarily widows, were still to be
found in the city.96 Shortly thereafter, Odian was drafted as a translator for Zor’s military
commander, who was not able to communicate with the German officers serving there.97
Now sporting a uniform, Odian took advantage of his good knowledge of French at meetings
between Turkish and German soldiers.98 Somewhat later, he even became the ordonnance
(assistant) of the military commander Edwal, a former Swedish officer in the Iranian gen-
darmerie and the commander of the German garrison in Zor.99 One can readily imagine the
oddity of his situation, which had made an Armenian exile the indispensable interpreter at
meetings between Turkish and German military men. Odian was, moreover, a witness to the
sharp tensions between the German officers and the Turkish civilian authorities, especially
over the Armenian wagon-drivers who had been given responsibility for military transports
between Aleppo and Zor, contrary to the authorities’ wishes.100 The authorities also prohib-
ited the Armenians working in the German barracks from leaving the city or even crossing
the bridge across the Euphrates.101 The mutesarif repeatedly demanded, Odian observes, that
the Armenians working for the Germans be turned over to him, reminding the Turkish offic-
ers that Armenians were not allowed to serve in the army. The antagonism between civilian
and military authorities over the status of the Armenians is palpable here. Moreover, the local
commander pointed out to the high-ranking civilian officials that a number of Armenians
were serving in all the Ottoman armies as doctors, pharmacists, and dentists and that no
objections had been heard from the War Ministry.102 According to Odian, the nephew of
the former parliamentary deputy Armen Garo was the last of the deportees from Istanbul
to be murdered in the prison in Zor, on orders from the police chief Ayntablı Mustafa Sidki;
he was killed in January 1918, at the moment that news of the fall of Jerusalem reached the
city. The famine that broke out here, Odian further reports, drove a number of women and
children living among the Bedouins to rally in Zor. After providing relief to an emaciated
woman from Istanbul, Odian took charge of three brothers from Smyrna, the Atamians, who
had until then been living as refugees in the Suvar area. When the British forces reached
Ana and the Germans began to evacuate their garrison in Zor, the lives of the Armenians
working there were endangered, the more so as the Germans never considered taking them
with them.103 Basing his estimate on the “best available sources,” Odian puts the number of
Armenians living in Arab and Turkish homes in Zor at this time, such as that of the head of
the post office or of the mayor, at around 2,000, to which we must add some 10,000 Arabized

children. There was not a police officer or government official who was not keeping a woman
from Harput, Bursa, Bardizag, Adabazar, Ismit, or Ayntab in his house.104
The World of the Concentration Camps

Our inventory of the 20 or so concentration camps set up by the Sub-Directorate of the
Sevkiyat in the northern part of the vilayet of Aleppo, on both sides of the Amanus moun-
tains along the trajectory of the Bagdadbahn in Ras ul-Ayn, and on the line of the Euphrates,
has not allowed us to broach certain crucial points – who ran these camps, how they were
organized, and what their social life was like. Without making any claim to exhaust the sub-
ject, which calls for a much more thoroughgoing study, we think it is useful to sketch a few
essential points as have been suggested by the many survivors’ accounts that we have pub-
lished.105 After examining, in the fourth part of the present book, the day-to-day experience
of a few convoys of deportees bound for the south, we now need to observe from the inside
the concentration camps, which functioned like a system of connecting vessels. This exami-
nation is all the more necessary as around 700,000 people passed through these camps.
Those in Charge of the Camps

In most survivors’ accounts, the armed men who escorted the convoys are identified either as
“gendarmes” or as Çerkez or Chechen çetes. However, on the basis of the information found
in these accounts, it can be said that the generic term “gendarme” used by the deportees
bears in the present case on people recruited locally, in Syria or Mesopotamia, as “gen-
darmes,” leaders of convoys, or camp directors, by the Sub-Directorate for Deportees in
Aleppo. The same accounts show that such recruitment proceeded in line with methods like
the ones employed by the Special Organization: irregular militiamen and auxiliaries were
recruited from among common-law criminals, notables, and local Arab, Çerkez, or Chechen
tribes. In other words, the Sub-Directorate for Deportees operated the same way the Special
Organization did in this respect, behind a legal facade: it supposedly answered to the Interior
Ministry, yet in fact clearly seems to have been under the direct authority of the CUP’s
Central Committee or that of the Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa. In this connection, it is not really sur-
prising to see that the collection of documents published by the Başbakanlik Develt Arşivleri
contains virtually no telegrams from the General Director of Deportations, Şükrü Bey, to his
subordinate Nuri. This suggests, at the very least, that the orders received in Aleppo came
directly from another agency.
The personnel recruited in this fashion basically constituted two corps: one was responsi-
ble for the convoys, the other for the camps. The convoys were conducted by a leader and an
escort of auxiliaries whom the deportees call “gendarmes.” As for the camps, they were run
by a director (Sevkiyat-ı müdürü), backed up by coworkers dispatched from Aleppo or a locally
recruited staff. The director, moreover, chose a supervisor and guards from the ranks of the
Armenian deportees, offering, in exchange for their services, to provide them with food and
guarantees that they would not be killed. These Armenians were responsible, notably, for
watching over the camps at night. The logic informing the selection of supervisors seems to
have been to recruit them from the most modest social strata, so as to exacerbate the already
existing antagonism between the affluent deportees – that is, those who could still buy them-
selves something to eat, and the others, who were literally starving to death. By all accounts,
these Armenian auxiliaries were just as brutal as their “Ottoman” colleagues and particularly
aggressive toward their compatriots. One hardly need say that special circumstances of this
kind favored the emergence of the basest instincts and promoted boundless aggressiveness
among the deportees. This aggressiveness came on top of the traditional social antagonisms

and ran through all social groups, as if the victims blamed each other for the fate to which
their executioners were subjecting them.
There were, finally, recruits of whom the deportees were less critical: these were the
gravediggers, whose task it was to go from tent to tent every morning and collect the bodies –
on average, 200 per day and per camp – of the people who had died the previous night, in
order to bury them in the mass graves that were dug in the immediate vicinity of each camp.
In exchange for their work, the gravediggers were given food and were temporarily exempted
from further deportation. Obviously, the information provided by these recruits constitutes
one of our most reliable sources when it comes to evaluating the number of victims in their
respective camps. When priests were to be found in a camp, they took on the task of celebrat-
ing simplified funeral services.
The Organization of the Camps and Social Life

Except for the two transit centers in the immediate vicinity of Aleppo, the concentration
camps were all located in desert areas and always outside towns and villages, access to which
was strictly controlled. To enter a city was to have a chance to vanish into the crowd and,
especially, to bribe someone living there into hiding one. In fact, the camps usually consisted
of nothing more than a bare stretch of land without facilities of any kind. They were gener-
ally located a quarter or half hour’s march from a small village or town and covered with a
multitude of “tents” made of different pieces of cloth sewn together that were pressed one up
against the next for reasons of security. We have already observed that the camps were often
attacked at night by local tribes and that it was not at all common for the director of a camp
to see effectively to the security of those under his “administration.”
As for food and supplies, no provisions had been made to provide the deportees with
them, rare exceptions aside. The exiles themselves had to obtain the bare necessities from
the local population. In exchange for a generous payment to the director of the camp, newly
minted merchants sold flour, bread, or even water at exorbitant prices to the deportees, who
had no choice but to buy what they were offered at any price simply in order to survive. Thus,
a sort of hierarchy of misery was established. Only the most “well-to-do” could eat as much
as they liked; the others were reduced to begging, with small success.
As for lodging, the least needy could also buy themselves a decent tent – that is, a form
of shelter capable of protecting them somewhat from storms or the heat of the sun in these
harsh regions characterized by sharp climactic variations. We also know that some managed
to hide in the Arab villages if they had paid their “hosts” a substantial rent.
Money was also the reason for big differences in the treatment meted out to the deportees.
By paying the director of their camp a kind of fee ensuring the right to stay put, the most
affluent could avoid being put immediately in one of the convoys that were regularly sent
south toward death in order to make room for new arrivals, especially when the “natural
mortality rate” was not high enough to lighten the camp population sufficiently. Every time
a convoy was scheduled to set out, the director had an opportunity to make money. On this
basis, a relation of shared interest was established between the director and some of those he
“administered”: the director had an obvious interest in keeping these families in his camp
as long as he could, or at least as long as they could find the means to satisfy his appetites.
That is why directors rather frequently failed to comply with the orders they received from
Aleppo, keeping the deportees in a camp even though they had been told to evacuate it. The
situation is comparable to the problems that the Sub-Directorate for Deportees encountered
when it tried to dislodge the tens of thousands of Armenians who had managed to “take
refuge” in the Arab villages north of Aleppo and whom the local peasants refused to hand
over because they represented a non-negligible source of revenue. Andonian, too, escaped

the common fate because he was, as he readily confesses, protected by an affluent family that
had succeeded in negotiating its survival, taking refuge in Aleppo. Alongside these excep-
tions, however, among whom many of the survivors were to be found, how many poor people
ended up in mass graves in Islahiye, Meskene, or Ras ul-Ayn, after enduring, in the case of
the youngest and most resilient, months of hell spent looking daily for something, anything,
to eat? How many cases of cannibalism were there? How many mothers ate their children or
sold them to some nomad for a crust of bread? Famine, malnutrition, and unspeakable hygi-
enic conditions seem to have been among the panoply of measures that the Sub-Directorate
for Deportees took to eliminate these “new migrants,” to whom the authorities had officially
assigned the task of making the deserts of Syria and Mesopotamia bloom, although only a
few thousand Bedouins actually managed to survive there. By itself, the image of orphaned
or abandoned children digging through animal excrements in search a few grains of barley
with which to ensure their survival sums up the situation of those interned in the desert.
Alongside the dramas of daily life, of death stalking its victims day and night and haunt-
ing people’s minds, of the petty ignominies that were the price of survival, we must also
point to certain aspects revelatory of a rather impressive desire to survive and a sense of
organization and talent for adaptation that seems to have been second nature for a number
of deportees. The information that Andonian provides about the system of communication
set up by a few intellectuals – the “living newspapers,” children of ages 10 or 12 who went
back and forth between the camps to ensure an exchange of information – offers an excellent
illustration of the kind of organization established by the deportees, despite the appalling
conditions reigning in the camps, in an attempt to avoid the moral traps set for them. In the
same register, we might also point to the admirable work accomplished in Der Zor by the
young Istanbul intellectual Levon Shashian, who directed a kind of humanitarian organiza-
tion that sought to ensure the deportees’ survival.
Finally, how can one fail to be impressed, as was Cevdet when he traveled through the
area in late February 1916, by the handful of Armenians in Ras ul-Ayn who, turning the
kaymakam’s benevolence (or sense of his own interests to advantage), succeeded in the few
months accorded them in settling down and even instilling life and activity into a poverty-
stricken little village? Even if political contingencies had an impact on their fate, “Cemal
Pasha’s Armenians,” whose story we shall examine later, were probably spared in part because
they represented a non-negligible potential for development in these zones which the Turkish
general dreamed of ruling. Deported in convoys comprising people from the same town or
village, subject to incessant attacks from çetes or the tribes living in the regions through
which they passed, the survivors of the Syrian or Mesopotamian deserts always maintained,
despite circumstances at the limits of the human, a strong sense of solidarity with those
of their compatriots who came from the same region. Geographical origins constituted, in
these years of suffering, a sort of major reference point in the social organization of the
Armenian deportees.

Chapter 6
The Deportees on the

Hama-Homs-Damascus-Dera’a-
Jerusalem-Amman-Maan Line
A
s we have seen, the system established in October 1915 by the Sub-Directorate for
Deportees had soon ruled out sending convoys southward, after those consisting
mainly of Cilicians had been expedited in that direction.1 On this route, which
was more directly under the jurisdiction of the commander-in-chief of the Fourth Army
Cemal Pasha, there was never any question of creating concentration camps; the deportees
were simply widely dispersed among localities in the countryside and care was taken that
they not make up more than 10 per cent of the total population. This marginal deportation
route, which also began in Aleppo, passed through Hama, Homs, Damascus, Jerusalem, and
Amman, in that order; moreover, it fed into the Jebel Druze and the western Hauran. As
early as 18 July 1915, in a circular, Mehmed Talât’s right-hand man informed the prefects
in the area that the southern part of the vilayet of Aleppo and the western regions of the
Hauran and Kerek (or Karak, a locality slightly to the south of the Dead Sea) had been
chosen as zones of relegation for the Armenian deportees.2 These instructions seem to have
been scrupulously respected: a 2 October 1915 telegram probably sent by the vali of Sham –
that is, Damascus – to the interior minister reveals that 21,000 deportees had arrived in the
vilayet: 8,858 had been sent to Kerek and 10,289 to the Hauran, while 494 women had been
dispersed in the kazas of Kuneytra, Bâlbek, Tebek, and Doma.3 A 20 September 1915 report
by the American consul in Damascus, Greg Young, confirms these official facts and figures.
The report states that since 12 August, from two to three convoys arrived weekly, containing
between a few hundred to 2,000 deportees, all of whom were concentrated in the outskirts
of Damascus in Kahdem. Kahdem, a vast, dry field, was for Damascus what the camps of
Sibil and Karlık were for Aleppo.4 According to Young, who went to this camp because he
wanted to make a more precise assessment of the deportees’ situation – the camp’s director
received him with “courtesy,” but did not allow him to enter the camp – there were only a few
makeshift tents there, together with a multitude in rags. Young’s informants put the number
of deportees who had so far arrived in Damascus at 22,000. Finally, in the same dispatch, the
consul revealed that, according to “well informed sources,” another 30,000 Armenians were
then interned in a camp in Homs.5 A 28 October 1915 report that refers to accounts by Arab
deputies in the Ottoman parliament states that “the train brings large numbers of Armenians
to the mountain areas and leaves them there without food or water ... We saw many women,
old people and children dying of hunger the length of the railway.”6 The American consul in
Aleppo, Jackson, wondered in a report that he sent to his ambassador on 29 September how
he might help the deportees, in view of the fact that “they are rapidly pushed on to Hama,
Homs, Damascus, etc. and on to Amman.”7 In attachments to this report, the American

diplomat estimated the number of Armenians who had been sent to the Damascus region
before late September 1915 at 40,300, and the number of children among them at 6,150.8 The
rate at which conveys were sent south seems, moreover, to have remained fairly high in the
following weeks, inasmuch as Jackson, again, counted, “from the reliable sources,” 132,000
deportees in February 1916, of whom more than 100,000 found themselves in the areas that
extended from Damascus to Maan (probably included in this figure were the deportees in
the camps of Jebel Druze, the western Hauran, Jerusalem, Kerek, and Amman), another
12,000 in Hama and its environs, and 20,000 more in Homs and the vicinity.9 Unlike their
compatriots on the lines of the Euphrates and Ras ul-Ayn-Mosul, these deportees were not
subjected to systematic liquidation.
The Fourth Army’s need for to recruit qualified personnel seems to have enabled a few
thousand additional deportees to move south, despite the ban imposed in November. Yervant
Odian, who spent time in the camp in Sibil in late November 1915, was able to introduce
himself into a convoy of one thousand one hundred craftsmen, with their wives and chil-
dren, who had been recruited by the army.10 These deportees, from Edirne, Bardizag, Adana,
Ayntab, and Kayseri, with their distinct dialects, were sent south in a freight train, 100 to a
car – that is, in extremely crowded conditions: it was impossible to sit down, and there were
many sick people in the group. All were well aware that they had cheated death.11
The Armenian Deportees in Damascus

In the more southerly city of Damascus, too, there was a heavy concentration of depor-
tees who had managed to avoid the line of the Euphrates and the Mesopotamian desert.
As in Homs and Hama, certain deportees who had a reputation as skilled craftsmen were
recruited to serve further north on the orders of the Fourth Army command and were sent
to Damascus to help meet the Ottoman army’s needs for various kinds of equipment. All
knew that it was a privilege to reach Damascus, a gauge of survival,12 all the more so as the
city had before the war boasted an Armenian community of some 400 members13 who were
likely to help the new arrivals.
The Armenian church and its dependencies were soon filled with a multitude of refugees.
During a November 1916 visit to Damascus, Bishop Yeghishe Chilingirian put the number
of deportees in the city at more than 20,000. One year later, in November 1917, he estimated
their numbers at 30,000, and observed that the deportees had adapted well to local life. Thus,
he noted that Armenian merchants rather largely dominated the market in Bab Tuma in the
Christian quarter.14 The immense majority of deportees, however, worked in enterprises run
by the army or indispensable from its point of view, such as the Bagdadbahn Company. One
well-known firm of this sort was a railroad equipment factory that employed 150 Armenians,
who represented one-fifth of its labor force.15 After a few months, during which these depor-
tees in Damascus were left more or less in peace, they were confronted with a painful choice:
either to convert to Islam or set out again for an unknown destination.16
Like Ahmed Cemal, the vali of Damascus, Tahsin Bey, who had previously been the vali
of Erzerum, was more interested in exploiting these deportees’ labor-power than in liquidating
them. Chilingirian notes that the vali had opened an orphanage for homeless children and a
shelter for widows in which the women did embroidery or made carpets17 without having to
face threats of expulsion.18 According to Patriarch Zaven, the Constantinople Patriarchate
sent money to vartabed Aristages Khachadurian of the Jerusalem congregation in order to
provide relief to the neediest deportees, including, he says, several hundred intellectuals,
writers, and elementary and secondary school teachers.19 This suggests that Aleppo’s under-
ground network had succeeded in preventing these people from being sent down the line of
the Euphrates and having them dispatched to Damascus instead. In addition to the widows

Deportees on the Hama-Homs-Damascus Line 675
and orphans cared for in the institutions created by the vali, a commission for social welfare
set up by the community took the poorest families and women without support in hand.20
In November 1917, in the wake of a joint Arab-British offensive on the Palestinian front,
the authorities transferred the patriarch-catholicos, Sahag Khabayan, and the former patri-
arch, Malakia Ormanian, from Jerusalem to Damascus.21 Khabayan had become the head
of the Armenian millet after the dissolution of the Constantinople Patriarchate (we shall
discuss these changes below). In February 1918, however, after the Ottoman army had been
dealt a series of defeats, Damascus was threatened in its turn, and the situation of its inhabit-
ants suddenly worsened. The Arab rebellion had made it difficult to bring food and supplies
into the city, and prices had soared.22 On the morning of 2 March, the police and army
rounded up all the Armenians in the city without advance notice, on the pretext that they
had a mobilization order. The 1,700 women and orphans who had survived on state aid until
then ceased to receive food.23 The fact that the orphanage and widows’ shelter were no
longer receiving food can be blamed on the military situation, but the “mobilization” of the
men in the face of the Arab-British advance seems rather to indicate that the civilian and
military authorities had decided to liquidate them before the enemy arrived.
The Armenian Patriarchate of Jerusalem and the Deportees

In Jerusalem, the Armenian Patriarchate was on the eve of the war going through an acute
crisis of the sort that was endemic to this venerable institution. The former Patriarch Malakia
Ormanian had been delegated as an inspector in Jerusalem by the Armenian authorities in
Constantinople. His mission was to restore order to the Monastery of Saint James and put
its finances back on a sound footing. After a stop in Alexandria, where he was received by
Boghos Nubar on 3/16 May 1914, Ormanian bent himself to his task.24 In fall 1915, he had to
take in 80 notables from Adana with their families: as a special favor, Cemal had authorized
these Armenians to move into apartments in the Patriarchal monastery that were tradition-
ally reserved for pilgrims.25
On 9 November 1915, the catholicos and his entourage, who had been expelled from
Aleppo by the vali Mustafa Abdülhalik, was finally authorized, on special orders from Cemal
Pasha, to take up residence in the Monastery of Saint James.26 It appears that, until April
1917, the institution had been more or less spared. On 25 April, all the students in the
Patriarchal seminary were “mobilized” and the seminary was shut down as a result;27 as was
just noted, the Armenian religious dignitaries were evacuated to Damascus in November
of the same year. According to information provided by a teacher who had taken refuge in
Jerusalem, hundreds of orphans were living in the city’s streets without any form of aid in
March 1918, and would continue to do so until war’s end.28 Presumably, the fact that the
superiors of the Congregation of Saint James were absent had prevented the venerable insti-
tution from taking these children into its care.
The Armenian Orphans in Ayntura

Before the war, Beirut was, with Damascus, one of the rare cities in the region that boasted
an Armenian colony; the small community here numbered 1,500. Not far from the city, in
Ayntura, the authorities had opened a “Turkish” orphanage in what had formerly been a
French monastery; it had been put in the hands of one of the Young Turk movement’s muses,
Halide Edip. This well-supported model institution was a kind of laboratory in which Edip
endeavored to Turkify the children who had been entrusted to her care – that is, around one
thousand “rebaptized” Armenian orphans, but also a few Kurdish children. The missionary
Harriet Fischer, who paid a visit to the orphanage in January-February 1916, reports that the

Young Turk feminist finally told her, in the course of a conversation about the fate meted
out to the Armenians: “It is our nation or the Armenians’.” “They are children,” Edip added;
“they don’t know what religion means.”29 It was to this institution that children from the
orphanage directed by Beatrice Rohner in Aleppo were transferred after the Aleppo orphan-
age was shut down by the Ottoman government in February 1917.30
The Armenian Deportees in Hama and Homs

The situation was palpably different in an Arab city such as Hama, which had 60,000 to
70,000 inhabitants, many of whom were orthodox Syriac Christians.31 A majority of the
deportees who ended up here in autumn 1915 were from Cilicia. A good many of them were
the victims of epidemics or malnutrition; others were under heavy pressure from the authori-
ties, whose objective was to convert them to Islam by force.32
Odian, who arrived in Hama on 21 December 1915, observes that around 5,000
Armenians from Adana, Kayseri, Ayntab, and Antioch had preceded him there.33 Before
long, half of the shops in the bazaar were in the hands of Armenians from Adana and
Ayntab who had not endured the suffering inflicted on the others and had even been able
to sell some of their assets before leaving. Pharmacists, dentists, tinsmiths, and so on pro-
vided services to the city, which faced a shortage of qualified personnel. Deportees opened
the first photographer’s shop and the first restaurants in town in the same period. Odian
notes that, when Enver or Cemal traveled through Hama, the local authorities appealed to
Armenians to organize a reception. But, alongside these quick-witted deportees, how many
others found themselves in a terrible predicament – the 30 young women from Samsun, for
instance, who reached Hama only after going through an ordeal lasting several months?34
Our witness also points to rather exceptional cases, such as that of a convoy of 30 men from
Kayseri, dentists and artisans whose wives, still in their homes, had either converted or been
deported to Rakka. Because the overriding priority was to survive, and because a specialty
such as medicine was often the ticket to survival, Odian writes that one of the men even
palmed himself off as a doctor and prescribed his admiring patients remedies that were any-
thing but orthodox. This determined charlatan was so successful that he was named to the
post of municipal physician in Hama. There Odian also crossed paths with families from
Ismit and notables from Adana.35
The deportees were all but cut off from the rest of the world here. The rare information
that reached them was provided by the Agence Ottomane’s French-language dispatches,
which a reading cabinet created by the Germans made available to the deportees who spoke
French and also to Armenian officers, doctors, and, especially, pharmacists who arrived from
Constantinople on their way to the Palestinian front.36
There were only a few hundred Armenian men in Hama. They were given only a few
months’ respite. Early in April 1916, roundups of Armenians were organized in Hama’s
streets by the city’s military commander, Osman Bey: the official purpose of these actions
was to mobilized men between the ages of 18 and 45. The decision was, however, post-
poned on Cemal’s orders.37 In July 1916, the deportees were abruptly confronted with another
threat. It was proffered by the president of the Young Turk club, Şevket Bey, who proposed
to Islamicize them. The mutesarif, Hayri Feruzan, a former colonel who was reputed to be
well intentioned, a man “whose advice revealed the danger that threatened the deportees,”
pointed out to the Armenian notables that if they refused this offer they could no longer
remain in Hama. While we have precise information about conversions organized in one
place or another, Odian’s account allows us to observe in detail how the deportees in Hama
reacted to this offer, as well as the methods used to convince them to convert. By itself, the
fact that the proposition came from the local Young Turk chief is revelatory.

The deportees were given two days to make up their minds. Initially, they made a collec-
tive decision to refuse the offer. According to Odian, the mutesarif strongly insisted, confess-
ing to his interlocutors that he was ashamed to make such a request of them but adding that
it was the only way to save them and that their conversion would in any case be temporary.
In the meantime, the deportees in Hama learned that collective conversions had begun in
Homs.38 Patriarch Zaven’s advice was certainly sought: he confides in his memoirs that he
suggested to the endangered deportees to accept while waiting for the storm to blow over.39
Odian does not tell us whether the patriarch’s opinion decided the matter, but notes that
a majority of the Armenians showed a willingness to accept the offer to “save its skin.” A
member of the Unionist Central Committee who was in Damascus, Ali Kemal, made a
personal appearance in Hama in order to supervise the conversion, which must obviously
be understood as a sign of adhesion to Turkism. Those who showed the greatest alarm were
men who headed families; they apparently feared that their daughters would soon face forced
marriages.
Under duress, Odian became Aziz Nuri and even received identity papers under that
name. To some extent as an act of defiance, and doubtless even more as a sign of deri-
sion, Odian notes that all the men took Abdüllah as their patronymic. Three priests and
two Protestant ministers who were suspected of having urged their compatriots to resist
conversion were arrested just before the commencement of the Islamicization procedures,
which took place in Hama’s Young Turk club.40 Of the 5,000 deportees in the city, only 30
Armenian women from Samsun categorically refused to give in. “They killed our husbands
and children,” they exclaimed, “and carried off our daughters; let them kill us now.” The
Arab population was apparently shocked by these methods and refused to grant access to the
mosques to these converts, who were spared circumcision for the moment, the appropriate
period for that ceremony being March or April.41 The case of Levon Mozian, which Odian
describes, is one of the most interesting. Mozian, who belonged to the underground network
working on the Intilli construction site of the Bagdadbahn, managed to escape when the
Armenian workers were liquidated and took refuge in Hama in August 1916.42 After Odian
was arrested in Mersin – considered to be a deserter, he was also accused of spying for the
British – and interned in Tarsus with a German driver who was also arrested as an English
spy, although no one could converse with him, his talents as an interpreter saved his life. In
Adana, he met Levon Zakarian, alias Ali Haydar, an inspector in the Department of the
Public Debt who traveled back and forth between Adana and Beirut or Damascus. Thanks
to Zakarian, Mozian was able to go to Hama, where he became, under the name of Ali
Nureddin, a mathematics teacher in the city’s only middle school.43 The travels of this com-
mitted journalist, who spoke French and knew how to live by his wits, doubtlessly offer some
sense of the way deportees in this category managed to survive.
Another group of survivors was made up of the 2,000 to 3,000 children, principally girls
between the ages of four and eight, who were in the hands of Arab families from Hama, and
also street urchins who sought to survive by any and all means. Among them, an 11-year-old
boy caught Odian’s attention, having survived by selling his younger sister to couples who
wanted children, then retrieving her and selling her again.44
A number of women without families survived by working as domestics in Greek Melchite
and Syriac homes in the city. In early 1917, the new mutesarif had them all rounded up on the
pretext that they had all converted to Islam and could no longer work in Christian families.45
One last group straggled into Hama late in 1916. Involved here were a few people who had
escaped the massacres of Der Zor by miracle;46 their accounts of what they had experienced
terrified the Armenians who had been relegated to Hama.
The situation of these deportees was then especially insecure. All of them were at the
mercy of the local authorities and, above all, the orders from the central authorities, who

continued to pay close attention to the fate of the “lucky ones” dispatched down the route
leading south.
Despite local conditions that hardly favored humanitarian action, in 1917 the depor-
tees personally took in hand around 150 orphans in Hama. The children were lodged in
a makeshift shelter. Once again, Zollinger, the philanthropist from Aleppo, stepped in to
save lives: the monthly stipends of from 60 to 100 Turkish pounds that he provided for
the orphans’ support were instrumental to their survival. For lack of funds, about the same
number of children were condemned to wander through the city’s streets.47 When the armi-
stice was declared, the number of Armenian deportees in the region of Hama was estimated
at 10,000.48
In the neighboring city of Homs, estimates put the number of surviving Armenians in the
same period at between 2,000 and 3,000. These Armenians, too, had been converted under
duress. Most of them survived by working in military firms until the British troops and the
Arab forces arrived in the area.49
The Deportees Relegated to Jordan and the Hauran

In addition to the zones of relegation in Syria that we have just discussed, deportees were
sent to several other regions further south. Patriarch Zaven reports that 1,000 families had
been scattered throughout the regions of Salt, Kerek, Amman, and the sancak of Saray.50
According to Hasan Amca, a Circassian officer working in Cemal Pasha’s service, between
20,000 and 30,000 of them were living in several localities in the Hauran and Jebel Druze in
May 1916. Amca was the better informed about the fate of these deportees, in that Cemal
had entrusted him with the task of organizing their transfer to Beirut and Jaffa in summer
1916.51 It was with a view to carrying out these instructions that he traveled in late August
to Dera’a, the principal town in the Hauran, in his capacity as a delegate of the Special
Commission responsible for the deportees in the Hauran. There he was confronted with
the hostility of the chief of the Damascus branch of the Sevkiyat, Neşad Bey, who was also
the Ittihad’s regional delegate. Neşad was all the more hostile to the idea of a transfer in
that he had just completed the procedures involved in the conversion of the deportees. “An
Armenian priest,” Amca recalls, “had been deprived of food until he died for systematically
refusing to convert to Islam.”52 In the first localities he visited, he discovered thousands of
people who were mere skin and bones, “with sunken cheeks, arms and legs that looked like
sticks, resembling nothing more than mummies, and close to death.”53 Later, in the very rug-
ged Jebel, which looks down on the desert of the Hauran, he came across a series of villages
where “thirty thousand to forty thousand deportees had died of typhus, relapsing fever, or
the malaria raging in the region.” In Hazraköy, an hour from Kefrence, he learned that 417
of the 500 people who had been relegated to this village had died: “Living corpses, leaning
on crutches, made their way down the narrow lanes of the village with great effort.”54 Amca
nevertheless managed to recover 400 widows and orphans from the mountainous region
known as the Jebel and bring them back to Dera’a; from there, they left in three convoys
for Damascus, Tripoli (Syria), Haifa, Jaffa, and Akkia. This modest operation, which Cemal
Pasha had decided to conduct at a time when Istanbul was in the process of liquidating the
deportees in the camps on the line of the Euphrates, led to a serious conflict between Amca
and the Ittiahd’s delegate in Damascus, Neşad Bey. Neşad is said to have given Amca a written
order to bring these operations to a halt but, running up against the officer’s stubborn refusal
to comply, the two of them went to Damascus and submitted their difference of opinion to
Cemal for judgement. Amca’s account of the meeting seems to confirm that the commander
of the Fourth Army had firmly resolved to carry out his plan to resettle Armenian deportees
from the Hauran in Lebanon and Palestine. Indeed, Cemal succeeded in having the Ittihad’s

delegate relieved of his functions and had the vali of Damascus, Tahsin Bey, appointed to
the post of director of the deportees. According to Amca, he went to Dera’a with Tahsin on
25 September 1916, and the convoys were once again put on the road south.55
Although this plan did not go forward as expected – too many deportees had already died
and there remained only 3,000 to 4,000 Armenians in the Hauran – it reveals that there
was a marked opposition between Cemal and the CUP leadership. When we recall Cemal’s
repressive practices toward the Arab elites of Syria and Lebanon, it seems reasonable to ask
what motivated him to launch a campaign that ran counter to the line adopted by his party.
In his memoirs, he contents himself with the statement: “I thought it better to bring a large
number of them into the Syrian vilayets of Beirut and Aleppo,” while saying nothing about
the objectives he was then pursuing.56

Chapter 7
The Peculiar Case of Ahmed Cemal:

The Ittihad’s Independent Spirit or
an Agent of the Genocide?
A
hmed Cemal, who simultaneously held the posts of minister of the navy and
commander-in-chief of the Fourth Army, was in theory the sole master of Syria,
Lebanon, and Palestine. Yet, we have already noted that he very often had no other
choice than to bow to the demands of the Ittihad’s radical branch. His political prerogatives
seem almost always to have overridden the military priorities of which he and the empire’s
German allies were in charge. One can, however, ask whether he favored the liquidation of
the Armenians. Before we try to answer this question, we should recall that Cemal’s policy
toward the Arab populations, Muslim and Christian alike, was at the very least harsh,
and that it was an open secret that liquidating the Arab elites was, as the Young Turks
and especially Cemal himself saw it, another “national priority.” In his memoirs, Ohannès
Pacha Kouyoumdjian, the last Ottoman governor of Lebanon (1913–15) and a remarkable
observer of the prevailing situation in the first year of the war, leaves little doubt about the
intentions that Cemal and the Young Turk regime harbored toward the Arabs in general
and the Lebanese in particular.1 The information that he provides on the debate about the
famine in Lebanon buttresses the thesis that a deliberate land blockade – a blockade of the
railroad – had been put in place for the purpose of decimating the Lebanese population,
which was suspected of being pro-French and fomenting rebellion. As in the Armenian
case, so here too the Young Turks’ virulent nationalism sought to punish these inassimilable
“traitors.” The alibi that the British fleet had imposed a naval blockade, to which certain
historians still frequently resort to explain the famine in Lebanon, offered the CUP perfect
camouflage. The mere fact that Cemal felt obliged to publish, in 1916, a pamphlet in French
justifying his anti-Arab exactions2 shows that the General was concerned about his reputa-
tion and also wished to take his distance from the acts of his colleagues on the Unionist
Central Committee. Nothing, however, suggests that Cemal was opposed to the policy
of ethnic homogenization put into practice by his party, the liquidation of the Armenian
population included. Rather, his opposition to prevailing policy seems to have been rooted
in a certain military rationale that consisted in profiting from the Armenian deportees’
labor-power before liquidating them. Cemal’s frequent intercession on behalf of Armenian
“friends” in Adana or in Aleppo, many examples of which we have already adduced, does
not necessarily mean that he was not an advocate of the Ittihad’s Turkism. Old friendships,
dating from the days when he was vali of Adana, may suffice to explain his generosity vis-
à-vis some of the Cilicians, who perhaps were also generous toward him, while playing on
the amour-propre of a man who was made uncomfortable by the great influence that Enver
enjoyed. The part he played in setting the trap for the people of Zeitun shows that, in accord

with his party, he participated in fabricating the scenario of a revolt and then personally
conducted the military operation.
That said, it must be pointed out that, unlike those on the line of the Euphrates or that
of the Bagdadbahn, the 130,000 to 150,000 Armenians on the southern deportation line,
which was more directly under Cemal’s jurisdiction, were not radically liquidated. Indeed,
in summer 1916, Cemal even undertook to mount a veritable rescue operation for a few
thousand deportees in the Hauran, as we have just seen. On the other hand, the policy of
systematically carrying out forced conversions to Islam that was applied from May 1916 on
to the Armenian deportees of the Aleppo-Damascus-Jerusalem-Maan line does not seem to
have met with his disapproval. Earlier, this possibility, which the authorities went so far as
to codify by publishing a sort of book of instructions about demands so formulated that it
was always possible to reject a request to convert,3 had benefited only a few Armenians from
localities scattered throughout western Anatolia. The spring 1916 campaign was, however,
of altogether different dimensions because it affected all of “Cemal’s Armenians” – that is,
around 150,000 people.
At all events, this operation did not escape the attention of diplomatic circles. According
to Ambassador Metternich, it was in May 1916 that recurrent reports of forced conversions
reached the German embassy. However, Metternich writes, “The central government in
Constantinople has consistently denied the accuracy of these reports. Halil Bey and Talât Bey
have both repeatedly assured me that they did not have the slightest intention of harming the
Christian elements of the Armenian population.”4 On 26 June 1916, the consul in Jerusalem,
Dr. Brode, informed his superiors that the deportees who had settled in Transjordan had
been converted by force, notably 3,500 people living in Dera’a.5 Similar reports were mak-
ing the rounds in Damascus, where consul Loytved indicated, in a 20 June note, that “the
Armenians are more or less all obliged to become Muslims.”6 The interim consul in Aleppo
reported facts indicating that a systematic campaign had been set in motion:
Over the course of the past few weeks, in Hama, Homs, Damascus, and so on, depor-
tees facing the threat of being sent to still remoter regions had to convert en masse
to Islam (the information comes from several concurrent sources). The procedure is
purely bureaucratic: a request is filed, followed by a name change ... Apparently, those
promoting this plan have examples dating from the time of the Ottoman conquest in
mind.7
These telegrams, which all corroborate Odian’s account, leave no doubt about the fact
that what was involved here was a planned operation and that the decision had been made
at the highest levels of the state – without a doubt by the Ittihad’s Central Committee – in
March or April 1916. It is even probable that it coincided with the plan to liquidate the
Armenians held in the concentration camps on the line of the Euphrates and to close down
all foreign humanitarian institutions providing relief for orphans and other deportees. In
other words, the method adopted to make “Cemal’s Armenians” disappear was much less
radical. Can we attribute this generosity to Cemal Pasha? That is quite possible. We are
even tempted to suppose that it was in the wake of this decision that Cemal assigned Hasan
Amca the mission of saving a few thousand Armenians, with the ulterior motive of showing
that he himself, who had no small amount of Arab blood on his hands, did not endorse the
genocidal policies of his party, thus arming himself in advance against fresh accusations of
war crimes.
It is known, moreover, that the catholicos, Sahag Kahabayan, was assigned a residence
in Jerusalem thanks to the commander of the Fourth Army, who later engineered the offi-
cial 30 July 1916 decree ordering the merger of the Armenian Patriarchates of Jerusalem

The Peculiar Case of Ahmed Cemal 683
and Constantinople under the authority of Sahag II, promoted to the rank of “patriarch-
catholicos” of all the empire’s Armenians, with his seat in Jerusalem. It seems reasonable to
suppose that this measure suited the CUP, for it made the elimination of the Armenians of
Asia Minor official while preserving a semblance of legality. This patriarch-catholicos was
apparently to govern the vestiges of the Armenian population settled in the Arab provinces
of the Ottoman Empire. In his memoirs, Patriarch Zaven does not deny that the deportees
were spared, relatively speaking, in the regions under Cemal’s control. According to Zaven,
Cemal had applied only the decision made by the Council of Ministers – to remove the
Armenians from the frontier zones – but not the decision to liquidate them, which had been
“taken by the Ittihad and implemented by the interior minister.”8
The constant interference of the delegates of the Unionist Committee or the interior
minister in local affairs, as in Dera’a, doubtless also helped make Cemal’s relations with the
CUP more tense. A wire that Talât sent Cemal on 18 February 1916 suggests that the two
men disagreed about the fate to be meted out to the deportees.9 In this telegram, the interior
minister requests the Commander of the Fourth Army stop moving the Armenian deportees
from “their places of residence.” Which deportees are involved is not specified, but it may be
presumed that Talât had in mind craftsmen or specialists who had been recruited to meet
the army’s needs. At all events, this was a way of reminding Cemal that he was exceeding
his prerogatives and slowing down his work by taking control of deportees who did not fall
under his jurisdiction. We shall see, moreover, that Cemal also endeavored, from December
1915 to spring 1916, to prevent the immediate liquidation of the worker-deportees who had
been put to work digging tunnels through the Amanus. While military contingencies may
explain these decisions, they were presumably also inspired by personal ambition. The same
cannot, however, be attributed to moral repulsion over the criminal acts of Cemal’s col-
leagues in Istanbul.
The Negotiations between Ahmed Cemal

and the Entente Powers
The exploration of many different Western archives carried out in the past few years enables
us today to point to a possible explanation for Cemal’s peculiar positions. A Foreign Office
document,10 as well as a strange exchange of letters between Dr. Ivan Zavriev,11 a Dashnak
leaders close to Imperial circles in St. Petersburg, and Boghos Nubar, the president of the
Armenian National Delegation based in Paris,12 supplemented by notes preserved in the
Archives of the French and Russian Foreign Ministries,13 reveals that, in December 1915,
Ahmed Cemal conducted negotiations in great secrecy with an eye to bringing together the
English, French, and Russians in a common plan to destabilize the Ottoman Empire from
within. Among the topics broached in these negotiations, it must above all be noted that
Cemal showed a willingness to carry out a military expedition against Constantinople, obvi-
ously for the purpose of overthrowing the Young Turk regime in exchange for guarantees of
the territorial integrity of Asiatic Turkey – that is, “Syria, Palestine, Mesopotamia, Arabia,
Armenia with Cilicia and Kurdistan” – and another promise that he would be proclaimed
sultan in place of the house of Osman, with hereditary rights for his family. What is more,
one of the clauses of the proposal bears on the deportees’ fate: Cemal offered to “take meas-
ures, beginning immediately, to save the Armenian population and provide it with basic
necessities until the end of the war.”14 The seven-point plan preserved in the archives of the
French Foreign Ministry,15 as well as the letters exchanged between the Russians, French, and
English, clearly indicate that the initiative here came from the Russians, but was inspired by
Armenian circles in Russia. But this attempt interfered with the French and English Sykes-
Picot negotiations over the future of the Near East.

The soul of this operation was Dr. Ivan Zavriev, a Moscow aristocrat with a background
unusual in Armenian circles.16 Zavriev had already played a very active role in St. Petersburg
during the negotiations that led, on 8 February 1914, to the promulgation of an Ottoman
Imperial decree providing for reforms in the eastern provinces. In 1915–16, he redoubled his
activities. Aware of the deportations and massacres to which the Ottoman Armenians had
been subject since spring 1915, he set out, with his party’s approval, to find means of saving
what might still be saved. To this end, he traveled to London in August 1915, but obtained
no concrete results.17 It seems, however, that the situation improved somewhat in December
1915, at a moment when Zavriev was in Bucharest. The first piece of information on the
question came from the Russian ambassador in the Rumanian capital, S. A. Poklevsky, who
indicated in an 11 December 1915 cable to the Russian foreign minister, Sazanov, that
Zavriev has received information about the rupture just consummated between Cemal
Pasha and the Turkish government; this opens up the possibility that he can be turned
against Constantinople if the Entente powers promise him that he will rule over the
Near East. Zavriev wants to know to what extent this measure corresponds with the
audacious [plans] of the imperial government. If it does correspond, the Armenians are
in a position to broach discussions with Cemal.18
This approach soon produced effects. In the next few days, Sazanov instructed the Russian
ambassador to France, Alexandre Isvolsky, to contact the French and English in order to find
out whether they were inclined to follow Russia’s lead on this issue.19 While the proposal was
not without interest, it apparently had the disadvantage of conflicting with the “arrange-
ments” that the members of the Entente had made for the dismemberment of the Ottoman
Empire. To promise Cemal the eastern regions of the empire came down to depriving France
and England of their “advance.” Thus, the initially hostile reaction of Aristide Briand, presi-
dent of the French Council of Ministers and also foreign minister, came as no surprise.20 The
response of the French ambassador in Petrograd, Paléologue, to Aristide Briand shows that
“Cemal Pasha’s suggestions were brought to the attention of the Russian government by one
of its secret agents in Armenia, a physician [Zavriev] who is currently residing in Bucharest.”21
Presented at first as a Russian plan, the affair was ultimately described as “an Armenian
plan ... that by no means implies adoption of all the points put forward by the Armenians.”22
From these first approaches, it is clear that it was Zavriev who had succeeded in establishing
direct contact with Cemal in Bucharest as soon as he got wind of the discord between him
and his Ittihadist colleagues. Doubtless he had also understood that, circumstances allowing,
Cemal envisaged carving out a personal fief for himself that would straddle the Arab world
and Asia Minor. In taking this initiative, Zavriev was obviously hoping to save the hundreds
of thousands of Armenians who were still concentrated in the Syrian and Mesopotamian
deserts, where they were wasting away. His correspondence with Boghos Nubar and the
echoes of their February 1916 conversations in Paris indicate that the Armenian National
Delegation, headed by Nubar, and the leadership of the Dashnak party, which had put this
matter in Zavriev’s hands, were working hand in hand. In a letter sent from Stockholm on 8
February 1916, Zavriev informed Nubar that he was coming to Paris “in connection with a
matter that interests our government, with the consent of [his] comrades.”23 After arriving
in Paris a few days later, he quickly obtained an interview with Alexandre Isvolsky.24 In a 24
February note to Nubar, he informed him of his interview with the Russian ambassador and
the hopes that it had aroused in him.25
All this tends to show that, early in 1916, a rift had appeared between the Ittihad, led
by Mehmed Talât and Ahmed Cemal, and that it had widened to the point that Cemal
could envisage the unlikely eventuality of turning against Istanbul if he obtained guarantees.

The Peculiar Case of Ahmed Cemal 685
His memoirs breathe not a word about this chill in their relations – no more than Talât’s
do. Hence we do not know the underlying motivations for his behavior, which are probably
unrelated to the fate of the deportees, now mere bargaining chips, in Syria and Mesopotamia.
It was perhaps because Cemal was considering raising this question again that he decided to
have nothing to do with the Armenians’ liquidation and even to launch the Dera’a rescue
operation.
That said, we need to point out that Aristide Briand’s and Lord Gray’s reluctance to
endorse this plan was never really overcome. Their Russian counterpart Sazonov failed to
convince them to enter into negotiations with Cemal, although an agreement with him
would have committed them to very little, while the possibility of destabilizing the Young
Turk regime was hardly one to be neglected. To be sure, the Russian forces had taken control
of Trebizond and Erzerum by this time; the Russians had the greatest interest in a conflict
between Cemal and the central authorities that could open the gates of Constantinople to
them. But the English and French could not afford, precisely, to let the Ottoman capital fall
into Russian hands. This was probably the decisive element leading to the failure of Zavriev’s
plan, which definitely sealed the Armenian deportees’ fate.26

Chapter 8
The Armenian Deportees on the

Bagdadbahn Construction Sites in the
Taurus and Amanus Mountains
W
e have seen how the Ottoman government took advantage of the Bagdadbahn
and proceeded, in July 1915, to deport the Armenian employees working on the
railroad construction sites in both the Taurus and Amanus mountain regions. We
have also noted that the company’s directors, threatened with confiscation, had no other
choice than to violate the ban on hiring Armenian workers if they wanted to resume con-
struction of the trunks of the railway running through the mountains.1
On the Taurus construction sites, where some ten tunnels were being dug, there were
hundreds of Russian, Georgian, Rumanian, French, English, and Russian-Armenian prison-
ers of war, but also thousands of Ottoman subjects, Armenian, Turkish, and Greek.2 Located
in the immediate vicinity of the points through which the deportees from western Anatolia
passed, the Taurus building sites embodied a hope of survival for the Armenians. According
to Sebuh Aguni, who had himself been recruited on one of these sites as a timekeeper,
3,000 Armenians were working between Bozanti and Dorak.3 Two brothers from Adana, Dr.
Benyamin Boyajian, the chief physician in the German hospital in Belemedik, and Kevork
Boyajian, a manager employed by the German Bagdadbahn Company, played an eminent
role in recruiting Armenian employees, especially intellectuals, and in providing hundreds
of deportees with places of refuge.4
Aside from the Boyajian brothers, who were close friends of the chief of the building site,
the Swiss engineer Lütneger exhibited a consistently benevolent attitude. The director of the
“Technical Bureau,” Hayg Kalenderian, but also translators such as Toros Avedisian, a man-
ager in charge of supplies, Krikor Chakerian from Edirne, the pharmacist Onnig Papazian,
the engineer and topographer Sebuh Sayabalian, the furnace supervisor Yervant Papazian,
and the vice-treasurer Onnig Postagian were agents of the Armenian network who gave
unsparingly of their time and energy in order to save their compatriots.5
In the Amanus region, where several tunnels were being dug, around 20,000 Armenian
deportees had been recruited to work on the building sites of Intilli, Ayran, Yenice, Bahçe,
and Keller in autumn 1915.6 From Ismit, Bardizag, Adabazar, Bilecik, Eskişehir, Konya, or
Eregli – that is, regions in western Asia Minor – these carpenters, woodworkers, blacksmiths,
skilled workers, surveyors, and draftsmen were recruited directly in the camps of Mamura or
Islahiye by foremen from the German company, who authorized them to bring their families
with them. Thus, two camps were rather quickly set up in the Amanus region. According to
Aguni, the engineer Philippe Holsmann, whose firm was responsible for building two of the
Amanus tunnels, took the initiative of recruiting Armenian deportees and later did all he
could to save their lives.7 The same witness reveals that the deportees handled the dynamite,

“for there was no one else to carry out such dangerous operations.”8 An orphanage was even
created in Intilli on the engineers’ initiative to care for homeless children roaming through
the area.9 Dr. P. Hovnanian, a physician working for the Bagdadbahn in the hospital in Intilli,
and Vartivar Kabayan and Garabed Geukjeian, who were responsible for supplies on the
Amanus building sites, played central roles in recruiting deportees.10
While Franz Günther, the head of the Anatolian Railway Company, obtained in fall 1915
the backing of the German military hierarchy and the War Minster for the idea of putting
the building sites of the Taurus and Amanus regions back into operation by hiring deportees,
M. Winkler, the engineer responsible for construction in the vilayet of Adana, had to put up
with harassment from local government officials on a day-to-day basis.11 The arrangements
to which the military men closed their eyes were apparently tolerated only provisionally by
the civilian authorities. When the interior minister learned, in January 1916, that 15,000 to
20,000 deportees had been concentrated around the Amanus building site, he conducted
an “inquiry” and demanded that those who were “illegally” present on the site be deported
to the “destination planned” for them.12 The presence of 20,000 deportees massed around
Bozanti and the Taurus building sites – some of whom were employed on the sites – also came
to the attention of Talât Bey, who ordered that they “be dispatched, convoy by convoy, to
the areas to which they are to go.” The minister also demanded “the competent individuals”
to furnish him “information about the number of Armenian émigrés who are to be found in
these places and about how and from where they have come to the area.”13 It is clear that
this procedure was part of the operation that the government launched in the same period
in order to evacuate the camps north of Aleppo and shift the deportees toward the line of
the Euphrates or Ras ul-Ayn. However, because in this particular case the procedure affected
workers on the sites of the Bagdadbahn, it sparked opposition from the German leadership
of the company as well as the German general staff.14 German sources reveal that Winkler
and his engineers faced down gendarmes who came to the building sites to arrest deportees.
Ultimately, however, they agreed to compile a list of their employees.15
The fact of the matter seems to be that Talât had by no means abandoned his plan to
liquidate the last deportees in the Taurus and the Amanus regions, but had simply suspended
it. The 19 March 1916 appointment of Cevdet Bey, the former vali of Van, to the head of
the vilayet of Adana was no doubt connected with this plan, the more so as Cevdet arrived
with a battalion of Kurdish çetes who had been following him since Van.16 Cevdet, associ-
ated with Colonel Hüseyin Avni, the commander of the vilayet’s gendarmerie, as well as the
presiding judge at the Adana court-martial and the local chief of the Special Organization,
and Colonel Şekerci Ağia Bey, the commander of the Amanus labor battalions,17 under-
took in the following months to organize the liquidation of the Armenian workers on the
Bagdadbahn construction sites. On 28 April 1916, he sent Colonel Avni to these sites to make
an official count of the workers to be found there.18 These operations, which took weeks to
complete, had no other purpose, according to the explanations that the officials gave the
German engineers, than to provide these deportees legal identity papers that would pre-
sumably protect them.19 Aguni writes that it was only after taking 1,600 British and Indian
prisoners-of-war in Kut el-Amara that the authorities decided to deport the Armenian work-
ers and replace them with these captives.20
German sources indicate that additional gendarmerie brigades commanded by Colonel
Hüseyin Bey arrived in the area in early June 1916 and surrounded the camps where the
workers were living. On 13 June, the first convoy of deportees was put on the road, inter-
rupting work on the site from the 19th on. Winkler estimates the number of Armenians dis-
patched by 17 June at 2,900.21 The cessation of activities on the building sites had predictable

Armenian Deportees on the Bagdadbahn Construction Sites 689
effects on the war effort; this and probably complaints passed on by ranking German officers
led Enver to issue the vali of Adana a counter order. It had, however, only a very short-term
effect. The first convoy passed through Islahiye, where a British officer learned from members
of the escort that these deportees were being sent to their deaths and would be replaced by
British and Indian prisoners.22 Discussion probably took place within the Ittihadist leader-
ship because, in obedience to a 29 June 1916 counter-order from Enver, the remaining 15,000
workers were immediately dispatched. The last to leave were skilled personnel from Kilis and
Marash whose families had been deported in early July.23
Kalust Hazarabedian, who found himself in the third convoy, reports that they had hardly
left Bahçe when they saw “naked bodies sprawled on the sides of the road, some of which
had been treated with the most appalling savagery and were ringed by dogs and vultures.”
“I knew,” Hazarabedian goes on,
the fate that had been reserved for the preceding convoys. The state of these bod-
ies entirely confirmed the information that I had received. Our escort had already
begun its bloody work. Those who could not follow the group, because they were ill or
too old, were killed within the minute, either shot or, more frequently, bayoneted to
death ... We had advanced as far as the frontiers of the territory of the Orçans, suffer-
ing a good many casualties. From that point on, the situation grew still worse. Sabers,
rifles, shovels, picks, stakes or sticks in hand, the Orçans attacked the group and began
killing and looting. The guards hailed their intervention with a certain pleasure. Not
only did they not try to stop them; on the contrary, they encouraged them. Involved
here were, for the most part, criminals who had been released from prison for the pre-
cise purpose of dealing with the Armenians ... After slowing down the progress of the
convoy and lining up to one side of it, they passed its members in review, one by one,
as they went by. They began to single out, in particular, the young men whose cloth-
ing and faces looked clean and who seemed more or less affluent. They separated them
from the others and shot them straightaway.24
According to the same witness, the great majority of the deportees who had been work-
ing between Islahiye and Yarbaşi were massacred between Bahçe and Marash in “a little less
than one month.” The others were driven to Birecik, Veranşehir, Urfa, or even, in the case
of the last of them, Mardin.25 Minas Tilbeian, however, who found himself in one of the next
convoys, reports that his group was liquidated much further off in the vicinity of Mardin,26
perhaps because it was made up of more resilient single men. It goes without saying that
the liquidation of these workers, carried out by local tribes and, above all, gendarmes and
the çetes commanded by Colonel Avni, was part of the vast campaign coordinated by Talât
in summer 1916, the purpose of which was to extirpate the last groups of survivors to have
reached the south. Be it added that the worker-soldiers of the amele taburis operating in the
region were also put to death in summer 1916.27
Paula Schäfer, a Swiss missionary in Adana, confirms that the workers of the Bagdadbahn
were deported with their families in July 1916 under the direct supervision of the vali of
Adana, Cevdet Bey.28 Three ranking Armenian employees of the German company working
in the Amanus region provide a detailed account of the circumstances in which the workers
of the Bagdadbahn’s construction sites were liquidated.29
Teotig and Aguni, who were employed on the Taurus building sites, state that the workers
on the Belemedik site, very close to Bozanti, were supposed to meet the same fate, but that
Dr. Boyajian and the Swiss engineer in charge of the site succeeded in convincing Colonel
Şekerci Ağia Bey, who had himself been entrusted with the task of liquidating the Taurus
sites, to postpone application of this order. In the end, only the Armenians working on the

second trunk of the line were deported, with the exception of a few white-collar workers.30
Cevdet Bey even personally “dealt with” Yervant Papazian, one of the management employ-
ees on this site.31 Several thousand men working on the first, third, and fourth sites escaped
this operation.32 According to Teotig, early in 1918, the two kilometer-long trunk of the line
on which he had been working had been practically completed, at minimum cost.33
The obstinacy with which the capital conducted these operations, against the advice
of some military authorities – notably the commander of the Fourth Army – and in the
face of all operational logic, illustrates, perhaps even better than the large-scale massacres
perpetrated in Zor and Ras ul-Ayn, the desire of the civilian authorities – that is, the Young
Turk leadership – to implacably carry through to the bitter end their plan to extirpate the
Armenian Ottoman population.

Chapter 9
The Second Phase of the Genocide:

The Dissolution of the Armenian
Patriarchate and the Decision to
Liquidate the Last Deportees
B
y a decree published in the Official Gazette on 28 July 1916, the Ottoman govern-
ment reformed the Armenian community’s internal constitution.1 After cleansing
Asia Minor of its Armenian population and undertaking liquidating the deportees
who had arrived in Syria and Mesopotamia, the Young Turk government plainly decided to
draw the consequences of these demographic changes. The decree that it issued provided for
eliminating the Constantinople Armenian Patriarchate, with its legal representative body,
the Chamber of Deputies, and its Political Council, notably charged with the mission of
serving as the Ottoman authorities’ official interlocutor. In eliminating the Patriarchate, the
government simply ratified an accomplished fact. In the new arrangement, the Armenian
Patriarchates of Jerusalem and Constantinople were to be merged under the authority of
Sahag II Khabayan, who had been promoted to the rank of “patriarch-catholicos” of the
Armenians; he was to have his seat in Jerusalem. According to the former Patriarch Malakia
Ormanian, who was in Jerusalem when the telegram announcing the appointment of Sahag
II arrived on 11 August 1916, it was Cemal Pasha who had suggested naming him catholicos
of Cilicia and locating his seat in the Holy City.2
In addition to the memoirs of Patriarch Zaven of Constantinople,3 the account handed
down to us by the patriarchal vicar, Yervant Perdahjian,4 constitutes a source of the first
importance when it comes to understanding the circumstances surrounding this event and the
situation prevailing in Istanbul on the eve of the dissolution of the Patriarchate. Perdahjian
observes in particular that a petition, drawn up by the secretary of the central direction of
the police, was submitted under duress early in 1916 to high-ranking clergymen and influ-
ential laymen for signature. The basic purpose of the petition was to condemn “Armenian
troublemakers”; it seems likely that it was intended to contradict information about the
mass crimes committed in Turkey that had filtered into the European and American press.
According to Perdahjian, the patriarch, the president of the Religious Council, Archbishop
Yeghishe Turian, and the president of the Political Council, Krikor Tavitian, “legitimized
the petition, in some sort, by signing a takrir accompanying it. The patriarch in person then
transmitted the petition to the prime minister, who expressed his satisfaction.” This text,
Perdahjian notes, “condemned all the Armenians of Turkey and insulted the memory of all
the innocent martyrs, without making the least proposal to improve the situation of those
who had survived the catastrophe.”5 Rumors had apparently been circulating since summer
1915 to the effect that the Armenian National Constitution was going to be suppressed

and even that the Patriarchate might be transferred to Syria, “at least for the duration of
the war,” but no one had believed that the authorities would go so far as to abolish the
Patriarchate of the Armenians of Turkey. The first signs pointing to an abrogation of the
Constitution appeared when the Patriarchate asked for permission to begin organizing elec-
tions to renew the Religious and Political Councils in May–June 1916.6 Before “giving an
official cast” to this request, the Patriarchate’s chief secretary had sounded out the Director
of Religious Cults, who had promised to come to “an arrangement.” But, after the official
request was filed, it appeared that “authorization from the government” would have to be
secured before the National Chamber could convene. Moreover, a police lieutenant came to
the Patriarchate on behalf of the general directorate of the police to tell him that since the
terms of those elected to the chamber had expired, they would “not be able, from now on, to
convene the assembly.”7 In other words, the patriarchal bodies, beginning with the Political
Council, found themselves paralyzed. According to Perdahjian, the patriarch “nonetheless
continued to conduct the affairs of the nation until the Patriarchal institution was abolished,
until the moment he left,” and virtually single-handed at that: “four members of the Political
Council had been deported,” one had died, and only its president, Dr. Tavitian, “came to the
Patriarchate twice a week.” “After the deportation of the intellectuals and politicians,” the
vicar observes, “no one dared associate with the patriarchal administration.” According to
the Müdur-i mezahib (the Director of Religious Cults), these restrictions had been triggered
by the steps taken by the Armenian authorities.8 It is much more likely, in fact, that the gov-
ernment simply took advantage of this occasion to carry its plan to abolish the Patriarchate
into practice.
The coup de grace came on the afternoon of 28 July/10 August 1915. The Director of
Religious Cults, Beha Bey, and the police chief, Ahmed Bey, arrived at the Patriarchate
“without warning,” while the neighboring streets were invested by policemen.9 According to
the vicar, who was present at the scene, the director of religious cults handed the patriarch
an official document signed by the minister of justice and religious cults. “Former Patriarch
Zaven Effendi” was written on the envelope containing it. The content of the document was
“more or less” as follows: “in accordance with the provisions of the law published in the today’s
Official Gazette, the Catholicosates of Cilicia and Aghtamar, as well as the Patriarchates of
Constantinople and Jerusalem, are merged under the authority of Catholicos Sahag; your
functions have been abolished.”10 The two officials further demanded that all the doors “of
the official offices of the Patriarchate” be sealed “with the seals of the Patriarchate and the
police chief” until a new vicar was appointed. The members of the Patriarchate’s staff were
invited to remove their personal effects from their desks, and the premises were put under the
surveillance of three policemen, who were regularly rotated.11
On 13 August, “former Patriarch Zaven” was informed that he had to leave for Baghdad
“in the next three days” and that his residence had been placed under surveillance by the
police.12 The Patriarch’s imminent exile, which was the logical consequence of the abolition
of the Patriarchate, attracted the attention of Constantinople’s diplomatic corps, especially
the American embassy and the papal nuncio, who, says Perdahjian, “repeatedly” interceded
“with the interior minister in order to prevent his departure and secure a promise that he
would be allowed to live after withdrawing to one of the islands in Constantinople.” The
diplomats, however, were only able to obtain guarantees that “the Patriarchate would be left
alive.” For his part, the Patriarchate’s chief secretary, Kamer Shirinian, sounded out the state
secretary in the Justice Ministry, Halil Bey, who is supposed to have told him: “The patri-
arch need not worry: the Council of Ministers has not decided to have him assassinated. If
we were to put Archbishop Zaven to death, we would be murdering the patriarch, and this
affair would lead to reactions abroad. Tell him that he will arrive at his destination safe and
sound.”13 Zaven Yeghiayan was finally put on the road on Monday, 4 September, bound for

The Second Phase of the Genocide 693
the Haydarpaşa train station under the guard of two officials. A crowd watched, weeping.14
We know about the rest of the Patriarch’s journey to Baghdad from his memoirs, thanks
to which it has also been possible to assess the effects of the second phase of the genocide
along the route that he took.15 After his departure, all the sums that had proceeded from the
inalienable funds at the Patriarchate’s disposal were frozen thanks in particular to one of the
directors of the Banque Ottomane, Berj Kerestejian. The remittances that had been going to
Aleppo by way of Dr. Peet now ceased for good and all.16
The Decision to Liquidate the Last Deportees

We have examined the fate reserved for the Armenian deportees who reached Syria and
Mesopotamia, especially those from western Anatolia. In particular, we saw that in early
spring 1916 a systematic campaign to liquidate the deportees held in the concentration
camps north of Aleppo was carried out. It culminated, beginning in June-July 1916, in the
elimination of the exiles in Zor and the workers on the construction sites of the Bagdadbahn.
The chronology of these events indicates that it had been decided, probably in the first half
of March 1916, to enact the second phase of the genocide. However, as with its first phase,
set in motion in the second half of March 1915, we have no materials that would allow us to
state the exact date of the meetings that approved implementation of this ultimate stage of
the genocide. To broach the problem, therefore, we must once again sift through the context
for a few revealing signs.
It must be recalled that, shortly before this decision was made in February 1916, nearly
500,000 deportees were still alive, scattered between Aleppo and Damascus or the Euphrates
and Zor. More than 100,000 were scattered between Damascus and Maan, 12,000 were in
Hama and the surrounding region, 20,000 were in Homs and the villages in the vicinity,
7,000 were in Aleppo, 5,000 were in Basra, 8,000 were in Bab, 5,000 were in Munbuc, 20,000
were in Ras ul-Ayn, 10,000 were in Rakka, and 300,000 were in Der Zor and its environs.17
These numbers correspond, of course, to a given state of affairs on a precise date; the depor-
tee population was subject to constant fluctuations, as was the geographical location of the
deportees.
In other words, more than 300,000 deportees out of a total of over 850,000 had died in
autumn 1915 and winter 1915–16 on the routes of Syria and Mesopotamia or in the con-
centration camps. The elements that we have discussed above indicate that by late 1916 the
number of those who had perished exceeded 600,000.18 At the very least, around 250,000
people were still alive at the beginning of the second phase of the genocide: 20,000 to 30,000
young women and children who had been sold to local villagers or abducted by tribes;
40,000 people who had managed to hide in the villages in the northern part of the vilayet of
Aleppo; 30,000 people living underground; around 5,000 in the Basra region, and a major-
ity of “Cemal’s Armenians,” who had officially been Islamicized on the line Hama-Homs-
Damascus-Beirut-Haifa-Jaffa-Jerusalem-Tripoli-Dera’a-Amman-Salt-Kerek-Maan.
The CUP’s initial plan had no doubt not foreseen that so many Armenians would survive.
This probably touched off a debate within the Young Turk leadership. It seems to us worth-
while to examine the events preceding this debate.
When the Ittihad’s annual congress opened in the club in Nuri Osmaniye Street on 23
September 1915, it is probable that one of the main subjects on the agenda was the ongo-
ing program to liquidate the empire’s Armenian subjects. In contrast, when the Ottoman
parliament inaugurated its autumn session on 28 September under the presidency of Halil
[Menteşe], the matter was not mentioned at all, even if the absence of most of the Armenian
deputies, who had been executed in remote spots in Asia Minor by CUP killers, did not go
entirely unnoticed. On 4 November, Tahsin Bey, the vali of Erzerum, and Cevdet, the former

vali of Van, were invited to Istanbul to receive a decoration; it is easy to guess why. The only
dissident voice amid this constrained unanimity seems to have been that of the heir to the
throne, Yusuf İzzedin, who dared to say in public that Enver Pasha bore most of the blame for
the defeat at Sarıkamiş.19 On 1 February 1916, the Istanbul press announced the “suicide” of
the prince, who had once employed Dr. Bahaeddin Şakir as his private physician.
On the foreign front, after the 24 October death of Hans von Wangenheim, his successor,
Count Paul Wolff-Metternich, proved to be more conscientious. He intervened repeatedly
with the Sublime Porte after his 14 November arrival in Istanbul, especially on the issue
of forced conversions. The repeated denunciations in the press of the Entente countries of
the atrocities that the Young Turk state had carried out against its Armenian population –
acts of violence with which Germany was associated – called forth a few reactions. Count
E. R. Rowentlow published a long article in the 19 December 1915 Deutsche Tageszeitung in
which, after listing the accusations of criminal activity published in the American, Swiss,
and British press, he wrote:
Turkey had not only had a right, but a duty to punish the bloodthirsty Armenians ... How
long will it take us to understand that it is not our business to bewail the fate of
Armenian usurers and revolutionaries who constitute a grave danger for our faithful
Turkish ally and are the tools of our mortal enemies, England and Russia ... . There you
have the reason that we Germans have to consider the Armenian question as a matter
of interest to not only to Turkey, but all its allies as well, and to defend Turkey against
external attacks.20
This reaction, of a cast that brings to mind subsequent events in Germany, did not, how-
ever, suffice to hide the fact that people at the highest levels of the German state were
beginning to be alarmed by the consequences of their “laxity” in the face of the crimes com-
mitted by their Turkish ally. Wolff-Metternich’s reports had not a little to do with this new
awareness.21 The circular telegram that the interior minister, Talât, sent out to the Ottoman
provinces must no doubt be attributed to the concern now manifested by the German diplo-
matic establishment. Talât here refers to “the rumors” circulating
in certain places about the fact that the deportations of Armenians are being carried
out under pressure from the German government. Everyone should be aware that the
means approved by the Imperial government, and by that government alone, are being
applied only for reasons and in consequence of obligations of a military nature, as well
as for security reasons, and that no foreign government can meddle in the situation
and our internal affairs. This should be communicated in the form of a circular, using
the appropriate means, to all the responsible state officials.22
But the public debate in Germany, postponed because of the imperatives of the war, even-
tually broke out in January 1916. German missionary circles – specifically, Dr. Lepsius’s
Deutsche Orient Mission and Dr. Friedrich Schuchardt’s no less powerful Deutscher Hülfsbund
für christliches Liebeswerk im Orient – received information from their two networks of insti-
tutions in the Ottoman Empire that left little room for doubt about the nature of the events
underway there. The voyage of these two missionary leaders to Istanbul and the conver-
sations that they conducted with Armenian circles and American missionaries convinced
them to make an appeal to public opinion in their country.23 Following publication of an
article on 11 January in the Volkszeitung, the socialist deputy Liebknecht put a question to
the government about the Armenian question in the Reichstag the same day, causing it con-
siderable embarrassment.24 Talât published an interview in the 24 January İkdam in which he

The Second Phase of the Genocide 695
declared: “I shall here prove that the remarks about the Armenians to be found in the enemy
press are baseless.” He stuck, however, to the official discourse that accused “the” Armenians
of collaboration with the enemy. The interior minister subsequently published a pamphlet
entitled Vérité sur les mouvements révolutionnaires arméniens (The truth about the Armenian
revolutionary movements).25
Confronted by the Christian charitable organizations working in the Ottoman Empire,
German diplomacy reacted to the campaign of forced conversion undertaken by the Young
Turks. The German foreign minister, who had not seen fit to react to the far more violent
liquidation campaign that preceded it, went so far as to instruct the German embassy in
Constantinople to make it known in high places that “all the Turkish denials notwithstand-
ing, the deported Armenians are still being forced to convert to Islam.”26 These complaints,
formulated rather late in the day, were perhaps not merely pro forma, since in February a
German parliamentary delegation under the conduct of the parliamentary deputy Matthias
Erzberger arrived in Constantinople. Erzberger was successively received by the government
ministers Talât and Enver, which speaks volumes about the importance that the Young Turk
leaders accorded their German ally. They had no choice but to listen to the criticisms of the
centrist German deputy, who suggested notably that they put an end to the forced conver-
sions and persecutions.27 There can be no doubt that this external pressure, which surely
reminded the two Young Turk chiefs of the pre-war situation, only exacerbated their easily
offended nationalism.
It must also be pointed out that in the first days of February, the news of the unexpected
fall of Erzerum, which was soon followed by that of Trebizond, came like a dagger blow. After
the Turkish victory over the French and British forces in the Dardanelles, Bulgaria’s entry
into the war on the side of the Allies and, in consequence, the inauguration of a direct rail
connection to Germany, the wildest hopes had seemed justified; now this painful defeat,
news of which was not made public until war’s end, darkened the Ottoman military horizon.
Yet there was no longer a domestic foe to blame for the setback, only internal weaknesses.
Our familiarity with the individuals involved leads us to think that that idea of having done
with the Armenians who had reached Syria and Mesopotamia materialized with the surpris-
ing February 1916 fall of Erzerum, somewhat in the manner of the radicalization that an
exceptional event can inspire in certain individuals. By this logic, what had been lost on one
front had to be made up for by a “positive” operation in another, better-controlled theater of
the war.
In view of the role that Cevdet, the former vali of Van, played in the Special Organization,
as well as his family ties with Vice-Generalissimo Enver, one can venture the hypothesis that
his 19 March appointment to head the vilayet of Adana constituted a terminus ad quo for
the decision to liquidate the deportees in the south. The successive directives that Talât
sent to the local authorities in these regions for the purpose of liquidating the concentra-
tion camps north of Aleppo in March 1916, and then clearing out the camp in Ras ul-Ayn
at the end of the same month before proceeding to eliminate the deportees on the line of
the Euphrates from June to December 1916, are so many chronological markers betraying
the methodical application of a pre-elaborated plan. The harassment of foreign humanitar-
ian organizations, which helped prolong the deportees’ lives, and the seizure of the orphans
who had been living in these organizations’ orphanages may be construed as proof of a
desire to show the diplomats and missionaries in Syria that all their efforts were in vain. The
campaign launched in the interior provinces of Asia Minor in late February 1916 to deport
the last of the Armenians, who had been allowed to remain in their homes for various rea-
sons – because they were Protestants, Catholics, members of soldiers’ families, craftsmen,
physicians, pharmacists, and so on – after several months of calm mark, in our opinion, the
beginning of the second phase of the genocide.

The Banque Ottomane’s February 1916 decision to freeze the accounts of these “clients on
voyage,” some of whom had hitherto been able to make withdrawals in the bank’s agencies in
Syria and Mesopotamia,28 was probably also the work of the interim Minster of the Economy,
Mehmed Talât, part of his policy of extirpating the Armenian deportees.
In the realm of German-Turkish relations, Wolff-Metternich did not long withstand the
pressure exerted by the Sublime Porte to obtain his recall.29 According to the former vali of
Konya, Celal Bey, who published a series of articles in Vakıt, Count Metternich was recalled
to Berlin after Halil Bey had made a voyage to Germany during which he had vigorously pro-
tested against the ambassador’s comportment. The ambassador had “offended” the Sublime
Porte by his frequent interventions regarding the fate dealt out to the Armenians.30
Mehmed Talât’s 22 January 1917 accession to the post of grand vizier appears, in this
light, as a kind of reward for everything that he had so far accomplished. Having reached the
summit of the state hierarchy, the chief of the Ittihad demonstrated, in private, his positive
attitude, if not indeed his magnanimity. “As far as the Armenians are concerned, he will do
everything he can to satisfy them: he will allow the Armenians who have been removed to
return to those provinces where that is possible,” the Austrian Ambassador reported in a 14
February 1917 note.31 Nothing seemed to faze the Committee of Union and Progress, which,
as the Austrian diplomat told it, did not hesitate, three days later,
even while proclaiming justice for all Ottomans in its program, [to promote] those
who helped expel and annihilate the Armenians in obedience to its orders. Thus the
vali of Aleppo, Mustafa Abdülhalik Bey (Aleppo was the central point through which
all the Armenians bound for exile in the sancak of Zor had to pass), would be named
undersecretary in the Interior Ministry. Thereafter, Hamdi Bey, the assistant director
general of the central office for emigrations in Constantinople, a close associate of
Abdülhalik’s and one of the most important agents of the Armenians’ annihilation,
has been promoted to the post of general director of this office.32
In his Damascene exile, the former patriarch, Ormanian, wrote in March 1918: “I have
said and I repeat: ‘The stone of which the imperial edifice is made is the Turk; the mortar is
the Armenian. Without mortar, buildings have no support, and cannot be erected.”33

PART VI
The Last Days of the Ottoman

Empire: The Executioners and
Their Judges Face-to-Face

Chapter 1
Grand Vizier Talât Pasha’s

New Turkey; or, Reanimating
Pan-Turkism
M
ehmet Talât’s 22 January 1917 accession to the office of grand vizier marks a turn-
ing point in the history of the Committee of Union and Progress. After long
leaving the management of day-to-day affairs in the hands of grand viziers and
ministers who were more or less submissive, the CUP publicly affirmed its power by putting
its president at the head of government. The committee, in its forward march toward the
construction of a new Turkey, had the opportunity to draw up a balance sheet of its work at
its annual congress, which was held on 24 September 1917 in Istanbul under the chairman-
ship of Midhat Şükrü, its general secretary. The composition of the new bureau elected by
the assembly did not reveal any striking changes. The general council elected its bureau,
made up of Musa Kâzım, Said Halim (the former grand vizier), Hayri Effendi (the şeyh
ul-Islam), Haci Adıl1 (the vali of Edirne who organized the deportations in Thrace in fall
1915), İsmail Enver (minister of war), Giritli Ahmed Nesimi [Sayman],2 Ahmed Cemal
Pasha (minister of the navy), Mehmed Cavid (minister of the economy), Halil [Menteşe]
(minister of foreign affairs), Ahmed Şükrü (minister of education), Mustafa Şeref, Hüseyin
Cahid (vice-president of parliament), and Atıf Bey3 (first the CUP’s delegate in, and then
the vali of Angora and Kastamonu, whose Armenian population he ordered deported or
massacred).4
The Central Committee also remained stable. In addition to Mehmed Talât and Midhat
Şükrü, the party’s secretary general, the following men were elected or reelected: Dr. Nâzım,
[Kara] Kemal (minister of supplies, who was charged with creating “Turkish” enterprises),
[Yusuf] Rıza5 (who was active in the Trebizond region), Ziya Gökalp (the committee’s ideo-
logue), Eyub Sabri [Akgöl]6 (a fedayi who served without interruption as a member of the
Central Committee from 1908 to 1918), Dr. Rüsûhi7 (who was active in Azerbaijan and the
Van region), Dr. Bahaeddin Şakir (the president of the Special Organization), and Filibeli
Ahmed Hilmi8 (the vice-president of the Special Organization, who was in charge of opera-
tions in Erzerum).9 The only noteworthy promotion within the party’s supreme body was that
of Hilmi, Şakir’s right-hand man. It is also worth remarking that the Central Committee
now comprised ten members and that the men who had reputedly opposed the liquidation
of the Armenian population were all in place in both the bureau of the general council and
the Central Committee. Even Mehmed Cavid, who had taken his distance at the outbreak
of the war, joined the bureau again. Thus, the opposition of certain leaders of the party to
the anti-Armenian measures must not be accorded too much importance, the more so as
our knowledge of its existence is based largely on accounts produced later by certain of its
protagonists.10 It is also possible, however, that, by early fall 1917, the Armenian question was

considered closed and that the most prudent no longer felt any need to remain on the edges
of the government.
The Grand Vizier’s Address; or, the

Legitimization of State Violence
The address delivered by Talât can provide only faint indications of the nature of the debates
within the party because it was to be made public the following day.11 To begin with, the
minister repeated, in the face of all the evidence, the official thesis about the conditions
under which Turkey had entered the war: “The Russian naval attack in the Black Sea and
the land-based attack on our borders forced us to embrace the party toward which our his-
torical destiny was carrying us and take our place alongside the Central Powers.”12 As for the
main count in the indictment brought against the Ottoman Empire, state violence, Talât
felt the need to devote more than half of his address to the government’s behavior toward its
non-Turkish subjects. It is worth pausing over his remarks, which are both a balance sheet
and a justification. “Our enemies everywhere,” he began,
are saying that we mistreat belligerent subjects and enemy combatants and that we have
committed all sorts of atrocities against the empire’s Armenians and Jews. Fortunately,
however, people in many different places are beginning to understand the invidious,
pernicious nature of these reports, which we and many neutral personalities have con-
tested in the name of humanity and justice.
According to the grand vizier, the American Ambassador Abraham Elkus and American
consuls Jackson and Bordon had exposed the libelous nature of the charges leveled against
the country.13 These affirmations, contradicted by the dispatches of the diplomats in ques-
tion, were an integral part of the Young Turk method of justification, which systematically
appealed to “foreign” witnesses. It mattered little whether those witnesses had said the oppo-
site of what the Young Turks claimed. In the case to hand, Talât’s statement was the easier to
make because the diplomats he named had not been in Turkey since the Unites States’ entry
into the war and thus were not in a position to contradict him. The appeal to “humanity”
and “justice” reveals another characteristic trait of the Young Turk leaders: the recourse to
values to which they were altogether insensitive in order to convince their interlocutors of
their ethical modernity. Indeed, the Young Turk regime never assumed its ideology of exclu-
sion through violence; it consistently took refuge behind “the necessities of the war,” as if it
were ashamed of the ideological monster that it had engendered and that animated it.
“The Armenians,” the grand vizier reminded his listeners in a long historical expose on
the Armenian question, “have for centuries comprised a vital element under the Imperial
flag; they benefited fully from the state’s solicitude, as industrious, peaceful elements, for as
long as they were not carried away by separatist suggestions that came from the outside.”14
Talât then made the inevitable argument:
The Armenians, whom we did not think capable of taking audacity to the point of
committing acts of treason against the fatherland during this World War, were inte-
grated, like other groups, into the structures of the army, and arms, too, were dis-
tributed to them. The ‘comitajis’ who had kept quiet until we entered the war went
from calm to revolution, from loyalty to sedition, as soon as the Russians crossed our
borders and occupied a few of our towns and villages. In the third month of the war,
the parliamentary deputy from Van, Vramian, presented the vali of this vilayet with
a memorandum detailing the Armenian claims; it was identical to the one that had

Grand Vizier Talât Pasha’s New Turkey 701
earlier been submitted to the Sublime Porte. The presentation of this memorandum
was followed by the desertion of the Armenian soldiers enrolled in the army, who fled
to the mountains with their weapons, and by attacks on gendarmes and the Muslim
population. The Imperial government thereupon explained to the patriarch and the
deputies on the committee, in Constantinople, the gravity of the situation, advising
them to take preventive measures. We waited one and a half months for the result.
It was only after the revolt in Van, before the army’s lines, and in Zeitun, behind
them, that police searches were undertaken everywhere, because the commanders of
the army had pointed out that they were necessary. Arms, bombs, and explosives were
found in Dyarbekir, Urfa, Kayseri, Ismit, Adabazar, Bağçecik, Amasia, Sıvas, Merzifun,
Trebizond, Samsun, Arapkir, Malatia, Dörtyol, Hacın, Bursa, Erzerum, Erzincan, and
other localities. These devices were discovered, for the most part, in monasteries and
churches.15
Pursuing his demonstration, Talât concluded:
Once it became obvious that the flanks and rear of the army were in jeopardy, we
proceeded to carry out deportations from the war zone for the good of the troops. We
cannot claim that this deportation took place under normal conditions, for order could
not be assured as we would have wished, since most of the gendarmes had been incor-
porated into the army. The central government, however, sent out several investigative
commissions, which brought all those who had committed acts of violence before a
court-martial. Those who were convicted of crimes were condemned and meted out
the most severe kind of punishment, such as death or hard labor. Every government
has the right to defend itself against those who stage armed revolts.16
These affirmations, whose accuracy we assessed in the fourth part of the present study, call
for a few comments. Talât does not deny that some excesses occurred, due to the lack of the
“gendarmes ... incorporated into the army.” He clearly perceives that to issue a blanket denial
of the mass crimes that he coordinated would put him in an untenable position. However, he
limits this budding confession by emphasizing that the central authorities severely punished
the guilty, going so far as to inflict capital punishment on some of them. In the process, he
obscures the original objectives of the commissions that had been sent out to conduct inquir-
ies, the sole function of which, as we have seen, was to identify the civilian and military
officials who had taken advantage of circumstances to make personal gains at the expense of
the party-state. The trials had probably also been intended to intimidate people tempted by
these examples. At all events, the judges imposed only light sentences and never, to the best
of our knowledge, condemned anyone to death.
Invoking the right to legitimate self-defense in the face of an armed revolt, Talât asked
whether “the English, who committed cruel acts of all sorts against the Irish, without tak-
ing the least thought for the lives of their women and children, would not have deported
them beyond the war zone if revolution had broken out there and had spread as far as the
flanks and the rear of the army fighting the Germans.”17 By taking as his point of reference
the acts of a great power with little concern for the lives of “women and children,” Talât,
too, claimed the right to exercise state violence and sought to legitimize the violence he
had ordered. He even referred to the “concentration camps in the Transvaal” in which the
British let women and children “starve to death” without scrupling over “humanitarian
considerations.”18 This rhetoric, which lays the groundwork for a justification of the crimes
committed under the CUP’s lead and with the support of the administration, is surely a
response not only to the persistent accusations expressed outside the country, but also the

muted rumors that must have been circulating within it as well. Profiting from the oppor-
tunity to express himself for the first time before the CUP in his capacity as grand vizier,
Talât sought to sever all connection with the past and convince skeptics that the actions of
the party had been justified.
In his conclusion, he hammered home the idea that “in our country, the Union and
Progress Party represents the new ideas and constitutes a factor for progress ... Social experi-
ence clearly shows that the rule of ‘law’ in a country can be guaranteed only by the rule of
knowledge and morality. The essential mission of a state is to institute justice and freedom
based on law.”19 Talât thus described the CUP’s “sacred” goal, which it was the vocation of
the party’s elite to achieve.
The Military Campaign in the Caucasus or

the Rebirth of Pan-Turkism (1918)
The party’s “sacred” goal obviously did not consist in its ambitions for social progress alone,
but also in uniting the Turkish-speaking peoples under its banner. We have seen how the
partisans of Pan-Turkism, beginning with Enver Pasha, were disabused of their illusions and
lost influence after the bloody defeat at Sarıkamiş. The order of the day was now Turkism
and the much more accessible objective of “homogenizing” Anatolia. The 1917 Bolshevik
Revolution and its military consequences, however, put a project that had hitherto been out
of reach for the Young Turk regime back on the agenda. The hasty evacuation of the front
by the Russian army was perceived in Istanbul as an unimagined opportunity to link up with
the “Turks of the Caucasus.” Arif Cemil, an officer in the Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa, notes in this
regard: “The question of the Turks in Russia had resurfaced. Those who were well informed
about the situation of the Turks in Russia had presented reports to the Central Committee
of Union and Progress in which they explained how it was possible to profit from this his-
toric opportunity.”20 After Turkey and the Bolsheviks concluded the truce of Erzincan on
18 December 1917,21 the government of Transcaucasia, which filled a political vacuum, was
also approached in mid-January by the Commander of the Third Army, Vehib Pasha, who
suggested that they sign a peace treaty.22 The aim of these advances was doubtless simply to
calm the fears of the Caucasian leaders while gaining time in which to reorganize the Third
Army, which was very weak when the Erzincan truce was signed.23 The Young Turk leader-
ship lost no time. The minister of war proceeded to carry out a full-scale reorganization of
the army of the Caucasus, which was initially restructured in three army corps – the first,
under the orders of Kâzım [Karabekir], had Erzerum and Kars as its objectives; the second,
led by Yakub Şevki Pasha, was directed toward Trebizond and Batum; the third, commanded
by Ali İhsan Pasha, set its sights on Northern Persia. Later, it was reorganized as four army
corps and put under the command of the War Minister’s uncle, Halil [Kut]: 1) the remains
of the Third Army were entrusted to General Esad; 2) the Islâm Ordusi (Army of Islam)
was to be led by General Nuri [Killigil], Enver’s half-brother; 3) the Ninth Army was to be
commanded by General Yakub Şevki Pasha; and 4) the Sixth Army was placed under the
orders of General Ali İhsan Pasha [Sabis]. In other words, the two Turkish divisions that
had been stationed on the Galician and Moldavian fronts were not, once they were freed
up by the Peace of Brest-Litovsk, sent to reinforce the Palestinian and Mesopotamian fronts;
indeed, the Sixth Army was transferred from the Mesopotamian front and used to beef up
the army of the Caucasus.24 The further course of events might have been a scenario writ-
ten in advance. In February, Vehib Pasha, who had not yet been replaced by Halil, sent the
commander of the Caucasian forces, General Lebedinsky, several notes of protest in which
he accused “Armenian bands” commanded by Sepastatsi Murad of massacring 15,000 Turks.
These accusations, which seem to have been on the order of a psychological feint, served as

a pretext for breaking the truce. On 13 February, an offensive was launched on Erzincan,
leading to the panicked flight of several thousand Armenian genocide survivors who had
returned to the region in spring 1916.25
All that the Turkish forces had to contend with was an Armenian corps of 20,000 men
that had been hastily formed beginning in December 1917 under the direction of General
Nazarbekov, after the commander-in-chief of the army of the Caucasus, General Lebedinsky,
had given his approval to the idea.26 This corps was supposed to defend a long cease-fire
line that stretched from Erzincan to Van, while also maintaining order in the Caucasus.
The nature of the Transcaucasian Federation, in which Armenians, Azeris, and Georgians
coexisted, was such as to guarantee the absence of cohesion of this improbable improvised
state that was, in addition to everything else, under pressure from two antagonistic Russian
blocs, Bolshevik and Czarist. The Armenians’ situation, of course, was the most precarious.
Caucasian Armenia had to provide for some 200,000 Ottoman refugees and establish secu-
rity in a country including a large Turkish-speaking minority that was far from deaf to the
sirens of Pan-Turkism.
After Erzincan in February, Enver launched a general offensive that culminated in the
capture of Trebizond and Erzerum on 12 March.27 The Turkish forces took Kars on 25 April,
opening a path to the Transcaucasus,28 and Van on 4 April, prefiguring the Ottoman army’s
general offensive in Azerbaijan. Thus, when the Batum “Peace conference” opened on
11 May 1918, the Ottoman plenipotentiary, General Halil [Kut], was in a position of strength
and could dictate his conditions to the Transcaucasian delegates with their diverging inter-
ests, the more so as in the midst of the negotiations on 15 May, the army of the Caucasus
launched an offensive on Alexandropol.29 That said, it must be recalled that while the appar-
ent objective of these military operations was to win back Ottoman territories, they also took
their place, as we shall see, in a Pan-Turk plan that aimed among other things to liquidate the
last surviving Armenians, whether Ottoman refugees or Russian subjects in the Caucasus.
General von Lossow, the German representative at the Batum conference, wrote in this
period that the Turks had undertaken “la liquidation totale des Arméniens en Transcaucasie
également.”30 Lossow stated the matter more precisely in the following weeks: “The aim of
Turkish policy, as I have always maintained, is to take possession of the Armenian districts
in order to extirpate the population living on them”;31 “Talât’s government wants to destroy
all the Armenians, not only in Turkey but also outside it”;32 “after completely encircling
the vestiges of the Armenian nation in the Transcaucasus, the Turks intend ... to starve the
Armenian nation to death – that much is obvious.”33 General Friedrich Freiherr Kress von
Kressenstein, the former chief of military operations in the Ottoman War Ministry who was
appointed to head the German Imperial delegation to the Caucasus in June 1918, was him-
self convinced that “the Turkish policy that consists in provoking a famine is evidence, were
there any need for further proof, of the will to annihilation that the Turks harbor toward
the Armenian element.”34 He saw proof of what he said in General Esad’s refusal, “on the
flimsiest of pretexts,” of his proposal to provide the Armenians aid; it was at most a ques-
tion, he thought, of a change in method.35 In the preparatory stages, Kress von Kressenstein
reports, the Turkish civilian and military authorities fell back on a tried and true rhetoric in
their reports to Istanbul, of the species “military necessity” or “threat to our communication
lines and our rear” that was meant to “justify the murder of hundreds of thousands of human
beings.”36 There are similarities here in the techniques used to present the facts and the
smear campaign that preceded the crimes of 1915. The leaders of the Caucasian campaign
evoked problems of military security in their communications with their superiors in order
to legitimize the exactions that they would go on to commit on instructions received from
those superiors. The only noteworthy difference observable in 1918 is the methodical use of
the army, which was both an instrument of conquest and a machine for extermination.

It is, however, impossible to understand the significance of the Caucasian operation

unless one is aware that the CUP seized the occasion provided by the Russian withdrawal
to attempt to achieve the Pan-Turanian plan that it had failed to early in 1915. Lieutenant-
Colonel Ernest Paraquin, who had been Halil [Kut’s] chief of staff first in Iraq and then in the
Caucasus, had “benefited” from the confidences of this general, who had, moreover, founded
the Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa and later felt the need to make them public. Familiar with the Young
Turk military leaders, the German officer points out how deeply obsessed an individual such
as Halil was by “Turan,” whose “frontiers he traced in blue pencil” in an English atlas.37
The military and demographic occupation of the space that he dreamed of appears as a new
form of colonialism à la turque, now based, however, on a “racial” homogeneity that was itself
legitimized by the myth of a return to the sources of the race. For Halil, Paraquin notes, “the
conquest of Turkestan, the Turks’ cradle, was the most important item on the agenda.” In
Halil’s eyes, “the Tatars of the Caucasus, related to the Turks by their origins,” were destined
“to be included” in the “federation” he envisaged. As for the “national minorities in the
countries in between,” they would have to “submit.” Halil further noted that “the Armenian
question” was on the “verge of being solved, thanks to the war, through the total annihila-
tion of the Armenian race. All the interested Turkish departments are working to this end,
with implacable resolve.”38
“These imperialist dreams, which Halil laid out for me one evening, his eyes sparkling
with enthusiasm,” writes Paraquin, “were not merely the product of a very fertile Oriental
imagination; their realization was pursued systematically and objectively.” The German offic-
er’s account emphasizes, moreover, that the Young Turk leaders were prepared to make every
sacrifice to achieve their Pan-Turk project, including abandoning their Arab possessions.39
According to Paraquin, Enver sent his younger brother Nuri, who had been promoted
to the rank of lieutenant general at the age of 27, to Baku in order to lay the groundwork
in secret. He even gives us to understand that the “Tatar Republic” had been baptized
“Azerbaijan” by the Young Turks: “the name is well chosen, no?” Halil Pasha is supposed to
have exclaimed, “alluding to Persian Azerbaijan, the incorporation of which into the new
republic was not merely planned, but had already been initiated by all means possible.”40
Well before the Turkish troops arrived in Baku, Nuri “was undisputed master of a new Tatar
state that, when I visited it in summer and fall 1918, left me with the distinct impression that
I was in a Turkish province.” All the strategic points in the region, Paraquin goes on, “had
been occupied by the Turkish troops, who had been given the name ‘Army of Islam,’ as the
cause required. The war minister, a Tatar lawyer, sported the uniform of a Turkish Pasha;
everywhere, Turkish officers and ‘softas’ preached submission to the Caliph in Istanbul; the
Turkish crescent waved over all public buildings. Similar procedures were used among the
Muslim peoples of the North Caucasus.”41
The “Azerbaijan” that was included in the Transcaucasian Federation in spring 1918 was
clearly already under Istanbul’s undisputed control and working from within to help realize
the Pan-Turk project. It is probable that Istanbul suggested that the country’s leaders main-
tain a certain reserve until the Armenian sanctuary had been completely liquidated. The
April–May 1918 capture of Alexandropol and Kars led to a massive exodus of the Armenian
population, which withdrew toward Yerevan, and also to massacres perpetrated with the
complicity of, notably, Colonel Abdülkadri Hilmi, a member of the Ottoman general staff
sent to reinforce the Turkish forces.42 The Turkish side appealed to the terms of the Brest-
Litovsk peace treaty (ratified on 15 March 1918 by the Bolsheviks), which awarded it the
districts of Kars, Ardahan, and Batum, as well as to the “military need” for access to the
Kars-Julfa-Baku railway in order to justify its inexorable advance, behind which the plan to
liquidate the Armenians was coming into focus. An examination of the military operations
shows that the army of the Caucasus sought to drive the population that the army expelled

from its homes into a circumscribed area around Yerevan. The Turkish forces, after arriving
in the Ararat plain on the left bank of the Arax River on 16 May, demanded free passage to
Julfa. If it was not granted them, they could not guarantee the “invulnerability of the popu-
lation.”43 Halil Pasha, in his exchanges of notes with the Caucasian Federation, promised
a “friendly advance” of his troops, yet had them take control of the route between Yerevan
and Tiflis and march on Bash Abaran, clearing the way to Yerevan.44 Even as Istanbul was
“negotiating” a peace treaty in Batum with the Transcaucasian Federation, it tightened its
grip on Georgia and Armenia, enjoying the notable advantage of being informed hourly of
the nature of the debates taking place within the Transcaucasian delegation, thanks to the
delegation’s Azeri members, who met discreetly with Halil Pasha.45 To legitimize these opera-
tions, which could no longer be legitimized as a strict application of the terms of the Brest-
Litovsk Treaty, Enver Pasha put forward, in a 20 May exchange with German interlocutors, a
twofold argument – the Bolshevik danger in the Caucasus and “the sufferings that innocent
Muslims had endured at the hands of vicious Armenians.”46 There is every reason to think
that the Turks’ strategy consisted at the time in shattering the Transcaucasian Federation so
that they could better manipulate the local populations. The ultimatum that Halil delivered
on 26 May had probably intended to serve that end. Like his nephew, he referred to the suf-
fering endured by “hundreds of thousands of Turks and Muslims in Baku and its environs”
and to the “irreparable tragedy” underway there to justify his demand for free access to the
Transcaucasian railway. No government, he said, could remain “indifferent in the face of
such atrocities.”47 Georgia’s 26 May declaration of independence and, the following day, that
of the state of “Southern and Eastern Transcaucasia,” which was to become the Republic of
Azerbaijan, put an end to the experience of federation and to ties with Russia. Nuri Pasha
himself undertook to form, in Ganja, the “Azeri” cabinet, which immediately demanded the
“assistance” of the Turkish forces in liberating the country from the Bolsheviks.48 In other
words, the formation of the “independent” republics was the fruit of a Turkish initiative.
The “liberation” of the Transcaucasus from Bolshevik dominion must be understood as a
liquidation of the Armenians who had a central place in the region’s economy, and who also
provided the main source of support for the Bolshevik revolution in the Caucasus. It was
indeed a strange situation, which illustrated the extreme fragmentation of Armenian society,
made up of groups with divergent interests, in the face of a Pan-Turkish movement that was
cohesive but hampered by the fact that its capacities were not equal to its ambitions.
The Armenian National Council cautiously proclaimed itself the “supreme” authority
in the “Armenian provinces” on 28 May, with an eye to filling the political vacuum created
by the Russian withdrawal and making the last square of territory around Yerevan appear
at least minimally representative. This new authority set about organizing the defense of
the city. On 24 May, the Armenian forces stopped the Turkish advance a few dozen kil-
ometers west of Yerevan in Sardarabad, and to the north in Karakilisa, thirty kilometers
east of Alexandropol.49 This sudden turn in the course of the fighting doubtless saved the
Armenians from being trapped in an entirely isolated enclave that would have constituted
a vast concentration camp in which they would unfailingly have starved to death. The
Armenian authority nevertheless had no choice but to sign, on 4 June, the Treaty of Batum,
which reduced “Armenia” to a territory with a surface area of some 10,000 square kilom-
eters. Vehib Pasha, whose remarks during the “negotiations” at Batum have been reported
by Khatisian, forthrightly justified Turkey’s enterprise: “Our blood, our religion, our language
are here. That exerts an irresistible pull. Our brothers are in Baku, Daghestan, Turkestan,
and Azerbaijan [“Azerbaijan” here undoubtedly designates northwestern Persia].”50
Turkish ambitions were not limited to Armenia. Georgia, which had dense Armenian
populations in Akhalkalak, Akhaltskhik, and Tiflis, was another objective for the army
of the Caucasus. Paraquin notes that it was the “unexpected” arrival of German troops

on 10 June that made it possible “to stop a victorious Turkish march on Tiflis.” The tense
relations that had sprung up between the Turks and their German allies as a result of
Turkey’s ambitions in the Transcaucasus issued in an armed conflict here, after which “the
victorious Turks swallowed their pride, while loudly gnashing their teeth.”51 Although the
Turkish army did not succeed in establishing a full blockade of the Armenian enclave,
it did a great deal to provoke a food shortage that led to famine and epidemics. At the
very least, around 200,000 people, first and foremost Ottoman Armenian refugees, lost
their lives in the enclave between spring and fall 1918. Marshall Hindenburg, head of the
German army’s general staff from 1916 to 1918, writes that “les événements atroces ... qui se
sont aussi étendus vers la fin de la guerre à la partie arménienne de la Trancaucasie ... étai-
ent considérés par les Turcs simplement comme une affaire interne.”52 In late May 1918,
an Austrian diplomat announced that, according to information received in Berlin, “la
Turquie souhaite annexer entièrement le Caucase et exterminer les Arméniens avec tous
les moyens imaginables.”53
Vice-Marshal Pomiankowski, the Austrian plenipotentiary and military attaché in Turkey,
observed in August that it would be necessary to “protect the Armenians again the massa-
cres and also again starvation.”54 Half a million Armenians, mostly women and children,
had been living scattered throughout the northern Caucasus since the Turkish offensive in
the spring; Yerevan was trying to persuade the Germans to permit these refugees to return
to their homes before the onset of winter. Armenia also sought Berlin’s help in bringing the
Turks to evacuate certain districts in Yerevan and Alexandropol in which exactions were
taking place daily, and struggled to obtain food supplies that failed to arrive.55
The Spring 1918 Turkish Military Operations

in Iranian Azerbaijan
While the Russian forces and battalions of Armenian volunteers commanded by General
Nazarbekov had stopped the first spring 1915 Ottoman offensive in Azerbaijan, the vacuum
created by the Russian retreat in late December 1917 led to a new Turkish occupation. As
in the Caucasus, the Young Turks once again activated their local networks and urged the
Iranian Democrats to support their campaign. The 4 April 1918 capture of Van marked
the beginning of the Turkish offensive in Azerbaijan and triggered the precipitate flight of
the 25,000 Armenians who had returned to their homes in the wake of the Russian army
in summer 1916.56 In February and March 1918, the Ottoman Sixth Army, commanded by
General Ali İhsan Pasha [Sabis], who was notorious for the exactions that he had committed
(notably in the Mosul region),57 advanced along the northern and southern shores of Lake
Van. He accelerated his advance from 1 April on. After the Russian troops dispersed, the
defense of the entire region was assured by a mere 2,000 men who resisted in only two places,
Vostan and Arjesh, before yielding before the enemy’s greater numbers.58 On 23 December
1917, France and Great Britain had, to be sure, signed an agreement providing that the
Transcaucasus would become part of the British sphere of influence, yet Britain limited itself
to setting up the “Dunsterville Mission,” comprising 150 senior and junior officers, far to the
south in Hamadân, in order to ensure the maintenance of communications between Baghdad
and the Caspian sea.59 In other words, the 10,000 to 12,000 men in the Turkish Sixth Army
encountered only one obstacle during their invasion of Azerbaijan: the Christian battalions
made up of Armenians and Syriacs that had been formed on a British initiative. Late in
March, small Turkish contingents were spotted in Azerbaijan, in Oshnu. Somewhat later,
1,000 men were reported present in Sulduz; their advance on Khoy apparently alarmed the
local authorities. The Iranian Democrats seem to have had something to do with this opera-
tion, which, an observer reported, “today does not (no longer) threatens anything but Persian

territory, which does not interest them much, and the Christian populations, a circumstance
that they find agreeable.”60
On 14/27 February 1918, the Armenians of Salmast intercepted a messenger who was
bearing a letter from a local Kurdish chieftain, Sımko, referring to a future intervention that
“no Christian would be able to resist.”61 As Magdalena Golnazarian points out, the Turks
“had already acquired some experience in the art of utilizing the Kurds to massacre and
plunder the Christians.” The Christians therefore tried to neutralize Sımko by making him
interesting offers.62 The attempt seems to have failed, for Sımko, who had for a time worked
for the Russians, attacked the 25,000 Armenians from Van who were trying to reach the
Caucasus by way of Julfa. Held up in Qotur, on the border, the Armenians were surrounded
by Sımko and his men: “On that day, Sımko killed until sunset, and the Qotur River turned
red with the blood of those killed ... Sımko was not satisfied with all these crimes. He sent his
horsemen into the Armenian villages around Khoy to kill more Armenians.”63 This eyewit-
ness account, however, omits to note that there was an armed contingent among the 25,000
refugees, which put up resistance to Sımko’s 700 to 800 men. According to one Armenian
refugee, 400 prisoners, primarily civilians, were killed on this day, 11 April 1918, while the
others went to swell the ranks of the Ottoman Armenians living in the Armenian villages
on the Salmast plain.64
The bulk of the Turkish force did not officially enter Persia until May; their declared objec-
tive was to “free the Persians of the obstacle represented by the armed Christian forces.”65
Several tens of thousands of Syriacs – perhaps 35,000 – were living on the plains of Salmast
and Urmia after their flight from the southern part of the vilayet of Van in 1915, and there
were at least as many Armenians there, both natives and refugees,66 who constituted a pref-
erential target for the Ottoman Sixth Army. The occasion was the more propitious in that
there had been violent clashes between Nestorians and Muslims in the wake of the 17 March
1918 murder of the Nestorian Mar Shimun by the notorious Sımko. These were followed by
massacres of the civilian population and by looting, especially in the Muslim villages of Jara
and Soma, where Sımko usually lived.67 One can of course ask why the religious leader of the
Jelos was slain, and speculate that this provocation, which spawned a spiral of violence, was
organized by Azerbaijan’s Young Turk networks. However that may be, the native Armenians
and Ottoman refugees, who had at first tried to keep their distance from the conflict, were
eventually swept up in the storm.
On 4 May, part of the Sixth Army directly threatened Salmast and its principal town,
Dilmân, as well as the city of Urmia. It faced forces made up of Armenian volunteers (above
all from Van) and Syriacs who had defended the city for more than one month. On 21 June
their defense crumbled, leading to the exodus of tens of thousands of Armenians and Syriacs.
Shortly thereafter, a battalion commanded by General Antranig reached a spot near Khoy,
30 kilometers north of Salmast, but its Christian inhabitants had already abandoned the
region. The inhabitants of several villages were massacred and the Armenians of Salmast
and Khoy as well as the refugees from Van withdrew to Urmia.68 After a first clash with Ali
İhsan Pasha’s Sixth Army on 23 June, the Armenian forces headed back to Julfa, together
with the refugees whom they encountered on the way. Antranig’s vain intervention, car-
ried out against the advice of Yerevan, constituted, according to Golnazarian, “an excellent
pretext for mobilizing the Persians against the ‘invader’ ” and massacring the local Armenian
population.69 According to M. Riâhi, Antranig’s arrival had been announced during the
festivities organized in Khoy on 21 June to celebrate the defeat of the Christians in Salmast.
That very evening, Turkish soldiers organized an anti-Armenian manhunt in Khoy. The
Armenians were removed from their homes, led out of the city, and massacred to a man.70
In Urmia, where 10,000 to 12,000 regular troops and around 3,000 irregulars who had
been recruited from the area confronted some 4,000 Syriac and Armenian combatants, the

situation was critical, the more so as the city was also subject to the pressure of the tens of
thousands of refugees from the plains to the north. Beginning on 18 July 1918, after several
days of fighting, approximately 60,000 to 70,000 refugees left Urmia for Hamadân, where
they hoped that the British would protect them. On 31 July, when the Turkish army marched
into the city, only 1,000 Christians were left, having taken refuge in the foreign missions
there. Bishop Sontag and nearly 600 Syriacs who had crowded into the French mission were
liquidated.71 Apart from the case of Khoy, then, it would seem that regular Ottoman troops
did not participate directly in the massacres, but rather sought to incite the tribes against
the Christians.
The Occupation of Tabriz by the Turkish Forces and

the Taking of Armenian Hostages
Tabriz, the seat of government of the province of Azerbaijan, had a big, long-standing, and
well-integrated Armenian community in 1918, which had nevertheless not escaped Turkish
dominion over the region. According to contemporary reports, the atmosphere in the city
was tense after the publication of inflammatory articles on the events in Salmast and Urmia,
especially in the daily Kelid-e Sa’âdat, which endeavored “to rekindle hostility toward the
Christian population of Tabriz, the largest component of which was represented by the
Armenians.”72
Pan-Turkish propagandists were also at work here. A physician from Baku, Dr. Melik-
Aslanov, held a meeting in the Aramian theater about “Islam’s victory over the Christians”
before an agitated audience. To counter provocations of this kind, the Armenian community
immediately organized an evening benefit in the same theater, entitled Shab-e Irân (Iranian
night), for poverty-stricken Persians. Patriotic speeches and the singing of the Anthem of
the Constitutional Revolution may have helped overcome “the negative effects of Turkish
propaganda.”73 At all events, it was not until 7 June 1918 that some 40 Turkish soldiers
appeared in Tabriz. A few days later, foreign nationals were invited to leave the city, at a time
when the Turkish presence there was becoming increasingly conspicuous.
Initially, the Turkish army conducted itself in disciplined fashion and saw to it that law
and order were maintained. In June 1918, P. Franssen notes, when the Turkish troops made
a triumphant entry into Tabriz,
a letter signed by a so-called Revenge Committee, primarily made up of Muslims who

had come from the Caucasus, was sent to the city’s Armenian notables; it demanded
that they remit ten thousand toumans [Iranian money] to the aforementioned
Committee within twenty-four hours, adding that, if they did not, the Bishop and the
notables would be held responsible for everything that happened ... On the evening of
the following day, Saturday, they began by attacking the Armenians.
Several Armenians were killed in this way.74

The territory of a neutral country such as Persia was, so to speak, open to one and all.
Although Istanbul had found an excellent pretext for intervening militarily in the regions
of Khoy, Salmast, and Urmia and expelling their Christian populations, it found it harder
to justify an occupation of Tabriz, fearing to display its Pan-Turkish ambitions too openly. A
declaration bearing the signature of Tufik Bey, the commander of the contingent stationed
in Tabriz, was posted up in the city on 23 June 1918. It gives some indication of the argu-
ment advanced by the Young Turks: “The principal objective of the Ottoman Army is to
drive the English from Persian soil, which is inhabited by our Muslim brothers and under
the authority of a government that is also Muslim; and, at the same time, to come to the aid

of the inhabitants of Tauris.”75 Thus, it was the discourse of Islamic solidarity in the face
of the aggressor that predominated here, with no mention of Turkism. Of course, Iranian
Democrats such as Beluri, who were faithful allies of the Turks, would not necessarily have
appreciated a different sort formulation. The efforts of the Young Turk officers to recruit
from the ranks of structures such as the Ettehâd-e Eslâm (Union of Islam), which were
supposed to obey orders issued by the Turkish authorities, did not produce the expected
results.76
Another declaration, published in Tabriz on 30 June 1918 by the Ottoman military com-
mander Munir Bey, illustrates the radicalization of the same discourse of Islamic solidarity:
“It goes without saying that all Muslims ought to take part, with devotion and sentiments
worthy of them, in the holy war currently being waged against Islam’s true enemies, and
should massacre them in order to prevent them from realizing their perfidious intentions
and cruel, tyrannical designs.”77 Golnazarian remarks that “the official representatives of the
Entente countries had already left Tabriz” and that “the Armenians, lumped together with
the ‘enemies of Islam,’ comprised the only big Christian group in the city”; as such, they were
the primary targets here. The military authorities, then, were capable of expressing them-
selves with less restraint. These barely veiled allusions took open form in another declaration
published on 7 July 1918, again by Munir Bey. It revealed the real objectives of the military
incursion into Azerbaijan:
The cursed, rabid Armenians are always doing whatever they can to violate the
political and religious rights of our poor brothers in Azerbaijan; what is more, they
are trying to seize their land. The victorious army of the Ottoman Empire, which is
striving to defend our holy religion and liberate our fellow Muslims in Azerbaijan,
and also to liquidate the Armenians, has already laid siege to the city of Urmia ... .
Thank God, all of them were massacred as the result of a little attack by our Turkish
heroes.78
In accordance with approved practice in the Ottoman Empire, the military authorities
also threatened to impose “severe sanctions” on those who dared provide assistance of any
kind to the infidels.79 This incitement to violence, however, was not enough to engender
more than a certain animosity toward the Armenians. The arrival in early August of Ali
İhasan Pasha had been preceded by a demand from Munir, who demanded that Bishop
Franssen provide him with 84 Armenian hostages chosen from among the notables, in
line with orders he had received from his superior. According to Golnazarian, İhsan had
reasons to fear acts of revenge for massacres that had been perpetrated in the province on
his orders. The Armenian community perceived this demand as the first act of a prepro-
grammed death. It was hard for it to shed the image of the domestic foe that Young Turk
propaganda had assigned it. Archbishop Melik Tangian and Bishop Franssen vainly tried
to convince the Turkish military command that the taking of hostages was pointless.
They were left with no other alternative than to beg the prince apparent and the gov-
ernor of Tabriz to intercede with the Turkish authorities and “vouch for their Armenian
subjects’ loyalty toward the occupiers.” Mohtasham ol-Saltane and the prince apparent’s
treasurer, Ehzâm ol-Molk, ultimately managed to reduce the number of hostages required
to ten.80
For nine days running, the Diocesan Council maintained permanent contact with the
Iranian authorities, who demonstrated on this occasion that they were clearly ready to pro-
tect their Armenian subjects. It was, without a doubt, thanks to the concern exhibited by the
central authorities, Golnazarian remarks, “that this community was spared the worst and the
hostages were never in danger.”81

When İhsan made his official entry into Tabriz on 11 August, a delegation representing
the Armenian community was among those that went out to receive him. The speech that
the general delivered to these delegates was extremely frank:
I thank you for having come out to greet me, but listen to what I am going to tell
you: above all, prove the truth of your words by your deeds. You are not unaware of
all the afflictions that the Armenians of Urmia, Salmast, and Khoy have brought
down upon the Muslims ... In retaliation, we killed the Armenians of Khoy, and I
gave the order to massacre the Armenians of Maku. If you wish to be well treated,
honor the promises that you have just made. If you do not, I cannot offer you any
guarantees.82
As soon as he arrived, İhsan called for the transfer of the hostages, who had hitherto been in
the hands of his Democratic allies, and demanded that the Armenians of Tabriz pay a trib-
ute of 60,000 toumans. As in the case of the hostages, the authorities opposed this demand
made by the forces of occupation, apparently because they feared that the measure would
be extended to Persian businessmen as well. Moreover, the French consul in Tabriz notes in
an 8 March 1919 report that İhsan said, in the course of a conversation with Archbishop
Tangian, that took place a few days after his arrival: “I have had half a million of your co-
religionists massacred. I can offer you a cup of tea, if you’d like.”83 While the general obvi-
ously wanted to exaggerate his deeds, he plainly expressed the spirit animating a number of
Young Turk military cadres. Lieutenant Colonel Paraquin, in turn, reveals the CUP’s desire
to exclude the Germans from its operations in “Persian Azerbaijan, which it considered to be
its own sphere of influence,” so much so, indeed, that the German Ambassador, Bernstorff,
worried that the nomination of a German consul in Tabriz would “cause new problems with
the Turks.”84 Even more than in the Caucasus, Istanbul wanted to be able to operate in
Azerbaijan without outside interference. Only after the Mudros armistice, signed on 30
October 1918, did the Turkish expeditionary corps begin to evacuate Tabriz.85
The human and material costs of the occupation of Azerbaijan were extensive. Without
distorting the facts, one can affirm that the centuries-old Armenian presence in the regions
of Urmia, Salmast, Qaradâgh, and Maku had been dealt a blow from which it would never
recover.86 In this region, the İhsan had threatened sardâr and other khans with death because
they had granted the Armenians refuge. In Keshmish Tape, the sardâr reports, “Ottoman
soldiers who had come from Bayazid and Ottoman émigrés living in Maku ... attacked and
committed an abominable act,” the massacre of 500 people, followed by the plunder of their
property and the nearby monastery of St. Thaddeus, which had been seized by the Turkish
soldiers.87
According to a report by M. Riâhi, despite the intervention of certain “wise men of the
city,” the very day the Turkish soldiers arrived in Khoy and nearby villages, the Armenian
population was massacred by “Sımko and his men, a few fanatics in the city, and those under
the influence of Ottoman propaganda.”88 The local population, which had given a warm
welcome to its Turkish “liberators,” rapidly soured when it was forced to provide for the
maintenance of this expeditionary corps. In his memoirs, Mollâ Ja’far, an inhabitant of Khoy,
says that on Wednesday, 10 July 1918, “Ottoman soldiers discovered seven Armenians in the
home of Mashadi Khalil Âqâ, Hâji Fath ollâh-e Mâku-yi’s son, who lived in Maqbare Street.
They found two of them hidden in the well and five in the basement. The owner of the
house was in Maku. They arrested his son Hâji Âqâ, the police chief ... they caught five other
Armenians in the same street and killed all of them.”89 The report that the Archbishop of
Tabriz, Melik Tangian, submitted to the catholicos on 19 June 1919 drew up a general balance
sheet that corroborates information available in other sources: 500 people had been killed in

the region of Maku, where women and children had been Islamicized; 1,000 people had been
massacred in Khoy and the vicinity, and an unknown number had been Islamicized; 5,000
inhabitants of Salmast, Urmia, Sulduz, and Sovuj-Bulâq had died while trekking toward
Hamadân and Bakuba; 30 villages in the Qaradâgh district had been looted and 60 people
had been killed in Âghâghân. Nearly half of the 30,000 Armenians of Azerbaijan had died
or gone into exile by mid-June 1919.90
Turkish Military Operations in the Provinces of

Elizabetpol and Baku in Summer 1918
General Korganoff, the former vice–chief of staff on the Caucasian front, considered that
the Turkish forces lost precious months because they wanted to “bring Armenia to submit”
before turning to their “main task” of taking control of Persian Azerbaijan and the Baku
region.91 We may add that this resistance also made it impossible for the Turkish forces to
utilize the railway that ran along the Arax River to advance rapidly on Baku, forcing them to
go by way of northern Armenia and march down the Kura River valley toward Elizavbetpol
(Ganja), where the “Azeri” government controlled by Enver’s brother Nuri Pasha had its
seat. It was the delay that this caused that doubtless allowed the Bolsheviks briefly to take
control of Baku on 25 April 1918. Whereas the military face-off had so far opposed Turks
and Bolsheviks, the Commissariat for Transcaucasia, led by Stepan Shahumian, resigned on
31 July, and the Bolshevik troops withdrew.92 The result was that the confrontation took on
the character of a clash between Armenians and Tatars. On 5 August, General Mürsel Pasha
tried to break through the enemy lines and march on Baku, but was thrown back by forces
that were almost exclusively Armenian. The arrival of British units, which had an interest
in seizing the city and its offshore oil, as well as the 27 August treaty between the Bolshevik
regime and Germany that notably guaranteed the Germans oil shipments, considerably com-
plicated the situation. The Bolsheviks made it a condition that the Germans prevent any
“third force” (Turkey) from occupying Baku. In other words, all parties wanted the city – or,
more exactly, wanted to prevent “others” from capturing it. Neither the Bolsheviks nor the
Germans, however, were capable of defending it. Baku’s fate was, as it were, left in suspense,
and its big Armenian community, which was far from being a coherent whole with its big oil
magnates and working classes, understood that its physical and economic existence was in
jeopardy. The affair took the form of a tug-of-war between the Germans and the Turks. The
conflict was so acute that Grand Vizier Talât had to go to Berlin to negotiate recognition of
the “specific interests” of his country with regard to the Muslims of Russia and “Ottoman”
influence in the Transcaucasus.93
While Talât was finalizing an agreement providing for the creation of “separate states” in
the “Northern Caucasus and Turkestan,” recognizing Turkish interests in the Crimea, and
calling for an evacuation of Persia and “Azerbaijan” (after operations against the British were
concluded), Enver was ordering his uncle Halil Pasha to take the reins of an offensive against
Baku. General Dunsterville’s thin British force set out for Enzeli, Persia, on 14 September, but
left almost as fast as it had come, abandoning the civilian population to its fate. Halil Pasha,
his nephew Nuri Pasha, and General Mürsel did not rush to take the city. There is every rea-
son to suppose that they deliberately let Baku “settle its scores” – in other words, they encour-
aged the ensuing carnage, which caused from 10,000 to 20,000 Armenian deaths. The troops
did not enter Baku until 16 September, meeting no resistance.94 According to the most relia-
ble sources, the regular troops confined themselves to controlling the populace. A note from
the Bolshevik regime denouncing the war crimes perpetrated by the Turkish forces in the
districts of Kars, Ardahan, and Batum, the fate of which was supposed to be decided later by
referendum, was a response to the Turks’ violation of the subsidiary Brest-Litovsk agreement

concluded with Germany. The note also pointed out that the invasion of Transcaucasus
constituted a violation of the treaty itself. Istanbul maintained that the exactions committed
in Baku had been the work of irregular bands.
These diplomatic and military gestures aside, a certain number of remarks are called
for here. It must first be pointed out that many of the actors of these events, especially
France and Germany, did not have the means to match their ambitions, and that the two
veritable protagonists in this struggle, Turkey and Bolshevik Russia, had both convergent
and divergent interests. Both regimes were interested, if for different reasons, in pillaging
the European and Armenian oil firms. The Russians were probably not unhappy to see the
Turkish forces and populace do the work in their stead. The Turks continued to pursue the
logic of physical and economic elimination of the Armenians so as to open a path toward
their Tatar brothers, now baptized “Azeris,” in order to pave the way for annexation of
Iranian Azerbaijan.
Lieutenant Colonel Paraquin, chief of staff of the Eastern Army Group’s Commander-in-
Chief Halil [Kut], informed his superiors in a report written between 15 and 17 September
1918 – that is, while the massacres were underway in Baku – that General Mürsel, the com-
mander of the Fifth Division, had informed him of the Tatars’ plans to carry out massacres.
Paraquin observed that it was only after Armenians had been hunted down in the streets for
three days that the commander of the “Army of Islam,” with Nuri’s approval, had imposed
martial law. Paraquin concluded that “the carnage was planned weeks in advance and stood
in no relation whatsoever with the tactical operations.”95
The clearest symptom of the genocidal logic masked by the military campaigns was
Bahaeddin Şakir’s presence in Baku. Şakir had arrived on the heels of the Eastern Army
Group in order to assume the post of “Director General of the Police” in Baku.96 Is there
any need to point out that the head of the Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa was there, together with two
of his CUP comrades, in order to honor the promise that he had made to his Caucasian
interlocutors in 1906, that he would “put an end to the importance and the influence of the
Armenians in the Caucasus”?97 It is more than probable that Şakir personally coordinated
the butchery in Baku in the three days preceding the regular army’s entry into the city. It
would even seem that Şakir became very popular with Baku’s Turkish-speaking population
thanks to the “services” he rendered the cause.98
After Turkish troops were stationed in Baku and martial law was imposed, the government
of Azerbaijan ordered the arrest of the city’s Armenian elite: lawyers, engineers, bankers, and
business leaders. Nuri, moreover, led contingents of the Army of Islam to Karabagh, where
massacres were reported in the villages.99 Information that reached the German representa-
tion in the Caucasus indicated that a system of extortion had been established: it targeted
affluent Armenian circles, which had to pay protection money to avoid being arrested.100
Delinquents certainly took advantage of the situation to make money, but it is more likely
that the government controlled by Istanbul initiated a campaign aimed at ruining Armenian
businessmen since it could not officially confiscate their assets.
The defeat of the Central Powers and the British forces’ march on Syria called a sharp
halt to the formation of a Pan-Turkish federation dominated by Istanbul. But, the invasion
of the Transcaucasus and Persian Azerbaijan allowed Istanbul to come close to completing
its program of homogenizing its territory and helped create another homogeneous Turkish-
speaking entity.
This chapter of history came to an end with an event that was, to say the least, odd – Halil
Pasha’s incongruous October visit to Yerevan, where he was received by Aram Manukian,
Armenia’s interim head-of-state. Arshavir Shakhatuni, Yerevan’s military commander, who
was present at the reunion of the two men, gives a rather surprising version of the motives
that induced the Young Turk war leader to travel through Yerevan after asking Aram to

guarantee his safety.101 In these last days of the war, the military situation of the Turks in the
Caucasus was by no means catastrophic, inasmuch as their forces controlled the region and
were not threatened by any outside force. At most, they were concerned about the imminent
defeat of their country and apprehensive about having to give accounts for the crimes that
they had committed or encouraged.

Chapter 2
The Refounding of the Young

Turk Party Shortly Before and Shortly
After the Armistice
T
he military successes scored in the Caucasus and Azerbaijan and the explosion of
joy among the people at the announcement that Turkish troops had entered Baku
momentarily obscured the fact that, in order to obtain these results in the north,
Enver had had to thin out his forces on the Palestinian front, opening the way before General
Allenby’s British troops. The British, after occupying Jerusalem on 9 December 1917, treaded
water for quite some time before capturing Damascus on 1 October 1918. The Bulgarian sur-
render, which was made official on 2 October, suddenly reminded the Young Turk regime that
its ten-year long adventure at the head of the country was drawing to a close, at least in its
Ittihadist guise. Yet this experience of exacerbated Turkish ethno-nationalism was not over.
Almost all key posts in the country’s civilian and military administration, both in Istanbul
and the provinces, were held by Unionists, the majority of whom had been appointed during
the war and had participated in the common adventure, for reasons that were acceptable in
some cases and less so in others. On 7 October 1918, Talât and his cabinet resigned. The
next day, the new Sultan, Mehmed VI Vahideddin, asked Tevfik Pasha, the former Turkish
ambassador to Britain, to form a new cabinet. Apparently, the sultan preferred to close his
eyes to the fact that, for the Ittihadists leaders, it was by no means a question of ceding
power to a hostile cabinet, but only of taking shelter behind a team with less blood on its
hands. General İzzet Pasha, a former war minister and close associate of Enver’s, was charged
on 9 October with negotiating the terms of the anticipated armistice. By including several
Ittihadists in his cabinet – Fethi Bey [Okyar] as interior minister, Mehmed Cavid as minister
of the economy, Hayri Bey as justice minister, and Hüseyin Rauf as minister of the navy – the
new grand vizier secured the support of Young Turk circles. Losing no time, the Ittihadist
Central Committee organized the party’s last annual congress. Between 21 October and 3
November, the CUP carried out a complete overhaul of its structures in both the capital and
the provinces. It then dissolved itself, reemerging under the name Teceddüt Fırkası (Party of
Renovation). Its assets were transferred to the new party, led by Fethi Bey.1
Officially, all relations between the new party and the CUP were severed. Moreover, the
congress restricted membership by former CUP members, who were accused of having “ruined
the country” with their arbitrary personal acts and said to have acquired wealth or positions
illicitly.2 The nationalist movement was obviously aware that identification with the CUP
now constituted a serious handicap.3 Hence it had to keep its distance from the Ittihad, even
while assuming the Young Turk ideological heritage. Erik Zürcher remarks that Teceddüt
Fırkası was basically made up of influential CUP members distinguished by their opposi-
tion to the policies pursued by Enver: Yunus Nadi [Abahoğlu] (1880–1945), a parliamentary

deputy from Aydın; Faïk [Kaltakkıran], a parliamentary deputy from Edirne; Galip Bahtiyar;
Dr. Tevfik Rüştü [Aras]; and a former interior minister, İsmail Canbolat.4 Let us note that, of
these opponents of Enver’s adventurism, the two last-named were close associates of Talât’s
and were heavily implicated in the liquidation of the Armenians. It is clear that the head of
the CUP had prepared the “second phase of the war” in the provinces, utilizing both public
institutions and underground organizations.5 In this undertaking, they relied, notably, on the
powerful Army of the East, stationed in the Caucasus, and, in particular, on two divisions
that had been repatriated from Galicia and Moldavia and been appropriately equipped and
trained; they were practically out of reach of the troops of the Entente.6
Returning to their practices of the past, the CUP leaders melted into apparently inof-
fensive organizations with humanitarian or cultural missions, such as the Hilâli Ahmer
(Red Crescent). The president of this organization was Dr. Esad [Isık]; its treasurer was Dr.
Tevfik Rüştü [Aras], while Dr. Abdülhak Adnan [Adıvar], the former inspector general of
the Turkish army’s Health Department, served as its counselor. This honorable institution
apparently provided cover for clandestine payments and provided a means of communicating
with the Unionists who had fled abroad.7 Another organization, the Millî Talim ve Terbiye
Cemiyeti (National Association for Instruction and Education), was controlled by Esad [Isık]
and the CUP’s former secretary general, Midhat Şükrü [Bleda]. It brought together magis-
trates and university professors who took the initiative, after the armistice was concluded,
of creating the Millî Kongre (National Congress).8 The Türk Ocağı, whose moving spirit was
Mehmed Ziya Gökalp, also sprang back into existence and played a major role, with its 28
regional sections, in organizing the National Congress. Esad Pasha, Ahmed Ağaoğlu, Halide
Edip, and Ziya Gökalp and his cousin Süleyman Nazıf (1870–1927), who held the post of vali
in several regions and directed Young Turk newspapers, undertook to reorganize the Young
Turk networks.9
However, the major decision made by the Unionist leaders before they fled the country
was the creation of Karakol (The Guard). Its objectives rather clearly revealed the spirit it
animating it at the time. It sought to 1) protect the Ittihadists against possible prosecution
for their involvement in war crimes by bringing them from the capital to the provinces;
2) organize a resistance movement in Anatolia and the Caucasus by transferring leaders,
money, weapons, and ammunition to the provinces; and 3) ensure the defense of the rights
of the Turkish population in areas that Greeks, Armenians, Frenchmen, Italians, and the
British were threatening to annex.10
It was Talât who took the initiative of founding Karakol, in the course of a meeting in
Enver’s villa in Kuruçesme in the last week of October 1918. Also attending this meeting
were Colonel Kara Vasıf,11 an eminent CUP leader; the inevitable Kara Kemal, one of those
in charge of the party’s finances and a great organizer of the “National Economy”; Colonel
Baha Said; General Halil [Kut]; and, “according to certain sources,” Dr. Adnan [Adıvar].12
Before going back underground, these men created an organization made up of independent
cells, with two distinct branches. One was urban. It had its center in the Topkapı and was
directed by Lieutenant Colonel Hüsammeddin [Ertürk]. The other, called Menzil Hattı (Line
of Communication) had as its guiding spirit Yenibahçeli Şükrü [Oğuz], and ran the system
that brought CUP cadres to Anatolia.13
Before leaving the country, Enver and Talât also ordered the Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa to stock-
pile arms and ammunition in secret depots in different places in Anatolia; it did so prior
to its October 1918 dissolution, when it was renamed Umum Alemi Islam Ihtilâl (General
Revolutionary Organization of the Islamic World). According to the memoirs of one of its
leaders, Hüsameddin [Ertürk], Enver issued orders to maintain the organization intact and
prepare “the second phase of the war” with his uncle Halil [Kut] and his brother Nuri [Kiligil],
who had significant forces under their command in the eastern provinces and the Caucasus.

The Refounding of the Young Turk Party 717
After the armistice, the Special Organization aided Karakol, informing it of where arms and
ammunition were hidden, sending it money, and offering it the benefit of its savoir-faire when
it came to clandestine activity or the ethnic cleansing of non-Turkish population groups.14
The secret arms depots created on Talât’s and Enver’s orders were established in Angora,
Kayseri, Erzerum, Kastamonu, and Bandırma under the control of the Special Organization.
They were intended to be of use to the resistance movements.15
According to Zürcher, the clandestine activities of the Unionists, club members, and
officers of the Ottoman Army seem to have been coordinated on a general plan prepared
in advance and put into practice by the chiefs of the party even before their flight from
the country. In other words, the protagonists of the budding national resistance move-
ment in Anatolia simply carried out a plan drawn up by the CUP.16 Zürcher also observes
that Unionist politicians and officers reacted in fairly uniform fashion – concentration in
Anatolia, mobilization of public opinion around the creation of a nation-state, rejection of
demobilization and disarmament, creation of a resistance network, and the conviction that
the defeat was only temporary.17
Zürcher is convinced that all the measures taken by Enver and Talât were based on a plan,
worked out as early as 1915, to defend Anatolia, “the true Turkish fatherland.” This scheme is
supposed to have been conceived, down to its least details, when the battle for the Dardanelles
broke out in spring 1915, as it anticipated a possible collapse of the Turkish forces with an
eye to continuing the war in Anatolia. In other words, Talât and Enver simply reactivated a
long-standing plan on the eve of the armistice and confided its realization to Karakol. It would
appear that generals such as Kâzım [Karabekir], Ali Fuad, Mustafa Kemal, and Yakub Şevki
were aware that they were proceeding in accordance with a plan established in advance by the
CUP leadership.18 This comes down to saying that there existed a relation of consanguinity
between the Young Turk regime and the beginnings of the nationalist movement, one thinly
disguised by a few cosmetic touches. Or, if one likes, it means that the Young Turk cadres did
not wait for the arrival of a providential leader to put Anatolia in a state in which it could
rebel. This is a phenomenon that Turkish historiography tends to obscure so as not to under-
mine the image of the hero who saved the “fatherland,” Mustafa Kemal.
The CUP plan was financed out of the war treasury that the party had accumulated in the
course of the First World War, thanks to shady financial practices, the acquisition of monopo-
lies on grain, tobacco, rail transportation, and, above all, the pillage of Armenian and Greek
assets. The German journalist Harry Stuermer, who lived in Istanbul in 1915–16, exposed
the mechanism established by the two succeeding chiefs of the Commission for Supplies,
İsmail Hakkı and Kara Kemal, to secure funds for the Ittihadist Central Committee. Hakkı
and Kemal founded the Bakal (Grocers’) Union, a semi-official organization that artificially
created a food shortage the better to speculate on rising prices to result of enormous profits.19
A British Secret Service document notes that the main beneficiaries of these monopolies
were CUP members.20 These practices, worthy of criminals, constituted one of the chief
counts in the indictment of the Young Turk leaders when the Fifth Commission of the
Ottoman parliament summoned them to testify at hearings in November 1918.21 As we have
seen, the primary task of this union of the Esnafs (guilds), founded in 1915 to foster the for-
mation of a middle class of Turkish businessmen,22 was to confiscate Armenian and Greek
assets in the name of a policy of Millî İktisat (National Economy).23
The British sources again indicate that some of the assets and capital obtained in the
framework of these operations was converted into foreign currency or French and British
treasury bonds in September 1918, with the help of Istanbul moneylenders such as Jacques
Manache and Aslan Fresco. These moneylenders bought the bonds in Switzerland or the
Netherlands at the behest of their clients, essentially Young Turks whom the documents
designate by name: Mehmed Cavid, İsmail Hakkı, Enver Pasha, and so on.24

It is probable that these individuals made such purchases with their own financial secu-
rity in mind. But, they no doubt also considered this to be a way of preparing to finance the
preprogrammed resistance movement in Anatolia.
The Mudros Armistice or the Effects of the Defeat

The signing of the Mudros armistice on 30 October by Admiral Calthorpe and Hüseyin Rauf
Bey marked the beginning of the second phase of the war and redeployment of the means at
the Ittihad’s disposal. Although the principal leaders of the CUP left Istanbul on a German
submarine during the night of 1 November, the fact remains that all the key posts in the state
apparatus were still controlled by Unionists, for it had not proved possible to carry through
with the purge begun in early 1919.25
The list of fugitives is based on how heavily they were involved in the exactions commit-
ted against the civilian population during the war. It includes: Mehmed Talât; İsmail Enver;
Ahmed Cemal; Dr. Bahaeddin Şakir; Dr. Nâzım; Aziz Bey; Bedri Bey; Cemal Azmi the vali
of Trebizond; İsmail Hakkı; Salih Zeki Bey, the mutesarif of Der Zor; İsmail Muştak Bey,
the secretary general of the Senate; Resneli Nâzım Bey, the CUP’s responsible secretary in
Mamuret ul-Aziz; and Haydar İbrahim, Azerbaijan’s representative in Istanbul.
Zürcher, in his study of the origins of the Kemalist movement, notes that from the outset,
the leaders of the CUP, the Special Organization, and Karakol sent military cadres to the
provinces to help organize the resistance in various regions. He notably cites the case of a
CUP inspector, Yenibahçeli Nail, who was sent to Batum, and that of his colleague, Filibeli
Ahmed Hilmi in Erzerum.26 Let us recall that these were two eminent members of the Special
Organization who had already been active on the Committee of National Defense in Thrace
in summer 1913 and, in 1915, on the Caucasian front, where Hilmi served as Şakir’s assist-
ant.27 As for the fate of the Turkish forces, which, according to the Mudros armistice, were
to be disarmed or stationed in Asia Minor, it should be noted that Yakub Şevki [Sübaşı], the
commander of the Ninth Army, which had its headquarters in Kars, was supposed to evacu-
ate the Caucasus and the provinces of Kars, Ardahan, and Batum, but refused to execute
these clauses of the agreement. On 26 November 1918, he even ordered his troops to defend
the three provinces. When, on 25 January 1919, he received the second injunction to evacu-
ate them, he complied only after entrusting the administration of them to the leadership of
the Millî Şura (National Council), which had just been formed by the Young Turk networks
in Anatolia. He also distributed arms to the population and turned over the stocks of arms
and ammunition in the citadel in Kars to the “new” authorities. Once he had withdrawn
to Erzerum, he created and armed militias, in line with instructions he had received from
the Ittihadist hierarchy.28 The CUP’s influence in Asia Minor thus appears to have been
unshaken and was even reinforced by the continuous transfer of Unionist officers, most of
the them wanted for war crimes, who were taken in hand by Karakol with the complicity of
the Ottoman administration.29
The political translation of the Ittihadist enterprise in Anatolia found expression in the
convening, at Karakol’s initiative, of a Millî Şura (National Council) on 11 December 1918.
The council brought together the representatives of 63 political, social, cultural, and pro-
fessional associations, which obviously were of Unionist inspiration, such as Türk Ocağı,
Teceddüt Fırkaşı, and Millî Müdafaa Cemiyeti (National Defense Committee). Also present
were “regional” organizations, with the notable exception of the liberals.30 Among the asso-
ciations for “Defense in the East,” the most important were Kars Islâm Şûraşı (Kars Muslim
Council), which had received money and weapons from General Yakub Şevki, and Vilayâti
Şarkiye Müdafaai Hukuku Milliye Cemiyeti (Association for the Defense of the National Rights
of the Eastern Provinces), initiated by Süleyman Nazıf, a cousin of Ziya Gökalp’s.31 There

The Refounding of the Young Turk Party 719
is perhaps no need to point out that the purpose of these two organizations was to oppose
the creation of an Armenian state in the six eastern vilayets the Armenian population of
which had paid for the CUP’s policy of homogenization with its life and property. One of the
uppermost concerns of the Young Turk networks was, moreover, to silence the newspapers
that now began to publish articles about the tehcir (deportation policy)32 carried out by the
Young Turk state-party – that is, about the liquidation of the Armenian population.
The whole of the system erected by the CUP not only allowed the party to maintain a
presence on the Ottoman political scene, but also to work, first and foremost, toward throt-
tling the release of information on the genocide it had committed, and even, as we shall see,
to thwart the timid attempts to punish those responsible for it as well as those who carried
out their orders. The Turkish nation-state in the Anatolian sanctuary was constructed on
the basis of a discourse legitimizing violence that many endorsed. Of course, the movement’s
principal leaders and their objective allies, Kurdish and Çerkez tribal chieftains and other
local notables, would have had a great deal to lose if justice had been done.
In other words, the governments that succeeded each other in Istanbul beginning in
October 1918 had an extremely narrow margin of maneuver. Sultan Mehmed VI Vahideddin,
Abdülhamid’s younger brother, who acceded to the throne on 4 July 1918, had spent most of
his life within his four gilded walls, but seems to have been resolved to reassert the influence
of the House of Osman. He nevertheless submitted without flinching to the desires of the
Ittihadist leaders, who imposed General Ahmed İzzet Pasha – the minister of war in 1913 – as
the head of government. İzzet put together a cabinet made up of Unionists of second rank:
Ali Fethi, Rauf Bey [Orbay], and Mehmed Cavid. It may be presumed that this carefully tai-
lored Young Turk cabinet had no other goal than to negotiate an armistice before ceding its
place. After the British and French High Commissioners had taken up residence in Istanbul,
it became obvious that a new cabinet had to be formed without Ittihadists. On 11 November
1918, a new council of ministers was formed by Ahmed Tevfik [Okday] (1845–1936), who
had served briefly as grand vizier in 1909 and had political sympathies that made him pre-
sentable. The Ottoman parliament, as well as the upper levels of the civilian and military
administration, still dominated by Young Turks, made this cabinet and its successors fragile.
The CUP did not hesitate to threaten the sultan and the authorities even after its members
were arrested. The only grand vizier in the true sense of the word to emerge in the course
of the year 1919 was Damad Ferid Pasha, who held office from 4 March to 10 October 1919,
after repeatedly facing votes of no confidence.33 It was above all under his government that
the Young Turks began to be called to account for their deeds, that arrests were made with
greater and greater frequency, and that the Ittihadist organizations were challenged.34 At
the request of the French and British, the Ottoman police proceeded to arrest, on 10 March
1919, Said Halim; Hayri Bey, a former şeyh ul-Islam; Musa Kâzım, the şeyh ul-Islam; Rifât
Bey, a former minister of finance; Halil Bey [Menteşe], a former foreign minister; Ahmed
Şükrü Bey, a former minister of public education; Ahmed Nesimi Bey, a former foreign min-
ister; İbrahim Bey, a former justice minister; İsmail Muştak Bey, the general secretary of the
Senate; Habib Bey, a parliamentary deputy from Bolu; Ali Münif, a former state secretary
in the Interior Ministry; Hilmi Bey, a parliamentary deputy from Angora; Ahmed Emin
Bey, a parliamentary deputy from Istanbul and the editor-in-chief of Vakıt; Celal Nuri Bey,
the editor-in-chief of Atti; Osman Bey, general secretary in the Interior Ministry; Fethi Bey
[Okyar], a former foreign minister and president of Teceddüd; Salah Cimcöz, a former parlia-
mentary deputy; Fuad Bey, the director of the telephone company; Sabancali İsmail Hakkı,
the publisher of İstiklal; İzzet Bey, a member of the CUP; Hoca Hasan Fehmi, a parliamen-
tary deputy from Sinope; and Mustafa Reşad Bey, the director of the political section of
the Police Department.35 In other words, the “big fish” were not arrested until after Ferid
arrived at the helm of government. Previously, with the exception of Dr. Reşid, the vali of

Dyarbekir, and İsmail Canbolat, both of whom had been arrested on 29 January,36 only those
who had merely carried out orders to liquidate the Armenians had been taken into custody:
Major İzzet Bey, the director of the hospital in Van, arrested on 4 February;37 Emmanuel
Carasso, a former Unionist parliamentary deputy from Salonica,38 on 6 February; Ahmed
Celaleddin Bey, the mutesarif of Tomarza, on 9 February;39 Colonel Tevfik Bey, the com-
mander in Ras ul-Ayn, on 19 February;40 Nâzım Bey, the head of the orphanage in Aleppo,
on 25 February;41 İbrahim Bey, the leader of a squadron of çetes in Ismit, on 3 March;42 and
Sabur Sâmi Bey, the mutesarif of Adalia, on 11 March.43
In March and April, Ferid’s government trained its sights on men of still higher rank. It
ordered the arrests of members of the Ittihad’s Central Committee and high-ranking party
cadres: Ahmed Ağaoğlu, on 20 March;44 Cevad Bey, the military commander of the capital;
Yusuf Ziya Bey, a member of the Central Committee; Necati Bey, on 27 March;45 İlyas Sâmi
Bey, a parliamentary deputy from Mush, on 1 April;46 Nusret Bey, the mutesarif of Urfa, on
2 April;47 Midhat Sükrü Bey, the CUP’s secretary general; and Kuçuk Talât Bey and Ziya
Gökalp, members of the Ittihadist Central Committee, on 17 April.48 Manifestly, in this brief
period there existed a real desire among certain Istanbul liberal circles to purge the country
of the Young Turks who had remained where they were and whose criminal past tarnished
the image of the Ottoman Empire, but who were also held responsible for its predictable
dismemberment and for considerable human losses. According to Ahmed Bedevi Kuran,
the war caused the deaths of around 550,000 soldiers, produced nearly 900,000 invalids, and
left over 100,000 missing and 2,176,000 wounded.49 M. Larcher, for his part, estimates the
number of combat deaths at 725,000 (doubtless including the missing in this figure), and the
number of those who died of illness or were carried off by epidemics at 240,000, out of a total
of 2,850,000 conscripts.50
These arrests did not, to be sure, prevent Karakol from organizing the escape of many of
these suspects, whom it set about bringing to safety in Anatolia. It would even seem that
this organization succeeded in introducing an informer into Ferid’s residence,51 and that its
military activities in Anatolia were supported by the army’s general command, with which it
was in “objective collaboration.”52
The dissolution of parliament, many of the members of which were deeply implicated in
the war crimes, became inevitable when Teceddüd held a general assembly on 20 December/
2 January and decided to call for a vote of no confidence against the Tevfik cabinet.53 The
next day, Mehmed VI signed the decree announcing the dissolution of the Ottoman par-
liament.54 The November–December 1919 legislative elections stood as a revealing sign of
popular support for the Young Turk movement, or at least of its capacity to influence the
masses: they returned a parliament that was still more heavily dominated by the triumphant
Unionists.55

Chapter 3
The Debates in the Ottoman

Parliament in the Wake of
the Mudros Armistice
A
lthough the main Ittihadist criminals had fled in the night of 1–2 November,1
the Arab parliamentary deputy from Divaniye, Fuad Bey, made a motion in the
Ottoman parliament to bring the ministers who had held their posts during the
war years before the High Court of Justice.2 Did the parliament address the question of
legal proceedings against the Young Turk leaders thanks to this deputy or a few party cadres
who regarded this assembly as the most appropriate place in which to initiate legal action
that could be kept under control? We shall attempt to answer this question by analyzing
the course of the debates and the remarks made by different groups present in the Ottoman
parliament.
While it is true that most of the individuals indicted had been ministers or high-ranking
state officials – a circumstance that justified bringing them before the High Court – it must
also be said that this option offered many advantages: because it could be realized very rap-
idly, it allowed parliament to seize the initiative, orient the debates in line with the wishes
of a majority of deputies, and, by the same token, thwart the legal initiatives that might be
taken by much less well disposed circles.
In fact, the Ottoman parliament had been in session since 10 October 1918, yet no steps
had been taken in the three weeks preceding the departure of the Young Turk leaders. The
president of the assembly, Halil Bey [Menteşe], an eminent member of the Young Turk
Central Committee and a former foreign minister, saw to that. Apart from Fuad’s motion,
he had to deal with the five-point request endorsed by 14 deputies,3 including two surviving
Armenians and two Greeks. It bore on acts committed during the war by the Ottoman gov-
ernment, and evoked, notably, the liquidation of 1 million Armenian subjects of the empire,
the expulsion of 250,000 Greeks and the wartime seizure of their assets, the massacre of
550,000 Greeks from the Pontus at war’s end, and the 1915 murder of deputies such as Krikor
Zohrab and Vartkes Seringiulian. This request, which bore directly on war crimes that the
Young Turk regime had committed against civilians, holding the Ottoman state responsible
for its acts, was voted down after stormy debates that lasted for several sessions, although
Fuad’s motion – eight of the ten counts in the indictment submitted to parliament declar-
ing the Committee of Union and Progress and its Young Turk ministers guilty of seizing
control of the state apparatus, deciding to enter the war, concluding a secret agreement with
Germany, engaging in financial misdealing for their own benefit, imposing censorship, pub-
lishing false information about the course of the war, and so on – had passed. It was the easier
to reject the request in that the two charges that more or less directly concerned the liquida-
tion of the Armenians and the violence perpetrated against the Greeks and Syriacs – the

fifth, on the “temporary deportation law,” and the tenth, which referred to the creation and
criminal activities of the Special Organization – were formulated rather vaguely, with no
mention of the principal victims, and focused, especially as far as the first point was con-
cerned, on a panoply of laws put in place by the Young Turk government itself in order to
legalize its crimes, or at least pass them off as administrative measures rendered indispensable
by the war. This is, as we shall see later, when we analyze the declarations that the ministers
made before the Fifth Parliamentary Commission, a way of avoiding drawing too much pub-
lic attention to the mass murders and mentioning the victimized group by name, and, at the
same time, an attempt to situate the debates on a terrain that the executioners had prepared
in advance to justify their acts.
Notwithstanding this motion’s obvious advantages, the Young Turk majority in parlia-
ment resisted, or pretended to, before finally adopting it on 4 November as the basis for its
work. In response to the takrir [motions] made by the rare deputies from minority groups in
the parliament, which summoned the government to state its position on the crimes com-
mitted by its predecessors, the interior minister Fethi Bey [Okyar] said that the victims had
not only been Armenians, Greeks, or Arabs, but Turks as well, and the government would
do all it could to remedy the injustices and send the deportees back to their homes.4 Thus, he
laid the groundwork for the position that the accused and, more generally, successive Turkish
governments would defend at all costs in the months and years ahead. It might be translated
as follows: we all suffered in the war; we are going to correct the abuses, punish the guilty, and
make certain that such things never happen again. Confronted with this approach, which
already contained the seeds of a denial of the facts, the Armenian deputies sought to place
the government before its responsibilities. After Fuad’s motion was adopted, the deputy from
Sis/Kozan, Mattheos Nalbandian, together with five of his colleagues, filed a written request
that the government state how it regarded the crimes committed after the passage and enact-
ment of the Temporary Deportation Law (27 May 1915) and the Law on Abandoned Property
(26 September 1915). Thus, they invested the terrain marked out by Fuad’s motion, a tactic
that had the merit of placing their Turkish colleagues before their responsibilities, since it
was with reference to these two laws that parliament should have voted that crimes had been
committed. The question these deputies put to the government was the more justified in that
the text of the 26 May 1915 decree had been transmitted to the president of parliament a
few days after the decree was promulgated, but had been submitted to the deputies only after
the deportations had been carried out.5 When the deputies demanded that the government
take the necessary steps to return the survivors who were scattered here and there to their
homes, the interior minister answered that that would take some time. These deputies were
no doubt unaware that the deportation law in question had been published in an official
form that deliberately left out four of its articles, which had been transmitted in the form of
a handwritten circular accessible only to the authorities who had been charged with carrying
out the deportations. This was no accident: the four secret articles contained the instructions
the authorities needed to attribute the homes of the Armenian deportees to Turkish refugees
and other refugee groups without delay,6 thus giving them to understand that these “displaced
persons” were not expected to return. In any case, the 4 November session of parliament
ended with a vote that abrogated the truncated decree of the former interior minister, which
had subsequently been transformed into an Imperial law.
There is, naturally, something surreal about the fact that Armenian deputies, whose most
important colleagues had been murdered in cold blood, should have been addressing a cham-
ber of which some members had been directly involved in the liquidation of the Armenians
and had for the most part reaped personal benefits at the deportees’ expense. Moreover, they
did so in order to raise a question that no one really wanted to hear, but that had to be posed
in appropriately minimal form to meet the needs of the moment.

Debates in the Ottoman Parliament 723
By the time the next session of parliament devoted to this question was held on 18
November 1918, the composition of the cabinet, as we have said, had changed: it no longer
included the well-known Young Turk leaders. In theory, a vote of confidence in the new
government should have been conducted. But, the Armenian deputies, particularly Artin
Boshgezenian, a Young Turk deputy from Aleppo whose previous interventions had been
marked by extreme caution, decided to raise the question of the collective murder of their
compatriots, putting their fingers on the sore spot. In a very long speech, Boshgezenian first
recalled that the country would soon be invited to attend the peace conference and that
it would be better that it not turn up there empty-handed; that the Turkish people were in
the situation of an accused party – this affirmation provoked sharp protests, to which the
speaker respond that his colleagues should first listen to him, and thrash him thereafter, if
they wished; that they were “today facing a major crime, one of the saddest, bloodiest pages
of Ottoman history ... the Armenian massacre”; that the country as a whole was being held
responsible for these acts; that many Turks and, notably, the inhabitants of a city such as
Konya, as well as some prefects, had nonetheless opposed the government’s orders and tried
to protect Armenian deportees; that the government had enacted its programs with the
help of its prefects, the local military authorities, the gendarmerie, groups of çetes (released
convicts organized in bands) and, more generally, state officials; and that it would therefore
be difficult to put the blame on the Young Turk leaders alone, the more so as the population
had taken part in the violence alongside the çetes in a number of localities. The Armenian
deputy then demanded that the country cease to encourage “the dishonorable people” who
continued to organize provocations and issue blanket denials that the crimes had occurred,
although they themselves had perpetrated them. He concluded that the essence of the matter
resided in the fate that would be meted out to these people; that Turkey’s destiny depended
on whether they were punished; and that it was necessary to arrest the guilty, most of who
were still circulating freely, with all impunity.7
For the first time, a deputy had, while taking a few rhetorical precautions, raised the ques-
tion of the liquidation of the Ottoman Armenians. This was no minor matter in a society
characterized by a conception of justice and penal practices at quite some distance from
European standards. The very idea that the Ottoman state might be accused of wrongdoing
was for many inconceivable. The reactions of certain Turkish and Kurdish deputies, who
echoed official Young Turk discourse about the Armenians’ treason to justify the “punish-
ment” that had been meted out to them and considered these events secondary, were symp-
tomatic of Ottoman society’s inability to take the measure of the mass murder that had just
been committed in its name. Much the same thing might be said about the concordant
reaction of the Young Turk deputies such as Hoca Ilyas Sâmi, a Kurdish tribal chieftain from
Mush who, as was revealed when he was later brought to trial, had played a major role in the
murder of the Armenians of his region.8
The 9 December session of parliament was just as interesting. It began with a reading
of a takrir submitted by Dikran Barsamian, a deputy from Sıvas and former member of the
Ittihad, and Kegham Der Garabedian, a deputy from Mush who had just died after a long
illness thanks to which he had been spared in 1915. Although their motion was dated
5 November, it constituted a response to Ilyas Sâmi’s intervention from a man who had
known him well. It expressed surprise over the statistics on the number of Armenians who,
according to their Muslim colleagues, had fallen victim to the exactions – 100,000 – point-
ing out that about as many Armenians had been slain in the coastal area of the Pontus
alone, from Samsun to Trebizond,9 and recalling how the Armenians from the plain of
Mush had been killed.
Theoretically, the 11 December session was to focus on the violence to which the Greeks
had been subjected, particularly in Tekirdağ, Edirne, and Çatalca, but it soon turned to a

consideration of the Armenian case. The famous poet and deputy from Mosul, Mehmed
Emin [Yürdakül] finally asked for the floor. An able, respected speaker, Emin insistently
repeated that the violent acts perpetrated by a criminal band, especially the liquidation of
the Armenians, could not be attributed to the government, let alone the Turkish nation,
which had indeed been the primary victim of the conflict (he meant battle casualties in
particular), and that it was unthinkable that they should blamed today for the crimes that
had been committed.10 Emin thus voiced the parliament’s major preoccupation, its desire
to clear the state’s name by attributing the crimes, which Emin acknowledged, unlike some
of his colleagues, to the group that had dragged the country into the war. Compared to the
usual discourse of Turkish circles, this represented a kind of concession that should not be
taken lightly. At the same session, the deputy from Trebizond, Mehmed Emin (who should
not be confused with the deputy from Mosul) declared that he had personally witnessed the
murder of the Armenians of Samsun, whom the governor had had drowned off the Black Sea
coast. Emin had also learned, he said, that the governor of Trebizond, Cemal Azmi, had done
the same thing in his vilayet.11 This account, which indicated that the local authorities had
taken a direct hand in organizing the massacres, did not go unnoticed: for the first time, a
deputy, one who also had a reputation as a brilliant jurist, had spoken out without restraint.
The next day, 12 December, parliament debated these questions again. The Greek deputy
from Tekirdağ, Efkalidis, addressed the government, focusing his remarks on the events that
had occurred since 1913, which had in common the fact that all had been denied or inter-
preted in tendentious fashion, to say the least: the expulsion, beginning in 1913, of 500,000
Greeks (and the plunder of their assets), which had been interpreted as the voluntary depar-
ture of men wishing to serve in the Greek army; the deportation of the Armenians, which
had been presented as a punitive measure similar to those adopted by the English in Ireland;
and the minimization of the violence endured by the Greek and Armenian populations,
which turned on the idea that there had also been many victims among the Turks, although
it was a question of, on the one hand, subjects of the empire murdered by the authorities,
and, on the other, soldiers who had fallen in the war. The Greek deputy, resolved to make his
Turkish colleagues uncomfortable, asked whether they were trying to convince themselves
of the truth of what they said, or whether they thought that they could thus fool the whole
world.
Efkalidis’s intervention was a way of staking out a clear position at a time when a sharp
debate raged in the capital between the editors of the Young Turk newspapers and liberal cir-
cles, both Armenian and Greek. The next speech, by the deputy from Sis/Kozan, Mattheos
Nalbandian, also sought to respond to the articles that put forward the Young Turks’ classic
argument: they were traitors; we had to take administrative measure to removes these poten-
tial traitors from the war zones; abuses were committed when these measures were carried
out but when they came to our attention we punished those responsible for them, and so
on. Nalbandian provided, for the first time, a historical summary of what had transpired,
beginning with the arrest and execution of the whole Armenian elite in both the capital
and the provinces; the systematic deportation of all the populations, wherever they were
found; and the liquidation of convoys in the Black Sea, the Tigris and Euphrates, and the
Syrian deserts. Directly addressing his colleagues, Nalbandian declared: “Gentlemen, these
things are not tales from One Thousand and One Nights; these are the facts, just as they
occurred, and our distinguished assembly should express regret over them and weep.” The
deputy went on to say that his own family had been deported; that he himself had survived
thanks only to the intercession of Halil Bey (who was presiding over the session of parlia-
ment at which Nalbandian spoke), then foreign minister; that in the course of his voyage
to Constantinople, he had witnessed unimaginable scenes – men and women in their death
agonies on the road, children abducted from their mothers – and that upon his arrival in the

capital he had described his experiences to Halil. Turning to Mehmed Emin (Yürdakül), he
asked him how he could say that only three to five people were responsible for these horrors
and that the Turkish people was a victim, given that it was the nation that dominated the
empire, whereas the Armenians were among the subjugated nations.12
Hoca Ilyas Sâmi took the floor after Nalbandian. This time, the deputy from Mush did
not present the usual thesis about an Armenian conspiracy. On the defensive, he first devel-
oped the theme of the benevolence shown to the minorities by religious circles from which
he himself came, taking as his (dubious) example the 1895–6 Armenian massacres. He also
asked that the war situation be taken into account and that attention be paid to the rea-
sons that had led to the anti-Armenian violence. In so doing, he took a conciliatory step,
admitting the crimes that had been committed against the Armenians; accusations that
the Armenians had massacred Turks, which had been strewn through his first speech, were
absent from this one. “I am under an obligation,” he declared, “to speak the truth. Yes, the
eastern provinces were transformed into a graveyard.” Nevertheless, he added, “this is not
the moment to settle accounts.” That should be done “only after the fatherland has dressed
its wounds.”
The new interior minister, Mustafa Arif Bey, who attended these debates, closed the ses-
sion with remarks that once again reveal an overriding concern to dissociate, from a penal
standpoint, the Turkish nation from the Young Turks:
Both your august assembly and the government have confirmed that certain of the events
connected with this question indeed took place. No one is saying that they did not happen.
I think, however, that if we go so far as to admit that, among the millions of Turks, one hun-
dred thousand [were involved], it is inadmissible to hold the entire race responsible for the
acts committed by those one hundred thousand people.13
The Work of the Fifth Commission of the Ottoman Parliament

Parallel to the debates just discussed, the Ottoman parliament decided to create a commis-
sion of inquiry, known as the Fifth Commission. On the basis of the ten points in the motion
by Fuad that had been adopted by the assembly, the Fifth Commission conducted hearings
of the ministers of the war cabinets still living in the capital. To the best of our knowledge,
the record of these hearings was not immediately published in the Ottoman parliament’s
Official Gazette, but was rather turned over to the court-martial, which in a sense pursued
the commission’s work in the judicial field. However, as can be readily imagined, the British
and French intelligence services (the S.I.S. and the S.R. Marine, respectively)14 followed the
commission’s work, carried on from November to December 1918, with great interest. In
addition to the official publications of the Ottoman parliament, which have been exploited
by the Armenian-American historian Vahakn Dadrian, we also possess, thanks to these
intelligence services, a complete record of the interrogations of 15 ministers. An analysis of
them is rich in lessons about the defense strategy adopted by Young Turk circles, even if these
materials reveal nothing new about the facts themselves. They also shed a great deal of light
on the atmosphere prevailing within the Fifth Commission and the objectives that parlia-
ment sought to obtain in agreeing to refer to the “abuses” committed against the empire’s
Armenian subjects, even if these references were drowned in a sea of issues revolving around
the way the Young Turks had conducted the war.
Before considering the work of the Fifth Commission, it should be emphasized that the
ministers it could interrogate – that is, those still living in the Ottoman capital – were
the ones who had been the least directly involved in the crimes committed against the
Armenians (even if they were perfectly well aware of the facts). The ministers themselves
pointed this out every time they had the chance.

At one of the first hearings, held on 24 and 25 November 1918, the commission inter-
rogated Mehmed Cavid, the former minister of finance, who had resigned as soon as the
Ottoman Empire had entered the war early in November 1914. This provided him the occa-
sion to describe the circumstances that had led to Ottoman entry into the war and to remark
that “the Russian aggression was simply a lie spun out of thin air.” He added that decisions
were made privately, at Said Halim’s house, not at sessions of the Council of Ministers.15
Cavid next affirmed, in response to a question from the deputy from Ertuğrul, Şemşeddine
Bey, about the conditions surrounding the general mobilization in the empire, that the mobi-
lization decree had not been decided upon by the Council of Ministers, but that it was Enver
who seems to have initiated it by having each of the ministers sign, separately, the draft of an
Imperial irade (command); the decree was signed and published in the Official Gazette only
after it had been publicly proclaimed.16 As for the temporary deportation laws, “contrary to
the rules of law and humanity, and a violation of the letter and spirit of our Constitution,
which turned the country into a field of tragedies,” Cavid pointed out that he was no longer
a member of the government “when the Armenian affairs took place ... At no time and place
did I ever endorse them; every time the occasion offered, I brought this subject to my col-
leagues’ attention.”17 Cavid went on to emphasize that after his 1917 return to the minis-
try, he had applied “the laws and regulations pertaining to the Armenian deportees’ assets
as generously as possible.” “I even convinced Talât Pasha,” he went on, “to authorize the
Armenians and Arabs to return to their homes ... I was not a minister ... when these laws were
applied.”18 For good measure, Cavid concluded that he had written to Talât when he was
appointed grand vizier and that Talât had informed him that the new cabinet “would see to
it that individual rights were scrupulously respected and that every Ottoman would benefit
from the rights conferred upon him by Constitutional law.” “For the moment, the Armenian
and Arab questions,” Talât had added, would “be resolved to the extent that the state of war
allows, and, shortly before peace is concluded, in fundamental fashion.”19
To the last question posed by the president of the commission, “about participation in the
crimes resulting from the disorder in the administration and the assistance given to bands
that violated the population’s freedom, life, honor, and property – in question is the Special
Organization,” Cavid gave a categorical answer: “this was not the government’s doing.”20
Even while seeming to take his distance from this colleagues on the Young Turk Central
Committee – Cavid, remember, had resigned from the government at the beginning of the
war – and without denying the criminal plans aimed against the Armenians, to which, he
gave his listeners to understand, he had been opposed, Cavid pointed out with a certain
cynicism that in 1917 he had even helped restore the rights of the Ottoman subjects who
had disappeared more than a year earlier or lived on in harsh surroundings several thousand
kilometers from their homes. However, in response to the key question about the Special
Organization, of whose criminal activities he could not have been unaware, Cavid contented
himself with saying that the government had nothing to do with these bands. The members
of the Fifth Commission seemed to find that answer satisfactory.
One day earlier, on 23 November, the acting president of parliament, Halil Bey [Menteşe],
had testified before the commission.21 Halil first denied the existence of the Temporary
Deportation Law, but then admitted that it had been promulgated before he joined the cabi-
net. To the insistent questions of the members of the commission, he ultimately responded
that, when he had been the president of the parliament, he had “used all his influence to
improve the deportees’ lot.” He added: “When I returned from Bern, the deportations were
a fait accompli and there were only a few isolated cases left ... If you ask the Armenians about
this, I believe that all of them will tell you about my efforts to that end.” Finally, when he
was asked about the Special Organization, Halil asked in return, “in what regions were these
bands organized?” for he had no memory of the creation of such an organization. When

he was told that felons were released from prison and employed with the approval of the min-
ister of justice, he said that he had not joined the cabinet until October 1915 and that “in the
period during which I was minister, nothing of that sort took place.”22 Halil, an important
member of the Young Turk Central Committee, seems to have been one of those opposed to
the plan to liquidate the Armenians. Yet he limited himself here to protesting his innocence
and covering for his colleagues.
The first accused person to testify before the commission, Said Halim, who had been
grand vizier until early 1917, could not, for his part, hide behind the excuse that he had
assumed his functions late in the day in order to argue that he knew nothing. Halim was
the only eminent member of the war cabinet still in Constantinople, and his testimony is of
crucial importance. Asked about his responsibility in state affairs, he tried to present himself
as a man who had had no power in his hands (the implication being that power had been in
the hands of the other Young Turk leaders): “The grand vizier presides over the Council of
Ministers, but the ministers pay attention to him only if it pleases them. They can perfectly
well turn a deaf ear to him on the pretext that only parliament is empowered to call them
to accounts ... No one ever asked me my opinion.”23 When Halim was asked about “certain
inhuman temporary laws bearing on the transportation of families living near the frontiers
or in strategic places,” he repeated the official thesis: “this law was passed in order to ensure
the security of the army while in combat.”24 However, the ensuing debate forced the grand
vizier to take the floor. A deputy, Râğib Neşaşibî, even declared:
No such temporary law was ever brought before parliament, although it was in session
for four years running; yet so important a law should have been submitted to it ahead
of all others. The government must punish those who interfere with the movements
of the army, but why did it punish people who were powerless to cut off the army’s rear
base? What motivated its acts?
One of Neşaşibî’s colleagues, Rıza Bey (a deputy from Bursa), reminded him that “the law
in question was presented to parliament; it is the law on the deportations.” Either uncon-
vinced or feigning ignorance, Neşaşibî now drew a fine distinction: “There exists a law on
the deportations, but the law that allows the commanders of the army to hang and kill was
not submitted to parliament.” Rıza felt obliged to point out: “That wasn’t a law. The com-
manders could, taking the first law as the basis for their acts, apply whatever sentence they
wished.”25 Stubbornly pursuing his line of reasoning, Neşaşibî replied: “The courts martial
could condemn and exile certain individuals. But does the law say that one has the right to
hunt down woman and children in their homes and have them executed?” It took this sharp
exchange to bring Halim to say, finally, after taking certain precautions: “You no doubt wish
to talk about the Armenian question.”
Alarmed, the president corrected the formulation – “the question of the deportations.”
Nevertheless, the grand vizier’s response was rather enlightening: “The vice-generalissimo
[Enver] and the commanders declared that the presence of the Armenians constituted a dan-
ger for the army and suggested transporting them elsewhere. But no one said that they should
be killed. The problem lay in the way the law was applied.” This was a step forward. Neşaşibî
pressed his advantage: “But hadn’t you heard that the enactment of the law was accompanied
by atrocities?” The grand vizier now assumed his role of straw man again, exhibiting clear
signs of amnesia: “As with everything else, so here too, I only learned about these atrocities
after everything was over ... Only the minister of war can explain his motivations; you will
have to get your information there, for I can say nothing that you are likely to find convinc-
ing. I no longer have any memory of all that.” The president thereupon pointed out to him
that the law had been adopted by the Council of Ministers and that “someone must have

presented the reasons for adopting it.” Was this question “discussed at a meeting of the
Council of Ministers?” As the Grand Vizier’s memory continued to fail him, he finally said:
Yes, that is all that I know. When I assumed the post of grand vizier, I undertook to
carry out reforms in the six vilayets ... At the moment when discussions were being
conducted with the ambassadors about the laws to be applied by the governors, the
general war broke out. This thwarted important reforms that the Imperial government
had intended to enact. It was natural that the government, which was firmly resolved
to ensure the welfare and happiness of its Armenian subjects, should, after the war,
have pursued the reforms that it had initiated before it. Consequently, the proper pol-
icy would have been to wait calmly for the war to end. Unfortunately, that is not what
happened. Commissions of inquiry were formed after the massacres of the Armenians
took place. These commissions returned to Constantinople after accomplishing their
task; despite my insistence, the interior minister did not want to make the results of
their investigations public. I understood that, for as long as Talât Pasha was in charge
of the Interior Ministry, the investigations would serve no purpose.
After a great deal of hemming and hawing, and notwithstanding a few euphemisms,
Said Halim at last confessed, while implying that the search for culprits should focus on
Talât.26
Another deputy, Nuri Bey, now took over from his predecessor and asked the grand vizier
if the events in Syria and Iraq had taken place by virtue of a decision of the Council of
Ministers? Halim, correcting himself, said: “Those events were never discussed in any way by
the Council of Ministers. No correspondence was ever exchanged with the Sublime Porte
about the Armenian affair, or the Syrian and Iraqi affairs.” Nuri now drove him into a cor-
ner: “Yet, when the Armenian and Arab questions loomed up on the horizon, you main-
tained that they constituted a reason for you to withdraw from the cabinet.” Halim then said:
“Yes, I was horrified by these two questions.” Nuri insisted: “You have just said that the Arab
and Armenian questions induced you to withdraw from the cabinet.” Halim answered: “Yes,
excesses were perpetrated without my knowledge. How could I approve of crimes like those
committed against [the] poor [parliamentary deputy] Zohrab Effendi?” This exchange put
the grand vizier in an embarrassing position, and he once again evoked, “with horror,” what
he called “those two questions,” a euphemism for the liquidation of the Armenians and the
crimes perpetrated against part of the Syrian population, notably among the Arab notables
of Damascus and the Christians of Mt. Lebanon. He tried to cover for those of his colleagues
who were the most deeply implicated and was unable to confess that he had, at the very least,
done nothing to stop what had happened.27
Although the rest of the interrogation, which concerned attempts to hide military defeats
or territorial losses, is not directly related to our subject, it is worth examining, because it
is revelatory of Ottoman practices during the war. Referring to the capture of Baghdad,
which was not made public, Rağib Neşaşibî asked Halim: “How could such events be kept
secret from the grand vizier’s office?” Without yielding an inch, Said answered, in the tone
that he had assumed at the beginning of the hearing: “They could, absolutely. They were
hidden from us as they were hidden from all of you.” Another member of the commission,
Hilmi Bey, thereupon remarked that they had all heard that “at such-and-such a moment,
Basra had fallen, that the enemy had reached Kurna and then Amara. The government must
certainly have been informed of this.” He added that he had also noticed that new valis had
been appointed in Erzerum and Baghdad, and that their names had been published in the
press. “How,” he said, “is it possible to appoint valis to places that have been captured by the
enemy? ... Yet people knew about that.”28

To the tenth question put to him, which concerned the Special Organization, Halim ini-
tially answered by repeating an apparently standard formula: “The government is in no way
to blame here. That question was not discussed by the Council of Ministers.” The president
of the commission then asked him: “But were you not informed of the creation of such an
organization?” The grand vizier then altered his line of defense: “We were, but after every-
thing was over ... As soon as I learned of the existence of an organization of this type, I took
measures: it ceased to operate.” The president pursued his line of questioning: “Nobody was
criticized in connection with this business?” Halim answered: “Of course we made criticisms.
But what good were they after the harm had been done ...? I told Enver Pasha that these were
reprehensible acts. I told Enver, insistently, that an end had to be put to these goings-on.”29
In the course of this hearing, Halim had finally said many things, but in veiled terms that left
his listeners to draw the lessons of his partial confessions. His remarks almost leave one with
the feeling that he had been the only person in the cabinet who had been unaware of what
was happening and that he had nonetheless condemned “the harm done.”
The next accused person to testify, Ahmed Şükrü Bey, a former minister of public educa-
tion (1913–18), was doubtless one of the least well-known cabinet members. He had none-
theless played an important role in the liquidation of the Armenians, because he had served
on the Young Turk Central Committee along with Dr. Şakir and Dr. Nâzım.30 More than
anyone else in Istanbul, he was in a position to provide information about the deportations
and the Special Organization’s operating methods. At his 12 November hearing, however,
he clung to an untenable line of defense.31 Thus, he said without flinching, in response to
the first question put to him, which had to do with the empire’s entry into the war, that the
Russians had attacked the Ottoman fleet in the Black Sea. The president of the commission
felt obliged to remark that everyone knew that it was the other way around. Asked about
the notorious deportation law, Şükrü responded that it had been necessary to draft a law to
meet the expectations of the army and general staffs, which wanted to make sure that they
had a safe avenue of retreat. He then referred to information that had been received about
“the events in Van, Bitlis, Kara-Hissar-Şarki and the Black Sea coast” in order to justify the
measures that had been taken. Rağib Neşaşibî thereupon asked: “But how could one apply
them to women and children? Even if these questions had not been discussed by the Council
of Ministers, the ministers could not have been unaware of them. Did the Council make a
decision that might have seemed to betoken approval of the acts of the military command-
ers?” To illustrate what he meant, Neşaşibî invoked the case of the vali of Dyarbekir, “who
had been removed from his post for his criminal activity in that province”:
Less than two weeks after he was dismissed, he was appointed vali of Sıvas on a decision
of the Council of Ministers. Yet, inasmuch as Reşid Bey had been dismissed because of
his conduct in Dyarbekir, the Council of Ministers could not have been unaware of the
acts of which the vali was guilty! How could it appoint him to a new post?
Without disputing these charges, Şükrü even pointed out that “Reşid Bey was then sent
to Angora, but I do not know if this was a result of the part he played in the atrocities.”
The next question, about the fact that Reşid had bought a house for 9,000 Turkish pounds
when “the interior minister knew that this man found himself in a very delicate position,”
was a ginger allusion to the fortunes that high-ranking state officials had acquired during
the deportation of the Armenians. It received, however, no response, no more than did
the one about the Special Organization that closed the hearing: “That is a question for the
minister of war and the army commanders,” Şükrü answered, “for the Council of Ministers
made no decisions in these matters. Hence I know nothing about the crimes attributed to
them.”32

The commission pursued its task with the 12–13 November interrogation33 of a former
minister of commerce and Agriculture, followed by that of a former foreign minister, Ahmed
Nesimi Bey, who from the outset hid behind the fact that he had joined the cabinet on 5
November 1914, well after the (August 1914) general mobilization, in order to justify his igno-
rance of the abuses committed during the military requisitions. With regard to the deporta-
tion law, the former minister offered the classic justifications, including collaboration with the
Russians and regular espionage on the military situation. For good measure, he added:
Nearly everywhere, we discovered arms, bombs, flags of an independent Armenia, and

preparations for revolt ... People insisted on the need to take extraordinary measures;
the commander-in-chief suggested that, in the military zones, the local population,
wherever the army was in danger, be removed and settled elsewhere, individually or en
masse. This, as well as all other extraordinary measures of the same kind, were to be
applied only in cases of absolute necessity and in proportion to the necessity involved.
On the insistent urging of the commander-in-chief, who invoked the welfare of the
army and the security of its operations, we felt compelled to grant this authority to the
commanders of the various army corps ... We were assured that, if this measure was not
taken, our army would effectively have been caught in a crossfire ... Thus the law in
question was a measure of military security ... Some time after this law was promulgated,
I went to Carlsbad on the recommendation of my doctors and remained there from July
to late August. Hence I was not in Constantinople during most of the period in which
the events objected to occurred. On my return, I learned that, when this measure was
applied, certain fundamentally evil people had committed all kinds of abuses.
Thus, the army was supposed to have instigated the “measures.” Like others, Ahmed Nesimi
spontaneously came up with an alibi – that he had been abroad in the summer of 1915 – to
clear himself – in other words, he admitted that a collective crime had been committed, but
declared that he had had nothing to do with the whole business. Moreover, he added, “it is
obvious that I was in no way responsible for the application of this measure.”34
The notorious deputy Ilyas Sâmi, whose role in the liquidation of the Armenians of Mush
we have already seen, now took over from his colleague, asking a question that was, to say
the least, odd:
How, in deciding to deport a population to save the army from danger, as if what were
involved were the withdrawal of a cabinet, could the government not have taken into
account the fact that his population, this element had been settled in the region for
years? The result was that women, innocent children, a defenseless Muslim [sic] popula-
tion, were liquidated by bands. Before proceeding with the deportation, all that should
have been seriously considered. The deportees should first have been protected against
attack from armed bands, and only then transferred. It was this negligence that led to
the liquidation of half of the total population. Not a Muslim [?] remains.
This intervention, which cast the executioner in the victim’s role and probably went beyond
the bounds of decency, provoked no reaction. After this grotesque intermezzo, Neşaşibî
resumed his interrogation, asking: “In your view, were the deportation measures applied to
everyone, including women and children, or only to male combatants?” Nesimi came up with
a rather disarming response:
As for the women, it was said that it would be still worse to leave them alone in their
villages, and this affirmation was in fact justified by the general state of the region.

What is more, it was said that the women would engage in espionage and that a few of
them had already been arrested. However, the law left this point to the discretion of
those who applied it, after taking military necessities into consideration. I say, turning
to my Armenian colleagues, you are familiar with my ideas and my sentiments. If you
are not familiar with them, you can inform yourselves of them. I struggled against the
adoption of a measure of this kind ... If abuses were committed and if the deportation
also took place outside war zones and without regard for military necessity, the culprits
deserve to be punished.
With this hearing, a further step had been taken. Although the deputies were not always
very curious, they sometimes managed to discomfit the ministers. By revealing that he had
struggled to prevent “a measure of this kind,” Nesimi clearly implied that there had been a
debate over this question within the government or the Young Turk party. The rest of his
testimony also indicates, cautiously, that this “measure” was applied “outside war zones and
without regard for military necessity.” His interrogation came to an end with questions about
the Special Organization: he said he was “unaware that such bands had been created.”35
The hearing that took place on 10 November seems to mark a discursive shift, and it can-
not be excluded that this shift stemmed from preparatory meetings in Young Turk circles.
The hearing is the more important in that it was an interrogation of İbrahim Bey, a former
justice minister.36 Like the witness who preceded him, İbrahim affirmed at the outset that
the Russians had attacked Turkey. In connection with the deportation law, he recalled that,
in the wake of events in Erzerum, Şabinkarahisar, and Bitlis, as well as
proclamations by the Armenian Committees, the government had no choice but to

promulgate a deportation law. There followed a decision by the Council of Ministers
about the amount to be raised from the émigrés’ assets to ensure the subsistence and
comfort of the people deported ... We were informed about certain atrocities and I was
deeply disturbed, for, truly, this was inacceptable.
Thus, a new element had been mentioned: without saying that the Council of Ministers had
discussed the deportation law, yet evoking, with a mélange of cynicism and humor, a decision
intended to provide for the “comfort of the people deported,” İbrahim ultimately gave the
commission to understand that debates about the Armenians’ fate had indeed taken place,
without saying anything more precise than that. But he went still further, affirming that he
had created a commission of inquiry comprising civilian officials, including court officials,
whom he had chosen himself, “among them Assime Bey, the presiding judge at the criminal
court, a very high-minded, honest individual, and Nihad Bey, the assistant general prosecu-
tor ... These commissions were attached to the Interior Ministry, and sent their reports to
this department.” Following up this response, Rağib Neşaşibî asked “how the army com-
manders had been able to let people be massacred,” but was called sharply to order by the
president of the commission, who was obviously apprehensive that the question would lead
to disclosures he had hitherto been able to prevent: “The subject before us is not massacres.
We are talking about the law.” In his capacity as justice minister, İbrahim was then asked if
the laws had been submitted to the Council of State and which laws had been promulgated
without first being submitted to him. But, İbrahim, too, was suffering from amnesia. He was
also asked if the Council of Ministers had made a decision “bearing on the deportations and
other atrocities. For this question is crucial and all the ministers are responsible for them.”
The former minister thereupon stated that “the exceptional treatment that was sometimes
meted out when the deportation law was applied occurred without the government’s knowl-
edge.” Neşaşibî, however, undaunted by these responses, went on to mention the case of

Dr. Reşid, the vali of Dyarbekir, “who was brought here to face serious charges. Fifteen or
twenty days later, however, he was appointed vali of Angora. The Council of Ministers no
doubt made this appointment.” Once again, İbrahim Bey “could not remember very well.”
The author of the ten-point motion, Fuad Bey, now entered the debate. “Two of these
temporary laws,” he recalled, “are extremely important. One is that on abandoned property;
the other is that authorizing the execution of death sentences without an irade.” He was given
the following answer: “There was indeed a law bearing on the deportees’ assets, but the pur-
pose of this law was to safeguard their property and protect it from being pillaged.” This very
honorable preoccupation seems not to have convinced İbrahim’s interlocutors. Harun Hilmi
Effendi pursued the interrogation of the accused: “İbrahim Bey says that the deportations took
place in military zones, for the security of the army.” İbrahim answered, “We were not the
ones who ordered them; the military ordered them carried out for that reason.” Hilmi pursued
his advantage: “The commanders had indeed been given very broad prerogatives; in the war
zones, they were authorized to punish those who were under their command as they saw fit.
But many people were deported or executed in areas that were not in war zones.” This remark,
however, produced no effect; İbrahim simply replied: “We did not know that.” Hilmi then
broached the issue of the government’s attitude with him, asking: “After being apprised of
these events, did the Council of Ministers not conduct deliberations for the purpose of putting
an end to them?” İbrahim answered: “What was not said! But nothing at all of an official char-
acter.” It was then pointed out to him that documents had been published and distributed to
parliament. İbrahim responded: “It was not the government, but the Interior Ministry which
published them.” This provided Neşaşibî with an opportunity to relaunch the debate: “Was
the Interior Ministry not part of the government? People say that there were a great many
more massacres and that there exist many documents on this subject. How was that?”
İbrahim’s answer was dumbfounding:
The Interior Ministry had published documents about the atrocities that the Armenians
had inflicted on the Muslims in the eastern vilayets. This question does not concern
my ministry; moreover, it was not discussed by the Council of Ministers. The docu-
ments were given both to us and to the deputies ... I believe that the deputies were bet-
ter informed about these questions than the government.
An investigation of crimes committed against the Armenians had suddenly turned into
proceedings focused on “atrocities inflicted on the Muslims” about which the justice minister
was, however, less well informed than parliament. İbrahim thus found himself in a difficult
situation. Hilmi pressed his attack: “People say that, when the non-Muslims were deported
in Angora, their neighborhoods were set on fire so that their property could be seized. Is that
right?” The former minister did not know.
Queried about the Special Organization, İbrahim answered: “I knew nothing about this
organization. Nor did the Council of Ministers. We were utterly ignorant of the goal and
activities of this organization. I know absolutely nothing about it and, what is more, it is not
my duty to know anything about it.” Irritated, no doubt, by the evasive answers given by the
accused, Ilyas Sâmi concluded:
İbrahim Bey has answered most of the questions put to him by saying that he was una-
ware of the facts or that they occurred after he left the ministry ... Moreover, the whole
cabinet has to answer for an event such as the fall of Erzerum. It was Ömer Naci Bey
who began to apply the measures pertaining to the Special Organization. It is rather
curious that İbrahim Bey, a member of the Council of Ministers when these events
occurred, learned about them only after the fact.

Without meaning to, the deputy from Mush had just broken the law imposing silence and
had clearly mentioned the name of the head of the Special Organization in Erzerum (its
headquarters), Ömer Naci. When, somewhat later, he was asked why, under these circum-
stances, he had not resigned, İbrahim finally blurted out: “I remained in the cabinet in order
to prevent the acts of this kind of which I was informed, to the extent that that was in my
power. Rest assured that when I say that we knew nothing about the Special Organization, I
mean that no decision was made by the Council of Ministers.”37
One of the last ministers to testify before the commission, a former Constantinople police
chief and interior minister, İsmail Canbolat, interrogated on 27 November, should also have
shed new light on the events that interest us. It was under Canbolat’s authority that the
Armenian elite of the capital was rounded up during the night of 24–25 April 1915. However,
to the questions he was asked about the deportation law, Canbolat contented himself by
replying, with rare cynicism, that “during the 4 August [1917] meeting of the Council of
Ministers, [he] had decided to arrange for the men arrested to be brought back home, and
that no one had objected. First steps had even been taken to carry this measure out: the
Directorate for Emigrés had begun to make the necessary preparations. The order author-
izing the return of the deportees from Samsun and its environs had already been issued.”38
Was it possible that an eminent member of the CUP did not know that the Armenians from
Samsun and the surrounding region had been drowned in the Black Sea or liquidated on the
roads?
Although, as we have just seen, the investigation conducted by the Ottoman parliament
and its Fifth Commission at least had the merit of initiating a debate about the crimes com-
mitted against the Armenian population, the sultan and Grand Vizier Tevfik’s cabinet had
soon come to the conclusion that, given its makeup, the standing parliament, which had
notorious criminals in its ranks, was incapable of rendering justice. But the fact that a peace
conference would in all likelihood soon be held meant that it was necessary to bring the war
criminals to trial before the Allies themselves did. It must be added, finally, that the cabinet
was not in a position to secure passage of any law whatsoever by the existing parliament. The
sultan accordingly decided to dissolve it. In so doing, he intended to take the task of judg-
ing the Young Turks from the legislature’s hands and, by the same token, strip the deputies
of their parliamentary immunity; this led to the immediate arrests of no fewer than 24 of
them.39 On 21 December, the foreign minister, Mustafa Reşad, appeared before parliament
in order to respond to the motion of no confidence brought by Hüseyin Kadri. He pointed
out, notably, that the actions of the preceding governments had been exposed “with the help
of Diogenes’ lantern” and that the amplitude of the atrocities inflicted on the Armenians
was now coming to light, “atrocities which,” the minister said, “have aroused the indignation
of the whole human race; the country entrusted to our care has been transformed into a
gigantic slaughter-house.” “This was,” Istanbul’s French-language daily concluded, “an official
confession.”40

Chapter 4
The Mazhar Governmental Commission

of Inquiry and the Creation of
Courts Martial
I
n the rather unusual context of a party-state that had signed the Mudros armistice even
while organizing the “second phase” of the war in Anatolia, the Tevfik government
encountered strong opposition when it relieved parliament of the responsibility of judging
the Young Turk criminals and planned bringing them before a special court. It is quite obvious
that the new authorities in Istanbul were aware of the threat of dismemberment hanging over
the empire and the need to purge the country of a clique that had led it to ruin and extirpated
part of its population. The crimes committed during the war constituted a heavy onus on
Turkey’s future and there was every reason to believe that the High Court controlled by the
Ittihadist deputies was going to culminate, as the hearings held by the Fifth Commission had
shown, in a parody of justice that would not suffice to appease the Allied Powers and justify
hopes of a certain generosity on their part. In other words, purging the Young Turk officials
who were omnipresent in the government and army, and then conducting credible trials, were
the two requisite conditions for putting the Western governments in the best possible disposi-
tion and presenting a less degraded image at the upcoming peace conference.
The option of bringing the criminals before national courts no doubt appeared as the least
unattractive choice at a time when the victors were considering the possibility of creating an
international “High Tribunal.” If it settled for this option, however, the Tevfik government
would have to deal with the opposition of the Young Turk network, which could count on the
support of the hundreds of thousands of Ottoman subjects at all levels of society who had been
involved in the violence, had profited from the plunder of Armenian or Greek assets, or were
still holding women and children captive. Manipulated by the Young Turks, this solidarity
network constituted a block of refusal that rejected its responsibility across the board. Despite
this barrier, the Tevfik government chose to act quickly, without waiting for the Allies to set
up their own legal machinery on the basis provided by the principles of The Hague.
The Commission of Inquiry’s Pretrial Investigation of

the Young Turk Criminals and the Court-Martial
It was no doubt with these considerations in mind that, on 23 November 1918, even before
parliament was dissolved, the sultan created a governmental commission of inquiry. The
Council of State had apparently discretely compelled the Sultan to promulgate a firman
setting up such a commission of inquiry within the Department of State Security. Hasan
Mazhar Bey, the former vali of Angora, was appointed president of the Commission.1 As
soon as it was created, the “Mazhar Commission” set about gathering personal accounts and

other evidence, focusing its investigations above all on the state officials implicated in the
crimes committed against the Armenian population. As shown in Vahakn Dadrian study of
the Commission,2 it took paragraphs 47, 75, and 87 of the Ottoman Penal Code as the basis
for its work, and enjoyed rather broad prerogatives, since it could subpoena witnesses, search
and seize documents, and even arrest and imprison suspects with the help of the judiciary
police or other state agencies. At the outset, Mazhar sent an official circular to the governors
and vice-governors of the provinces, demanding that they send him originals or certified
copies of the orders concerning the deportation and massacre of the Armenians that had
been received by local government officials. The commission also set about examining wit-
nesses under oath. In a little less than three months, it had constituted 130 pretrial investi-
gative files, which it gradually transmitted to the court-martial that had been formed in the
meantime. These files contained numerous official or semi-official documents, only some of
which were published in the legal supplement to the Takvim Vakayi (Official Gazette) and
the Ottoman Turkish, Armenian, or French press of the day.3 In the provinces, where many
of the valis, mutesarifs, and kaymakams appointed during the war were still in office, some
had kept the orders received from the capital out of negligence or in order to defend them-
selves against possible charges, despite the instructions they had received to destroy or return
them after reading them. Thus, the commission was able to secure a number of telegraphic
orders the nature and origin of which we have examined;4 these cables had been sent out
from provincial governmental centers, notably in Konya, Angora, Dyarbekir, and Sıvas.
It was these provincial materials that served as the basis for the indictments drawn up
in the various trials later conducted before the Istanbul court-martial. The indictment and
the copies of telegrams presented before the court-martial on 27 April 1919 indicate that,
in the course of the investigation, it became clear that many important “documents bear-
ing on this organization and all Central Committee documents were stolen.”5 The archives
of Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa and the Ittihadist Central Committee, two organizations that, as we
have seen, were closely intertwined, were removed by the Ittihad’s secretary general, Midhat
Şükrü, from the Nuri Osmaniye headquarters after Talât’s government resigned.6 A note (no.
31) from the interior minister attached to the indictment of the Unionists exposes the facts
“proving that files containing important information and the Organization’s correspond-
ence were removed by Aziz Bey, the Director of the Department of Criminal Investigations
[in the State Security Service] before Talât resigned.”7 In other words, files were purged in
the two places where decisions had been made and therefore where directives, circulars, and
telegrams sent out by the Ittihadist Central Committee and the specialized departments of
the Interior Ministry were preserved. Also removed in early October 1918, two days before
Talât’s resignation, were the statistics on the deported and massacred Armenians that had
been kept, according to the same judiciary source, on the premises of the Political Section
of the Interior Ministry, where they had been kept with the files of the Special Organization
(Mahrim Dosieler) known as the “Special Secret Archives”; these documents were packed
into crates by night and transported to an unknown destination. Such, at any rate, was the
response with which the Interior Ministry met the repeated demands of the court-martial.8
It will have been understood that Talât and Enver had, among the other arrangements they
made before fleeing the country, given the necessary instructions to wipe away the traces of
their crimes. In an article that appeared in the daily Sabah, the president of Hürryet Ittilaf
(which was liberal in tendency), Mustafa Sabri, declared that İzzet Pasha, in the brief period
before the signature of the Mudros Armistice in which İzzet had headed the government,
“made it possible to, and provided the means required to, destroy a large number of official
documents connected with the events of the war.”9 While this statement by a member of
the opposition might seem questionable, it nonetheless indicates that the opposition to the
Ittihad suspected that the authorities and administration were conniving with the fugitives.

Mazhar Governmental Commission of Inquiry 737
It is probable that some of the documents spirited away by the Ittihadists were destroyed,
but there exist various indications that others were stored in a safe place by Karakol or con-
fided to the fugitives’ friends or family members. Concurring accounts suggest that a police
search of the CUP’s headquarters in Nuri Osmaniye Street was carried out immediately
after the Young Turk leaders’ departure. They attest the discovery of official documents and
telegrams. However, those conducting the search do not seem to have found more sensitive
material. On the other hand, the police search of the home of Bahaeddin Şakir’s son-in-law,
Ahmed Ramız Bey, in Sabon Hane Street in Şişli, which was carried out on Saturday, 14
December 1918 by the Constantinople police chief, seems to have been more fruitful: it turned
up a large sack containing many and secret files which obviously had come from the Nuri
Osmaniye headquarters, among them the minutes of the committee’s secret meetings.10
Destroying or removing the central archives bound up with the liquidation of the Armenians
was not the only measure taken by the Ittihad’s leaders. While the operations were being car-
ried out, strict instructions had been issued, notably to the party’s responsible secretaries and
delegates, to destroy the telegraphic orders they received once they had been understood. It
should be pointed out here that the process of decoding encrypted telegrams led to the produc-
tion of several different types of documents;11 this made it difficult to destroy all the copies in
the provinces, especially in the case of circulars that were, by their nature, widely distributed.
Among the known documents, a distinction must be made between those that emanated from
the leaders of the Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa and those, formalistic and bureaucratic in tone, which
originated notably in the Interior Ministry. We have only a very few documents of the first
category – we have described them in Part Four – and more of the others. However, since the
system of extermination had two faces, one of which was governmental and public, while the
other was secret and violent, the first and better documented face of it allows us to assess the
activities of those responsible for the second. The precautions that were taken to mask liquida-
tion orders, so that only the official orders would come down to later generations, reflects the
general image of the CUP, a vast manipulative operation that it is not easy to grasp.
The presiding judge at the court-martial before which the Unionist leaders still to be found
in Istanbul were tried was probably familiar with their practices as well as the hierarchy that
supervised the crime. At the fifth trial session on 12 May 1919, the court-martial conducted
a close examination of Colonel Ahmed Cevad,12 the military commander of the capital and
a member of the Special Organization’s Political Bureau, for it knew that all the orders dis-
patched to the provinces had necessarily passed through his hands.13 The presiding judge first
had the court clerk read out several telegrams and then asked Cevad if the signature they
bore was indeed his. “It is possible,” the Colonel replied; “I do not remember, a good deal of
time has gone by since.” In the end, however, he agreed that he was indeed the person who
had noted in the margin that it would be necessary to return “the originals of such important
telegrams ... in compliance with the rules.” He referred, however, to military instructions when
the presiding judge asked him if this had been one of Teşkilât-i Mahsusa’s standard procedures.
The colonel affirmed that he had received on 21 January 1915 an order from the General Staff
of the Army, “sealed with the seal” requiring him “to return the document in question ... a
copy of the order issued by the minister was addressed to every army commander. Once the
information had been received, it had to be sent back to the places indicated ... After an order
had been diffused and implemented, it had to be effaced.” The presiding judge, however,
pointed out to Cevad that the court had a copy of this circular about the organization of
squadrons of çetes that had emanated from the War Ministry (no. 1117), and added that “it
said absolutely nothing about the destruction of orders.” He accordingly asked the colonel if
he had destroyed orders on his “own initiative.” Cevad was unable to reply.14 Thus, it emerges
from this interrogation that it had been necessary to send the “originals” back to Istanbul,
whereas “orders” issued in non-coded form were supposed to be destroyed locally. Let us note

that Cevad carefully avoided mentioning the Special Organization, systematically referring
his questioner to the War Ministry, although the telegrams read out at this session of the trial
had been signed, as the presiding judge remarked, by the leaders of Teşkilât-i Mahsusa.
In order to authenticate the official or semi-official documents sent out by ministers, state
officials, and officers or leaders of the Special Organization, the court-martial established a
standard procedure: after a document was read out, the accused or witnesses were asked to
confirm that it did indeed bear their signature. If they denied it, the court appealed to the
recipient(s) of the document in question and often succeeded in establishing their authentic-
ity in this fashion. By comparing and confronting often contradictory statements by different
people, it managed to draw conclusions it regarded as reliable. The investigating magistrates
of the court-martial and the governmental Commission of Inquiry were thus able to examine
293 files.15
An incident that occurred in February 1919 in Ayntab, where the British military author-
ities had seized official documents in the possession of the city’s (italicize), suggests that
initiatives had been taken, if only on the local level, to destroy correspondence between the
interior minister and the provinces dating from the war years. A 17 June 1919 note of protest
to the Sublime Porte reveals that a British officer had gone to see the mutesarif of Ayntab in
order to “ask him to turn over all the telegrams and letters exchanged between the vilayet
and the Imperial Interior Ministry on the one hand and the mutesarifat on the other in the
period running from 1330 to 1334 [1914–19].” Confronted with the Ottoman official’s refusal
to comply, the officer had the building surrounded and the exits from it sealed off and then
seized the documents in question. This procedure had been decided on after the dispatch of
“a circular telegram from the head of the telegraph office in Dyarbekir instructing the agen-
cies under his jurisdiction to destroy the originals of obsolete documents.”16
Demands for documents made by the Commission of Inquiry or court-martial were only
rarely heeded by the provincial authorities. A few vilayets nevertheless responded positively,
remitting locally held telegrams and other materials. According to a British intelligence doc-
ument exhumed by Dadrian, the commission retrieved, from the vilayet of Angora alone, 42
encrypted telegrams.17 The vilayet of Konya also “conducted a search for copies of telegrams”
and sent them to the Interior Ministry.18
The documents gathered in certain vilayets were addressed to the Interior Ministry and
the governmental Commission of Inquiry headed by Mazhar Bey, which had its offices in the
“special bureau of the headquarters of the Department of State Security” otherwise known
as the “directorate general of investigations.”19 This bureau transmitted them in turn to the
court martial after certifying that they were authentic.20 A 2 April 1919 letter that the interior
minister, Cemal Bey, sent to the presiding judge of the court-martial21 reminds him that
It has been communicated to all concerned that the originals of encrypted telegrams
pertaining to the question of the deportation sent by the Ministry to the valis between
May 1331 [1915] and late April 1333 [1917] – which should be available in the telegraph
offices – must be collected and expedited by a state official empowered to do so. We
send you herewith all the documents sent to us by the Postal and Telegraph Ministry:
forty-two telegrams dispatched by the prefecture in Angora in a special file and, in
connection with the same question, correspondence that was sent to us by the prefec-
ture in Konya (containing copies of the encrypted documents).
It seems that the Postal, Telegraph, and Telephone Ministry was also asked to collect and
turn over correspondence dating from the war years. Thus, the general directorate of the
Dyarbekir post office transmitted to the ministry from which it depended on 17 April 1919 a
17 May 1915 telegram from Dr. Reşid to İsmail Hakkı, the vali of Adana.22

The Creation of the Ottoman Courts Martial

The formation of courts martial was obviously the logical extension of the work of the
Mazhar Commission. Early in December, the office of the chief prosecutor of the Istanbul
Court of Appeals took the first steps toward creating them. They took definite form at a
meeting between the director of the Justice Ministry’s Division of Criminal Affairs and the
Interior Ministry’s chief legal counselor. On 13 December 1918, Armenian circles close to
the Patriarchate announced that “individuals accused of having taken part in the Armenian
massacres whose guilt has been established by the Commission of Inquiry” would be brought
before an extraordinary court-martial under the presidency of Mahmud Hayret Tiranli; it was
to comprised five members – three military men and two civil magistrates.23 On 16 December
1918, the sultan formally established a court-martial and declared on 25 December 1918 that,
for regions that were not under martial law, the existing courts were charged with organizing
the trials. It was only on 8 January 1919, however, that the extraordinary court-martial was
officially called into being.24 On a decree issued by the sultan, three courts martial were
established in Constantinople, as well as ten jurisdictions in the provinces, with their pros-
ecutors and investigating magistrates:
1) the vilayet of Angora and Kastamonu, the sancak of Bolu;

2) the vilayet of Trebizond and the sancak of Samsun (Nusret Bey, chief prosecutor;
Kevork Effendi, investigating magistrate);
3) vilayet of Bursa and Edirne, sancak of Çatalca;
4) vilayet of Aydın (Smyrna), sancaks of Çanakkale and Karasi (Mustaf Remzi, chief
prosecutor; Aram Ipekian, investigating magistrate);
5) vilayet of Konya, sancaks of Eskişehir, Karahisar, Kütahya, and Antalia;
6) vilayet of Sıvas, sancaks of Kayseri and Yozgat;
7) vilayets of Kharpert and Dyarbekir;
8) vilayets of Erzerum, Van, and Bitlis;
9) vilayet of Adana and sancak of Maraş (İsmail Bey, chief prosecutor; Apostolaki
Effendi, investigating magistrate);
10) mutesarifat and sancaks of Urfa, Ayntab, and Zor (İzzet Bey, chief prosecutor; Krikor
Effendi, investigating magistrate).
Each of these jurisdictions was to have its own operating budget.25 It is noteworthy
that several Armenian investigating magistrates were appointed to provincial courts
martial. It should also be pointed out that the jurisdictions of the easternmost vilayets
remained pro forma because they were not assigned prosecutors and officiating magis-
trates. It seems reasonable to suppose that the objective of these local courts was to make
it possible to carry out local investigations in places where the governmental Commission
of Inquiry had been unable to function, and that the Sublime Porte was, at the time,
resolved to shed light on the crimes committed in certain regions in the course of the
war. In February, the judge presiding at the court-martial asked the Interior Ministry to
transmit the originals or certified copies of documents pertaining to the deportation of
the Armenians to its services. The 3 March 1919 resignation of the Tevfik government,
and its replacement by a cabinet headed by Damad Ferid Pasha, seem to have been due
to its opposition to a project to create a special jurisdiction to judge the Ittihadists. As
early as 5 March, the new Council of Ministers examined a report drawn up by Sâmi Bey
proposing to abolish the provincial courts and bring all cases involving massacres and
deportations before an exclusively military, rather than a mixed, court-martial based in
Constantinople.26

On 8 March 1919, the sultan ratified the accreditation of this new court-martial, with
extended competencies and exclusively military judges.27 It is further noteworthy that the
mixed court-martial, which had begun to try the organizers of the massacres in Yozgat only
two months earlier, suddenly suspended its operations on 6 March, during the twelfth ses-
sion of the trial. When the trial was resumed, the court was made up of exclusively military
judges. The most basic change, however, was the absence of the plaintiff, who was repre-
sented from now on by the prosecutor.28
According to the daily Sabah, the court put the accused who were to be tried separately on
charges of “massacre and illegal personal gain” in different categories:
1) those who had really instigated the crimes against the Armenians;
2) those who had worked in the shadow of the main culprits, such as the influential members
of the Committee of Union and Progress;
3) members of secret organizations, such as the Special Organization, as well as high-ranking
military men and felons released from prison;
4) parliamentary deputies who failed to protest and acquiesced in the crimes committed;
5) journalists who applauded and encouraged these crimes and inflamed public opinion with
misleading, provocative articles;
6) those who took advantage of these crimes to enrich themselves; and
7) the legions of pashas and beys who supervised these crimes.29
The judicial procedures were unmistakably sped up when Damad Ferid took the reins
of government, while Young Turk leaders who had until then been spared were arrested.
The Istanbul military prison and the prison of the court-martial – known as the Bekirağa
Section – where the suspects and the accused were held, turned out to be unreliable. The
complicity of people in the administration allowed many of the accused to escape, especially
from the court-martial’s prison. The circumstances surrounding the 25 January 1919 flight of
Dr. Reşid, the former vali of Dyarbekir, from the Bekirağa Section bear witness to a certain
laxity, at the very least. While Reşid was being taken under guard “to the Hamam,” three
men grabbed him and pushed him into “a black car” that disappeared before his guards could
react.30 This was clearly the work of the Karakol network.
It is noteworthy that, subsequently, the court-martial acquitted Lieutenant Colonel Ali
and Lieutenant Yusuf Ziya, respectively warden and assistant warden of the house of deten-
tion attached to the court-martial. The two men were tried for helping Halil [Kut] escape.31
As for the competencies of the three courts martial created in Istanbul, only Court
Martial No. 1 tried people accused of committing crimes against the Armenian population.
Court-Martial No. 2 was apparently specialized in cases involving the illegal seizure of assets.
A 15 May 1919 imperial decree initially set up two commissions charged with investigating
economic abuses and “internal questions.”32 According to the Istanbul press, 1,700 officers
who had enriched themselves during the war “thanks to financial misdealing” were under
criminal investigation in early August 1919.33 The creation of Court-Martial No. 2 was not,
however, officially recognized until 27 October, with the appointment of a chief prosecutor,
İsmail Vasif Bey, and two investigating magistrates, Ali Rıza and Hüseyin Bey. It addressed
the “affair of the secret military committee Nigehban” and that of the Red Khanjar.34
Court-Martial No. 3 judged senior officers. It conducted, notably, the pretrial investigation of
General Vehib Pasha.35 Vehib, who appeared before the court-martial’s Commission of Inquiry
on Wednesday, 3 December 1919,36 was jailed after the court unanimously decided to try him.37
There are no clear reports of the reason for this indictment in the press, but it is highly prob-
able that it was related to the long report38 that Vehib submitted to the Mazhar Commission
in early December. In breaking the law of silence and making precise revelations of the crimes

perpetrated by the CUP, the ranking Young Turk officer committed an act bordering on treason;
the colleagues of his sitting on Court-Martial No. 3 apparently wished to make him pay for it.
As for the provincial courts martial, it must be pointed out that the judges presiding over some
of them were appointed only in late November or even early December 1919: Lieutenant Colonel
Mustafa Tevfik Bey in Bolu,39 Colonel Abdül Vahid Bey in Tekirdağ, and Colonel Kemal Bey in
Samsun.40 Early in February 1920, Major General İbrahim Pasha was appointed presiding judge
at the Angora court-martial.41 One can, of course, ask what significance these appointments had
when one recalls that the central government was unable to assert its authority over cities such as
Bolu, Samsun, and Angora, which were controlled by the nationalist movement.
In any event, these nominations went hand-in-hand with the abolition of the chief prosecu-
tors’ and investigating magistrates’ posts in the provinces,42 apparently because they had com-
pleted their investigations of those responsible for the massacres of Armenians and Greeks.
The account given by Setrag Karageuzian, who was appointed investigating magistrate in
Trebizond in March 1919, provides valuable insights into the atmosphere that reigned in certain
provinces immediately following the armistice.43 Karageuzian’s colleague Nusret Bey, the chief
prosecutor in Trebizond, who had been appointed two months earlier and charged with beginning
the investigation, “did nothing and did not even remain in the city.” The Armenian magistrate,
whose “mission it was to conduct an investigation into the crimes of deportation and massacre of
the Armenians,” immediately began to collaborate with his colleague. However, he says,
none of my efforts and none of the work I did produced results. After a tortuous three-and-
a-half months of labor, I came to the following conclusions: 1) the Ottoman government
did not intend to punish those responsible for the massacres or the other culprits or to see
that justice was done. Its sole aim was to deceive Europe and America and public opinion
in the civilized countries; 2) the program of Union and Progress is a crystallization of the
mentality of the Turkish people; 3) the great majority of the state officials, gendarmes,
officers in the gendarmerie, police chiefs and policemen who organized and carried out
the deportation and massacres are still in the posts they held then. Consequently, they
will never want the investigations to succeed. The state officials have created as many dif-
ficulties as possible in order to bring our mission to naught. The police and gendarmerie,
instead of arresting the accused, producing witnesses, and carrying out the orders given
them, forewarn the guilty, that is, their former accomplices, of all pending actions; 4) with
the means currently available, nothing can be done to apply the principles of justice.
Here are a few proofs of what I have just said. 1) A poor Greek woman who had the cour-
age to tell me everything she knew about the massacres was killed. 2) So far, none of the
guilty has been arrested by the police or gendarmerie. Hardly had I summoned two criminals
without informing them of the reason for the summons and proceeded to arrest them than
a universal feeling of anger and irritation made itself felt among all classes of the people,
from the governor to the poorest peasant. The policeman who was working for me and had
served the summons on the two criminals whom I had had arrested was promptly replaced
by another who was supposedly more competent. Now they are busy inventing a thousand
different ways of getting the arrested men released. It goes without saying that I categori-
cally refused all the propositions that were made to me in this regard, but they are working
ceaselessly to attain their goal. 3) On 22 May, I ordered the major of the gendarmerie to
produce the eight accused, one of whom, a man by the name of Haci Mehmed, had been a
receiver of contributions. On 23 May, I had to issue the same order again; there was, however,
no response. I thereupon wrote to the prosecutor on 25 May, again without results. I next
wrote to the Colonel of the gendarmerie (26 May). Finally, on 28 May 1919, the following
response reached me: “One of the eight accused is in Of, another has gone to Russia, a third

is dead, and the other five are facing prosecution.” The prosecution in question, however, has
produced no results to date. I again appealed to the gendarmerie and to Of, but my requests
were not even answered. Disappointed by the attitude of the gendarmerie, I wrote on two
occasions to the police to ask them to arrest and produce the receiver of contributions Haci
Mehmed. I was told that he was not in the village. I again wrote to the gendarmerie, but
received no answer. Finally, on 14 June, I wrote directly to the superior of the wanted man
at his place of work [defterdar], who, on 6 July, sent me a response dated 21 June in which
he said: “Haci Mehmed is ill; he will be back in a few days.” But, no one ever came, and the
man who organized massacres is still in his post; he has not been inconvenienced in any
way. I related all this to the governor, who told me: “we lack the forces required to carry out
your orders.” I replied: “But not even the criminals who come and go as they please in the
city have been arrested, and the accused state officials regularly receive their salaries.” The
governor contented himself with saying: “I will say something about that.” But there have
been no changes. Later, I informed the chief prosecutor of everything that had happened,
but without seeing any results or receiving a response from him. 4) I called a famous Unionist
and organizer of massacres by the name of Kelim, the first secretary of the Public Works
Administration. After interrogating him, I demanded a written order from the governor
authorizing me to arrest him. The prosecutor sent the accused man back home, kept his file
for two days, and sent it back to me later. Two days after that, I was obliged to issue the arrest
order, but Kelim was not arrested. He stands accused of a crime; there exists a warrant for
his arrest; he is apparently a fugitive, but, at the same time, he has employment. 5) On 26
May, I demanded a copy of a few orders concerning massacres issued by the previous govern-
ment. I was simply told that “no such orders exist.” 6) I issued an order to arrest a notorious
organizer of massacres named Hakkı. One month later, I was told: “ten days ago, Hakkı left
for Erzerum.” Why did they wait until he had left to answer me? 7) I issued an order to arrest
notorious organizers of massacres such as Reşad, Kahya, Ömer, Hakkı, Haireddin, Süleyman
and Murad, and I wrote a number of letters on this subject, but was unable to obtain any
results at all. 8) Before my arrival, the police chief conducted an investigation of the crimes
committed by police lieutenant Rauf. I asked the governor and police chief to send me the
file three times, but my request went unanswered. According to information provided by wit-
nesses, the file was burned ... 9) Although I issued an order for his arrest, the famous Unionist
and organizer of massacres Haci Ali Hofuz Zâde Ëumer comes and goes in a car in the city as
he pleases, is not arrested, and is not inconvenienced in any way. Recently, he came to the
city with Reşat, Kahya, Süleyman, and others, and went to the government building to speak
with the governor. 10) The well-known organizer of massacres and brigand Topal Osman was
officially appointed mayor of Kirason. Is there any need to produce further proof?
If the government does not arrest brigands and people who have committed massacres, if
it does not punish criminals, if bloodthirsty monsters who should be arrested on orders from
a competent authority at liberty and even hold conversations with people in official posts,
why were we sent here? If the aim is not to fool Europe and America, why do the Turks want
to stage this well-constructed farce? But an Armenian can never serve as a pliant tool in the
hands of people who wish to commit a shameful injustice. A judge can never play a cowardly,
ignoble role.44
This provincial experience of an Ottoman Armenian magistrate was certainly no isolated
case. If the Istanbul authorities had objective reasons for prosecuting people before the law, in
order, as it were, to purge the state and appear more presentable at the peace conference, it is
obvious that the provinces were still under the CUP’s control, and that its elites were by no mean
inclined to be tried. Whatever the divergences between the different Turkish nationalist currents,
they concurred on one point – a categorical refusal to assume their responsibilities; an implacable
desire to see their common project of building a Turkish national state through to the end.

Chapter 5
The Armenian Survivors in their

Places of “Relegation” in the
Last Days of the War
T
he British forces under the command of General Allenby, in the course of their march
northward in late 1917 and throughout 1918, occasionally encountered deportees who
had ended up in various places in Palestine and the Sinai. These were in fact survi-
vors from the convoys that had been driven down the Hama-Homs-Damascus-Hauran-Salt-
Kerek-Maan-Sinai route three years earlier.
A first group of 40 survivors was liberated by the British forces in November 1917, in
Jordan’s Wadi Musa region, which marked the northern limits of the zones of relegation.
They had subsisted in cave dwellings or the ruins of the city of Petra.1 Bit by bit, other infor-
mation about the survivors that had been gathered up by General Allenby’s army reached
Cairo,2 and the first humanitarian operations were launched from the Egyptian capital with
the support of the British military authorities.3 For example, the capture of Jerusalem on 9
December 1917 led to the discovery of around 500 deportees who had found refuge in build-
ings attached to the Armenian Monastery of Saint James.4 Three months later, their number
had risen to 650.5 About 100 orphans who had been found in the region of Salt, west of
Amman, were lodged in the monastery shortly thereafter. In the course of the February 1918
military operations, 900 deportees were also found in Tafile on the southern tip of the Dead
Sea, all in terrible health. They represented the remains of a convoy of nearly 10,000 people
from Gürün, Marash, Hacın, Dörtyol, Kayseri, and Mardin that had gotten as far as Tafile.6
In April 1918, the British provided relief to 1,500 Cilician deportees eking out an existence
in Salt, and a few others further south, in Kerek, natives of Adana, Marash, Ayntab, Kesab,
and Karsbazar.7
It must also be pointed out that, during the British offensive, Armenians in another cat-
egory fell into the hands of the Allied forces: the hundreds of Armenian soldiers who had
been serving in the Ottoman Fourth Army, who had been taken prisoner at the same time
as their Ottoman comrades, and who had been interned just as they had.
The first big group of deportees – nearly 30,000 people – was discovered in Damascus,
which fell to the Arab and British forces on 1 October 1918. Their situation was all the more
appalling in that they had survived until then by working for the Ottoman army.8 Finally,
in fall 1918, French forces discovered 4,000 Armenians in Beirut when they entered the city
on 8 October, and another 1,000 in Baalbek and Zahle. In the next few days, 2,000 were
found in Homs, 5,000 in Maara, and 1,000 in Hama.9 Aleppo and the surrounding area
were the last to be liberated, on 26 October. Forty thousand Armenians were found there.
All in all, on the eve of the armistice, 100,000 deportees remained on the Alep-Damascus-
Sinai axis.

In Aleppo, the 26 September 1917 departure of the vali, Mustafa Abdülhalik, reduced
the danger to which the deportees were exposed. A number of Armenian survivors of the
massacres in Zor, and others who had hidden in the nearby countryside, gradually came
looking for aid and refuge in the regional metropolis. The fact that Beatrice Rohner’s
German orphanage had been shut down, that the Mazlumian brothers had been exiled
to Zahle, and that the moving spirit behind the humanitarian operations in Aleppo, the
auxiliary bishop of the city, Father Harutiun Yesayan, had been arrested in February 1917
had put all but a complete end to the relief programs for the deportees and led to the
dissolution of the committee charged with organizing the aid.10 A few private initiatives
benefiting the deportees nevertheless made it possible to compensate, to some extent, for
the absence of organized structures. Yervant Odian, who had returned to Aleppo in mid-
March 1918, notes that Aram Andonian was there, living in the Baron hotel, as were Dr.
Boghosian, Dr. Hekimian, Mikayel Natanian, Andon Rshtuni, and Krikor Ankut. This
indicates that the underground network had succeeded in saving these intellectuals. But
Odian also notes that the authorities were rounding up Armenians of draftable age in
the streets and sending them to Bozanti.11 The situation was thus far from being normal.
The notorious informant Arshavir Sahagian, who had denounced the Hnchaks to the
authorities, was tracking down Armenian deportees there. Odian, known for his impru-
dence, fell into Sahagian’s hands and found himself condemned to exile in Dyarbekir.12
While waiting to be exiled, thanks to the complicity of an Armenian doctor who worked
for the Aleppo police force, he observed the practices of the local police and noted that
individual cases, such as that of a young Greek from Alexandria who was described as
“dangerous,” were decided in the Interior Ministry.13 Odian also describes the situation of
the Armenian soldiers who had been serving on the Syrian front for more than three years
without ever being granted a leave.14
The second big group of survivors was found in Mesopotamia, in the Mosul and Baghdad
areas. The Turkish forces abandoned Mosul on 21 October; General Ali İhsan Pasha tried
to take up positions there again upon his return from Azerbaijan, but was driven out by the
British troops.15 The former patriarch, Zaven, now exiled to Baghdad, set out to recover the
women and children who had been scattered throughout the region. He rented five houses
in which he lodged the deportees who had arrived from the deserts, including young women
who had prostituted themselves in order to survive.16 Late in December, 1,700 survivors were
recovered. The number reached 40,000 by January 1919, 1,000 of them orphans.17
Recovering the thousands of women and children held by Arab tribes in the region – the
Anezes, Albu Diabs, and Zobas – constituted another thorny problem. Initially, a joint dec-
laration by local religious leaders and notables, especially in the regions of Dehok and Zakho,
whom a colonel in the military Security Forces and the British civilian governor, Nolder, had
turned to for help, made it possible to organize a campaign to recover these women and chil-
dren, sometimes by force.18 The British authorities, however, soon curbed such operations,
especially when the Armenians involved were converts or “married” young women, in order
not to alienate the local population.19 In Baghdad, the patriarch estimated the number of
deportees recovered there at 2,000.20
The biggest problem, however, was constituted by the 75,000 Armenians and Chaldean
Syriacs from the plains of Urmia and Salmast who had fled to Hamadân and Bakuba on 18
July 1918 in order to escape the threats of massacre from the Ottoman troops under Ali İhsan
Pasha. After evacuating Iranian Azerbaijan, these Christians made a long trek in search
of protection. Pursued by the Turkish forces, a number of them were killed in the vicinity
of Heydarâbâd or in the attacks by Kurdish tribes to which they were subjected en route.
Others dies of exhaustion or fell victim to stratagems, as in the case of the 400 horsemen
wearing British uniforms who killed the former governor of Van, Kosti Hampartsumian,

Armenian Survivors – Last Days of the War 745
near the Sahin Ghal’e mountain pass. Around 5,000 people lost their lives during this opera-
tion, carried out jointly by Turkish forces and Kurdish irregulars.21
In September 1918, Colonel Chardigny, the head of the French Military Mission in the
Caucasus, estimated the number of Christian refugees in Hamadân at 50,000.22 He also
noted that they were being gradually evacuated to Baghdad, except for the men capable of
bearing arms: thus, 7,000 men, including three thousand Armenians, were “recruited” by the
British military authorities. According to the Armenian Republic’s plenipotentiary repre-
sentative in Persia, Araratian, of the 18,000 Armenian refugees who left Azerbaijan, 12,000
arrived in Bakuba, most of them from Van; the roughly 4,000 Armenians from Salmast and
Urmia remained in Ghazvin and Hamadân.23
By late 1918, some 15,000 Armenian refugees, a majority of them from Van, inhabited
the tent camp set up by the British in Bakuba, northeast of Baghdad.24 The Lord Mayor’s
Relief Fund provided considerable sums to ensure these deportees’ subsistence. A breakdown
of the Armenians living in Bakuba in December 1919 according to place of origin shows
that 10,247 came from the Van region; 2,530 from Iranian Azerbaijan; 547 from Bitlis; 385
from Aleppo; and 290 from Cilicia, while the others were natives of the Caucasus, Erzerum,
Sıvas, Kharpert, Bursa, Angora, and the capital.25 The camp also had an orphanage, founded
in October 1918 and run by the Vorpakhnam (Association for the Protection of Armenian
Orphans), which was based in Egypt. One thousand two hundred children, mostly from the
Van and Azerbaijan regions, lived here in tents. When Patriarch Zaven visited the camp in
January 1919 on his way back to Constantinople,26 he spoke with General Austin about the
conditions under which the British might create an Armenian battalion. Eight hundred fifty
Armenian soldiers refused to serve elsewhere than in their native regions.27
In Basra, where the patriarch was getting ready to board ship for Constantinople and
resume his functions, he discovered another group of survivors from Van, who had been
provided relief by the Belgian consul, Dervishian, as well as Arshag Safrastian, who was for
his part on his way to Paris to rejoin the Armenian National Delegation.28
One hundred fifteen thousand is no doubt a realistic estimate of the number of Armenian
survivors living in the area stretching from the Sinai through Syria to the Persian Gulf when
the armistice was signed. But this figure leaves one category of survivors out of account –
the women and children in these regions held in Bedouin tribes. We shall discuss them
separately.
The Armenian Presence in Asia Minor

Shortly after the Armistice
A French-language daily in Istanbul puts the Armenian survivors in the following categories:
1) those who had converted and were living in Muslim localities; 2) those who were scattered
throughout the empire, living in isolation and looking for their families, whose fate they did
not know; 3) those who had returned to their homes, which they generally found in ruins or
inhabited by “new owners who did not intend to be pushed out”; 4) those who had regained
possession of their goods (an exception); 5) those who did not have the means they needed to
return to their native regions; 6) those who had returned but had been unable to regain their
homes and had left again, bound for areas in which their safety was assured.29
In examining, region by region, the way the deportations were carried out, we observed
that certain categories of Armenians, notably those working for the army or municipalities,
had been allowed to remain in their homes on a more or less temporary basis – as a rule, after
agreeing to convert to Islam. We have also noted many cases in both cities and the country-
side in which young women and children were abducted, placed in orphanages, or “taken up”
in families. Finally, we can neglect neither the populations that fled to the Caucasus early

in the war – some briefly returned to their homes in the vilayets of Erzerum and Van before
fleeing again in early 1918 during the Turkish offensive – nor the Armenians from Istanbul
or Thrace, who found refuge first and foremost in Bulgaria; all in all, they found it the easiest
to return home. In sum, we find ourselves, in November 1918, facing a complex problem in
which people found themselves widely scattered and in sharply contrasting personal situa-
tions. Reconstructing the pre-war Armenian world was a task obviously made difficult not
only by the demographic disaster that resulted from the genocide, but also by the new situa-
tion created during the conflict. The CUP’s policy of settling muhacirs in formerly Armenian
homes made the elimination of the Armenians irreversible. The seizure of their assets by
local Young Turk networks was another fait accompli that it was difficult to reverse by peace-
ful means. This multifaceted issue has yet to be seriously studied but merits examination,
for it is extremely revelatory of the atmosphere reigning in the provinces of Asia Minor that
were still controlled by Young Turk networks.
An account by a young officer from Talas, Yervant Der Mardirosian, who had been enrolled
in the Nineteenth Brigade on his return from the Dardanelles, shows that in spring 1916
there were little islands of deportees scattered throughout Anatolia. Bound for Osmaniye
with his unit on 19 April, Der Mardirosian met a compatriot there, Garabed Hergimian, who
told him that his mother and two brothers had passed that way before setting out for Zor.
Upon arriving in Marash on 29 May, the young man witnessed the departure of a convoy of
2,000 deportees for the south.30 In Malatia in early June, he encountered a few Islamicized
Armenians from Trebizond and saw that the cathedral had been transformed into a stable.
Further north, in Harput, he noted the presence of a handful of Catholic and Protestant
families, as well as Islamicized Armenians, living in dire poverty. In Palu, on 15 June, he
does not mention seeing a single compatriot, but learned that young women were being
held in the harems of government officials and officers, as was also the case further east in
Jabaghchur, where the front lay at the time.31
Yervant Odian, whose wanderings from Istanbul to Der Zor we have followed over a
three-year period, notes that in spring 1918 5,000 to 6,000 survivors of the Syrian Desert
were living in Sultaniye, south of Konya. The vali of Konya, Muammer (who had previously
been the vali of Sıvas), had adopted a policy of uninterrupted harassment toward them. The
only Armenian men present were a deportee from Bursa, Karnig Shishmanian, who had a
boutique in Sultaniye, as well as a few pharmacists and agronomists. They helped the women
and children who had taken refuge in the town as best they could, and these people tried
to subsist by taking small jobs.32 Around 6,000 natives of Zeitun, who had been deported
to Sultaniye in April 1915, had died of hunger there; their bodies had been buried in mass
graves.33 Odian spent the last months of the war in the town and still worked as an inter-
preter when German officers, sometimes taken for “Englishmen,” traveled through it. It was
from German officers that the deportees in Sultaniye learned one day that Aleppo had just
fallen to the British. From the Istanbul press, they learned that the İzzet government had
decreed on 14 October that the Armenian deportees could go back home. However, Odian
writes, these were “just words.”34
With the end of hostilities, an unending stream of soldiers and civilians began pouring
out of Syria into Asia Minor. For example, on 19 January in Cilicia, “all the trains were
subjected to close searches; if Armenian women or orphans were found in the possession of
Turkish officers or soldiers ... they were immediately set free.” Cautiously, the newly formed
National Council in Adana forbade Armenians to set foot beyond a line running through
Bozanti, “with the result that all the Armenians who ended up in Cilicia were maintained
there. Thus there are currently 35,00 thousand to 40,000 [deportees] there.”35 This prohibi-
tion was imposed rapidly in reaction to the frequent murders of deportees who had returned
home. Of course, the situation was not the same everywhere. The vilayets of Erzerum, Bitlis,

and Van were calm, for not a single Armenian was still to be found in them. Elsewhere, it
was obvious that the Young Turk networks had not been hard put to implement a policy of
intimidation calculated to prevent the deportees from returning and, thus, from laying claim
to their property. Reports arriving in the Patriarchate in Constantinople clearly implied that
the exactions and murders committed in certain provinces were the result of a concerted
plan.
In the vilayet of Sıvas, in February 1919, a group of çetes commanded by Nalband İzzedin
Kâmil, “famous for the crimes he had committed during the deportations,” murdered 12
Armenian deportees who had just returned to Zara. The judge presiding at the court there,
who was also Kâmil’s uncle, had not deemed it worthwhile to hold these criminals in deten-
tion. In Sıvas, when the Greek forces occupied Smyrna, the authorities had organized rallies
during which former CPU propagandists had aroused “Muslim fanaticism” and preached holy
war against Christians in the mosques. In July in İnebazar, the çete leader Kâmil attacked
a group of Armenian deportees returning to their homes and killed several of them.36
Immediately after the 4 September 1919 Congress of Sıvas, Armenian sources note, Mustafa
Kemal, Fahri Pasha, and Rauf Bey set about creating a provisional government, entrusting
the important posts to those bore the main responsibility for the massacres.37 It is quite
obvious that Kemal moved in step with the “resistance” initiated by the CUP,38 even if the
Kemalists proclaimed their independence of the Young Turk network.39
In Tokat, the situation was rather similar to the one in Sıvas. The local Unionist lead-
ers, deeply implicated in the 1915 massacres; Gurci Ahmed, the vilayet’s accountant; Faik,
the president of the emvali metruke; and İmam Bekir, who held property belonging to the
Monastery of Saint John Chrysostom, prevented survivors from returning and blocked res-
titution of their confiscated property.40 Later, in Merzifun, 2,000 returning survivors fell
victim to a massacre; “the Turks burned down all that was left intact of the old Armenian
quarter.”41 Finally, it should be noted that the courts martial set up by the new “nationalist”
authorities condemned nearly 2,000 Armenians to death in the vilayet of Sıvas alone, and
that many young people were enrolled in labor battalions.42
In the vilayet of Trebizond, as is indicated in another report, the induction into labor bat-
talions of Greeks between 20 and 25 years of age confirms that in January 1919 the criminals
involved in the massacres of Greeks and Armenians were not prosecuted and were even
appointed to important posts.43 The repatriates, wrote a French diplomat,
had a hard time of it recovering their property because [of] silent opposition from petty
Turkish officials, who had the support of the heads of the local branch of the Committee
of Union and Progress. Those who had taken an active part in the Armenian mas-
sacres, which had been frighteningly cruel in this city, and who had an interest in
keeping what they had stolen and blocking the return [of] witnesses, endeavored, by
means of terrorist acts, to spread alarm among those who had returned, some of whom
fled a second time.44
In March, the Young Turk networks distributed arms to the peasants, while 300 soldiers took
to the maquis on the urging of three Unionist officers, who were joined by Ekrem Bey and
his band of çetes. A similar situation reigned further west in Ordu, Kirason, Bafra, Samsun,
Uniye, and Çarsamba.45 While murders were less systematic in Trebizond than in the inte-
rior, they were no less frequent, as was observed by an American who traveled through the
city on 21 June 1919. The officer also noted that returning survivors’ real estate and moveable
assets had still not been returned to them.46
In Ismit, where muhacirs from Salonika and Rumelia had been settled during the war,
replacing the Armenians, barely 30 deportees had returned by 30 September 1920;47 none

were to be found in the surrounding region, where acts of pillage and murder had multiplied
in the course of the year 1919.48 The court-martial in Bilecik, after first imprisoning the local
Young Turk leaders, freed, on 15 October 1919, “Unionist leaders of the city by the names of
Mercimakzâde Ahmed, Dedeoğlu Ali, Cadizâde Haci Ahmed, and their accomplices.” These
men immediately took “the head of the nationalist movement and sowed terror among the
Armenians.” Observers further noted that they organized public demonstrations “with flags
and a band, to cries of ‘long live the Ittihad!’ ”49
The situation in the neighboring region of Bursa was appreciably different. Initially, the
new vali had ordered the arrests of the local Unionist chiefs, who stood accused, notably, of
the massacre of Atranos:50 Dr. Midhat Bey; the lawyer Osman Nuri; Muheddin and Hakkı
Baha; Sadık Bey, who had formed a squadron of 300 çetes; and others. The French intel-
ligence service noted, however, the formation of “clubs made up of reserve officers”51 – in
other words, the local Young Turks had not thrown in the towel. In April 1919, between 800
and 1,000 deportees had returned – that is, around 10 per cent of the pre-war population.52
A few months later, bands of çetes began to harass these survivors, demanding protection
money from them, while the local press published inflammatory articles about them and the
youngest were drafted into the Kemalist forces. It is also noteworthy that the trial of those
responsible for the massacres in Atranos culminated in an acquittal on 8 March 1920, lead-
ing to a repression campaign that forced the Armenians to leave Bursa for good. They were
immediately replaced by muhacirs.53
The sole information we have about the eastern provinces comes from Harput, where
the French consul’s former dragoman, Kevork Aharonian, began working again as an “infor-
mation agent” in March 1919.54 In his first report, dated 1 May, he notes that he is having
problems because the state officials, “all of them Unionists,” have not been replaced (“we are
almost living under the rule of the Talaats and Envers,” he writes). Aharonian also emphasizes
that the returning deportees had enormous problems in recovering “real estate and move-
able assets [and] the girls and women who had been abducted, finding food and supplies and
realizing of the Armenian orphans. In the courts,” he adds, “lawsuits brought by Christians
were never taken into consideration.” Aharonian notes a few murders and also reports that
five Armenian prisoners who had been arrested by Ali İhsan Pash in Dersim early in 1918 –
Ihsan had had most of the refugees seized in Dersim shot – were found guilty of “espionage”
and were still behind bars.55 He reveals, finally, that the CUP had reorganized in Harput
under new names, such as Hurryet Itilaf (Liberal Entente) and “Association of Kurdistan” –
parties that defended Turkish and Kurdish interests.56 In August, Aharonian informed his
superiors of the arrest of the vilayet’s police chief, Hulusi Bey,57 formerly a police lieutenant
in Erzerum, where he had a notable hand in the massacres in the Kemah Gorge.58
Statistics produced jointly by the Ecumenical and Armenian Patriarchates early in 1919
indicate that around 255,000 Greek and Armenian survivors had managed to return to their
homes or were living in the following regions: Constantinople, 2,339 Greeks and 470 Arme-
nians; Edirne, 52,907 Greeks and 2,355 Armenians; Erzerum, 6 Greeks and 3,193 Armeni-
ans; Adana, 133 Greeks and 45,075 Armenians; Angora, 140 Greeks and 1,735 Armenians;
Aydın, 26,790 Greeks and 132 Armenians; Bitlis, no Greeks and 762 Armenians; Bursa,
20,034 Greeks and 13,855 Armenians; Dyarbekir, no Greeks and 195 Armenians; Sıvas, 731
Greeks and 2,897 Armenians; Trebizond, 10,890 Greeks and 2,103 Armenians; Kastamonu,
no Greeks or Armenians; Konya 2,346 Greeks and 10,012 Armenians; Mamuret ul-Aziz, no
Greeks and 1,992 Armenians; Van, no Greeks and 732 Armenians; Eskişehir, no Greeks and
216 Armenians; Erzincan, no Greeks and 7 Armenians; Urfa, no Greeks and 394 Arme-
nians; Içil, no Greeks or Armenians; Ismit, 184 Greeks and 13,672 Armenians; Bolu, no
Greeks or Armenians; Teke, no Greeks or Armenians; Canik, 2,286 Greeks and 801 Arme-
nians; Çatalca, no Greeks or Armenians; Ayntab, no Greeks and 430 Armenians; Karahisar,

no Greeks and 298 Armenians; Dardanelles, 741 Greeks and 222 Armenians; Karasi, 32,165
Greeks and 899 Armenians; Kayseri, 14 Greeks and 47 Armenians; Kütahya, no Greeks and
721 Armenians; Karasi, no Greeks and 241 Armenians; Menteşe, 804 Greeks and no Arme-
nians; and Nigde, no Greeks or Armenians. This makes a total of 152,510 Greeks and 103,456
Armenians.59 It goes without saying that the number of repatriates was constantly changing
as a result of late returns, especially those of deportees who had still been in Syria, Mesopo-
tamia, and Transjordan in early 1919 or, again, women and children who were only gradually
released by the families that had been holding them. After the repatriation campaign that
affected, above all, deportees in Syria and Mesopotamia as well as refugees in Bulgaria and,
to a lesser extent, the Caucasus, the repatriation of Armenian populations on the eve of
the Treaty of Sèvres presented the following picture:60 Constantinople, 150,000; vilayet of
Edirne, 6,000; mutesarifat of Ismit, 20,000; vilayet of Bursa, 11,000; sancak of Bilecik, 4,5000;
sancak of Karasi, 5,000; sancak of Afionkarahisar, 7,000; vilayet of Aydın, 10,000; vilayets
of Kastamonu and Bolu, 8,000; sancak of Kirşehir, 2,500; sancak of Yozgat, 3,000; sancak
of Angora, 4,000; vilayet of Konya, 10,000; sancak of Sıvas, 12,000; sancak of Tokat, 1,800;
sancak of Amasia, 3,000; sancak of Şabinkarahisar, 1,000; sancak of Trebizond, none; sancak
of Lazistan, 10,000; sancak of Gümüşhane, none; sancak of Canik, 5,000; vilayet of Erzerum,
1,500; Van (the city alone), 500; vilayet of Bitlis, none; vilayet of Dyarbekir, 3,000; sancak of
Harput, 30,000; sancak of Malatia, 2,000; sancak of Dersim, 3,000; vilayet of Adana, 150,000;
sancak of Aleppo, 5,000; sancak of Ayntab, 52,000; sancak of Urfa, 9,000; sancak of Marash/
Maraş, 10,000; Jerusalem, 2,000; Damascus, 400; Beirut, 1,000; and the Hauran, 400. This
makes a total of 543,600 Armenians.
This breakdown calls for a few remarks. Two hundred thousand of these Armenians were
concentrated in Cilicia, to which the British and, later, French forces had encouraged them
to return. According to Vahe Tachjian, by repatriating the Armenian survivors to Cilicia,
France avoided the risks of tensions in Syria, since letting the deportees remain there would
not have been a popular measure, At the same time, the French were certain that they could
rely on the support of the Armenian population in Cilicia, notably for the purpose of obtain-
ing a mandate over the region.61 As in the non-occupied regions of Asia Minor, the repatria-
tion of so large a number of Armenians, whether or not they were natives of Cilicia, raised
a hue and cry from the local Young Turk networks, which benefited from the discontent
caused by the issue of the restoration of Armenian property acquired during the genocide
and also of the young women and children who had been abducted.62 During the two years
and more during which the French occupied Cilicia, the local branches of Karakol systemati-
cally thwarted the efforts of the French administration, led by Colonel Brémond, to promote
peaceful coexistence between the different groups that had long been present in Cilicia.
The colonial administration, despite its good faith, was hard put to ensure the restitution of
property as well as people. The psychological condition of the Armenian repatriates, enraged
in particular by the fact that their wives, daughters, and sisters were still being held in har-
ems, also engendered countless conflicts and led to the settling of scores. Cilicia became the
scene of a confrontation between victims and victimizers that intensified the long-standing
rancor responsible for the unbridgeable gulf between the two groups. The Armenians’ feeling
that they had been unjustly treated was expressed more freely here than elsewhere thanks
to the French military presence. Conversely, the local Young Turk leaders sought to preserve
what they had acquired, throwing off the French colonialist yoke with all possible speed and
simultaneously expelling the Cilician Armenians, who, during the genocide, had received
better treatment than others. The local Turkish elites began working more closely with the
Young Turk movement, which had in part rallied to the Kemalist banner.63 As Tachjian has
brilliantly shown, the Kemalist movement inexorably pursued the CUP’s policy of demo-
graphic homogenization. By force or through administrative measures, it methodically strove

to make it impossible for the repatriates to remain in their native towns and villages, terror-
izing these non-Turks in hopes of making them flee. The CUP’s strategy of harassing repre-
sentatives of the League of Nations’ High Commission for Refugees as well as humanitarian
organizations that, as we shall see, provided the refugees assistance, speaks volumes about its
desire to purge Turkey of “foreign bodies.” The “war of national liberation” prepared by the
Young Turks and carried through by Mustafa Kemal was, a few skirmishes with the French
forces and the war with Greece aside, a vast operation with the purpose of completing the
genocide by expelling the Armenian survivors. The policy adopted toward the Greeks of
Asia Minor merely confirmed the existence of this political objective, which the Ottoman
Empire’s defeat in the war had not been enough to thwart. According to a report produced
by the Armenian Patriarchate, 37,957 Greek and Armenian repatriates were murdered in
the vilayets of Konya, Sıvas, Kastamonu, and Trebizond – the vast majority of them in
Trebizond.64 Herbert Gibbons, a reporter in the area, telegraphed to the Monitor in Boston:
“Angora Turks continue deliberately their pitiless politic of extermination of the Greeks.”65
The Patriarchate’s Political Management

of the Post-War Situation
As soon as the Mudros armistice was signed, the Constantinople Armenian Patriarchate,
an institution that had been dissolved by the authorities in 1916, was reestablished at the
demand of the Entente Powers. It was all the more urgent that it be called back into existence
since several questions of vital importance for hundreds of thousands of survivors were being
posed at the same time. In a declaration published in November 1918, the French and British
High Commissioners demanded that the Ottoman government see to the repatriation of the
deported Greeks and the Armenian survivors; that it give them back the property that it
had confiscated from them, together with their bank deposits; and that it obtain the release
of the women and children abducted during the deportations.66 The Armenian authorities’
priorities were to restore the rights of those survivors who were returning to their homes,
ensure them adequate support, and establish means of legal action against those who had
perpetrated violence or seized property.
An Armenian leadership body was created even before Patriarch Zaven, who was still in
exile in Mosul, returned to Constantinople. In January, it sent the Entente powers a memo-
randum that illustrates its position.67 While it had no doubts about “Grand Vizier Tevfik’s
good intentions,” it wondered whether the victims could be rehabilitated when “eighty per-
cent of state officials today are Unionists and were deeply implicated in the same crimes.” A
purge of the administration seemed the more necessary to the Armenian leaders in that the
inquiries into war crimes were making no progress and the preliminary files being assembled
by investigating magistrates were being transmitted only very slowly to the court-martial.
In the rather peculiar situation that had come about as a result of the appointment of
Entente High Commissioners, the Armenians had the feeling that the experience of the
war had not modified the authorities’ behavior. “It goes without saying,” the Armenian
leaders observed, “that if the Allied powers had not been eyewitnesses to these tragedies,
it would have been affirmed, in line with age-old practice, that nothing of the sort had
ever happened and that these were only false rumors, or else that what was involved was a
minor event brought on by the Armenians.” They went still further, declaring to the powers
that “the government [was] not going to punish the culprits.”68 The skepticism thus voiced
by the Armenian leadership barely veiled the gulf that the violence had put between the
Ottoman Armenians and the Turkish authorities. The patriarch doubted not the govern-
ment’s good faith, but rather the state itself, which was still entirely controlled by the Young
Turks. He observed, accordingly, that if a radical purge were not conducted, it was out of

the question that the CUP leaders would be brought to trial. The other argument advanced
by the Armenian leadership to justify its skepticism was no less important: what it called
a “centuries-old habit” that consisted in considering mass crimes committed against entire
peoples as legitimate “punishment.” The editorialist of the Spectateur d’Orient understood
this well when he wrote:
This is the first time in Turkey’s history that a former grand vizier and former ministers
have been brought to trial and risk being punished for crimes committed against the
population of this country ... Today, former Turkish leaders are being prosecuted for
having ordered the massacre of Christians. It is the only time in the empire’s history
that this has happened, and represents a profound change in this country’s customs.
Where is the reason for this to be found? The sole reason is the outcome of the world
war.69
It other words, it was the prospect that the Ottoman Empire might be dislocated that
had impelled the new authorities to bring the Ittihadist leadership to trial in spite of pre-
vailing public opinion. Reading the Istanbul press had convinced the Armenian leadership
that it had no chance of obtaining retribution from the Ottoman courts. It had from the
outset advocated creation of an “International Court of Justice” and had begun working to
that end. In a 6 January 1919 public declaration, Dr. Tavitian, the president of the Political
Council, pointed out that, despite the departure of those who bore the main responsibil-
ity for the massacres, a majority of the Turkish population had not changed its views and
remained threatening: “We can see, especially in the provinces, the same bad faith as far as
restoration of the ‘loot,’ orphans, girls, and women is concerned; the same threats are hang-
ing over the heads of the human wrecks who escaped the carnage with their lives.”70
Admiral Calthorpe rapidly set up a Greek and Armenian committee71 that was charged
with attending to the problems of the refugees, but also with seconding his own efforts to
identify, arrest, and indict the authors of crimes against humanity. Dr. Krikor Tavitian was
the Armenian representative on this committee.72 It was, however, necessary to wait for
Patriarch Zaven to return, as he did on 19 February 1919, in order to create the Deghegadu
divan (Information Bureau), which was headed by Arshag Alboyajian (1879–1962) and placed
under the direct authority of the Armenian Political Council.73 Zaven Yeghiayan was wel-
comed by a large crowd, in conditions “likely to offend the religious and national sensibilities
of the inhabitants of Istanbul,”74 as the authorities complained.
The Information Bureau had been given the mission of collecting old and recent docu-
ments on demographic questions, the Armenian persecutions, the massacres, the deporta-
tions, and the real estate and moveable assets that had been seized, as well as facts about
those mainly responsible for the massacres, eyewitness accounts, proofs, and statistics victims
of abductions and sequestered orphans.75 It also regularly produced reports on the situa-
tion in the provinces and the exactions perpetrated by the “nationalist forces,” sending 300
reports on this subject to the British High Commission. Above all, it complied 292 files on
the authors of the deportations, “whom the Turks are trying to whitewash.”76 Thus, the
Armenian authorities had decided to gather documents and other evidence in anticipation
of the creation of an international court of justice charged with judging the crimes commit-
ted by the Ottoman state.
The patriarch remarks in his memoirs that the new authorities did nothing to help the
survivors return to their homes, especially in the eastern vilayets, with the result that many
of them had thronged into Istanbul, making the Armenian authorities’ task still more dif-
ficult. He notes that the government did not attempt to improve their lot, behaving as gov-
ernments “did in the past, in the days of the Ittihad, except for the fact that the massacres

have ceased.”77 Zaven sums up the situation as follows: “With the Turkish defeat, we were in a
position to make demands; the Turkish government, for its part, had the feeling that we were
working against it by bringing charges against it before the European powers.” He concludes
that under these circumstances it was hard for him “to cultivate friendly relations with it,”
the more so as the majority of Armenian circles were, opposed to reestablishing relations
with the Sublime Porte, preferring to wait and see what the Entente would decide.78 The one
attempt at a rapprochement took place in spring 1919. Senator Manug Azarian came to see
the patriarch on behalf of Grand Vizier Damad Ferid in order to propose that they reestab-
lish relations “as they were before the war.” As a goodwill gesture, the grand vizier informed
the patriarch that a commission charged with “settling the Armenian question,” of which
Azarian was a member, had been created and attached to the Sublime Porte. The patriarch
answered that the grand vizier knew very well what had happened to the Armenian nation
and that, under these conditions, he wondered why he was doing nothing to help the thou-
sands of survivors living in Constantinople in appalling conditions; why he had not budged
“an inch” to provide them with relief and food, clothing, and shelter. He pointed out that
the government had not made the “least sacrifice” for them, nor expressed “the least regret
for the acts that had been committed.” “How can you expect us,” he exclaimed, “to cultivate
relations with a throne and a government that have mortally wounded us and that do not
seem to have put the sword back in its scabbard or to regret what they did? If the grand vizier
wishes to do something, let him show some solicitude for these people. If he does, I will be
the first to show him my gratitude.”79
The Armenian authorities’ position on the wartime persecution of the Armenian popula-
tion is clearly laid out in a 27 December 1918 report80 that merits examination. The descrip-
tion of the CUP’s structures and the way it operated that serves as the introduction to this
report aims to show that “in every city, big or small,” “the bureaucracy,” the army, “all the
government’s civilian agents, the police, the gendarmerie, all the notables, clergymen, rep-
resentatives of the press and even criminals” were admitted to the Ittihadist clubs, for one
could not “be a civil servant without being a Unionist.”
The Central Committee was described as the “highest state council,” in charge of “all
domestic and foreign affairs.” The report further points out that the
Committee was able to win the support of the entire Turkish nation, with the excep-
tion of an insignificant minority, and for good reason: 1) it was the only organization
that offered posts to all its members; 2) it wanted to strengthen the economic position
of the Turkish element at the expense of the others; it gave Turkish merchants every
advantage, while oppressing non-Muslims; 3) it flattered the Turkish soul with its Pan-
Islamic ideas and Pan-Turk propaganda; 4) it aroused the fanaticism of the Turkish
peasants and the populace; 5) by abolishing the Capitulations, it granted the Turks
unrestrained freedom of action.
Formulated in the terminology current at the time, this description is not irrelevant and
shows that the Armenians wished to communicate their experience of Turkism to the repre-
sentatives of the Entente. As for the “crimes perpetrated against the Armenians, Greeks, and
other nations,” the report contends that “the program was decided upon after long reflection
and its application was pursued with consummate skill.” The report puts criminals in several
different categories: 1) the deciders and organizers; 2) the cadres who provided “the means
with which to massacre, plunder, and rape”; and 3) those who merely executed orders. In
the first category, it puts Central Committee members and the war cabinets, parliamentary
deputies, responsible secretaries, “the majority” of valis and mutesarifs, and certain journal-
ists. According to the report, the immense majority of civilian and military officials, as well

as police chiefs and commanders of the gendarmerie, fall into the second category. In the
third category it puts all Kurdish, Çerkez, Chechen, and Laz çetes, as well as the officers and
enlisted men of the regular army.81
This hierarchization of the criminals is developed in a subsequent report containing a list
of those chiefly to blame “for the massacres and deportations.”82 It must first be pointed out
that the Patriarchate, delegated by “the nation,” addressed this report directly “to the justice
of the Allied Powers.” The introductory part of the text insists on “the moral and political
effect” that a “judgement and punishment” could have on the development of “mentalities
in Turkey,” influencing “its future conduct toward the ‘minorities.’ ” We do not know whether
this document was produced on a demand from the Entente’s High Commissioners, but it
at least attests to the continuity of the policy adopted by the Armenian authorities, who
apparently never contemplated anything other than an international court. The Armenians
do not, moreover, hide the fact that they face a choice, drawing up an exhaustive list of the
accused, “great or small,” or “selecting” the most deeply implicated organizers, along with
their main accomplices. In the first case, the scope of the crimes and the “tens of thousands
of murderers” involved would remain inaccessible to “human justice.” Consequently, the
report declares, the Patriarchate has voluntarily restricted itself to presenting a selection “of
the documents in its possession” and compiling a list of the main culprits while neglecting
their “agents.”83
The Information Bureau further states that it has opted for a province-by-province classifica-
tion of the CUP’s responsible secretaries, as well as the governors, military commanders, com-
manders of the gendarmerie, police chiefs, high-ranking officials, clergymen, and other notables
involved locally in the “liquidation committees” that organized the plunder of Armenian assets
or the creation of the Teşkilât-i Mahsusa “gangs” that massacred the population.84
A subsequent report broaches the crucial problem represented by the need to collect
“proofs” of the guilt of the “high-ranking personalities,” now fugitives, “who planned, organ-
ized, and ordered the deportations, massacres, and despoliation of the Armenians.” It points
out that it is hard to find “definitive proof ... black on white,” of the orders that they issued,
since there was nothing to prevent them from “destroying most such proofs” before the armi-
stice was signed. The Information Bureau also suggests that the “tribunal designated by the
League of Nations” interrogate the members of the four commissions of inquiry dispatched
to the provinces after the deportations, in reaction to the “indignation” voiced in Europe and
America when “news of the atrocities” committed against the Armenians reached them.85
After “officially declaring that no massacres had occurred, the Turkish government” sent
commissions to the provinces so that they might produce “reports confirming the official
declarations.”
We have mentioned certain reports drawn up by the presidents of these investigative
teams in late 1915 or early 1916. The interrogations of these men before the Fifth Commission
prove that the reports were never published, but remained “buried” in the Interior Ministry.86
The Bureau of Information proposed that the members of these commissions be interrogated
in the knowledge that some of them took the mission entrusted to them seriously and sub-
mitted devastating reports. This held for Mazhar Bey, who had been chosen to conduct an
inquiry in Harput and Dyarbekir.87 The conclusions he reached probably convinced Talât
to keep them to himself. The functioning of the second commission of inquiry, responsible
for conducting investigations in the regions of Angora and Konya, also attracted the atten-
tion of the Armenian Bureau. According to declarations that Radi Bey made before the
court-martial, the court’s presiding judge, Hulusi, Tahsin Bey’s brother-in-law, had contented
himself with interrogating a few gendarmes who had been punished for “irregularities,” pass-
ing over in silence, the Patriarchate’s report notes, the “carnage in Keller and Boğazlian,
although, for these two sites, at any rate, we have flagrant proof of what went on.”88

With regard to the third commission, which held inquiries in the vilayets of Erzerum,
Van, and Bitlis, “where the most barbaric massacres were perpetrated,” the bureau observed
that the commission’s president, Nihad Bey, the brother-in-law of İsmail Muştak, the secre-
tary general of the Senate, officially discovered no irregularities “during the deportations.”
He had also been invited after the armistice to assume the post of prosecutor at the first
court-martial, the presiding judge of which was Mahmud Hayret Pasha, but “he refused
this post so as not to have to plead against his colleagues on the Committee of Union and
Progress.”89 By reporting this information, the bureau sought to show that these inquiries
were conducted, as a rule, by creatures of the CUP. The case of the president of the fourth
and last commission, Asim Bey, charged with inspecting the provinces of Adana, Aleppo,
and Damascus, is even more flagrant in this regard. Asim, a CUP member, former court
inspector in Salonika, and former director of the Justice Ministry’s Department of Criminal
Affairs, submitted a report in which not a single offence was mentioned. It would even seem
that it was Asim who called Istanbul’s attention to the fact that, in the Der Zor region, the
Armenian deportees represented from 50 to 60 per cent of the total population, a proportion
that was “not desirable.” According to the Information Bureau, it was after this report was
filed that Talât cabled Zeki, the mutesarif of Der Zor, the order to liquidate the Armenians.90
It may therefore be affirmed that the patriarchal authorities played a major role in collecting
information about the Young Turk criminals and had as early as 1919 a precise notion of the
facts and the respective responsibilities of the main CUP leaders.
The memorandum sent to the British intelligence services by Dr. Avedis Nakashian, a
former nonpartisan parliamentary deputy from the capital, developed a more legalistic line
of reasoning with respect to the anti-Armenian exactions.91 According to Nakashian, if the
liquidation order was formulated in a special law, the affair could be considered legal, but one
could also hold that what was involved was a crime, whether it was carried out “on an order
formulated as a law or not.” In the first case, only the late sultan and certain cabinet mem-
bers would be considered responsible, since the others had only obeyed orders and done their
duty. In the second, there would exist a “collective responsibility,” about which Nakashian
flet the need to make a few remarks.
1) Every official, from the minister to the simple gendarme, knew perfectly well that
this law was nothing more than a pretext to murder and plunder an entire nation.
Everyone knew that the law opened the doors of the prisons for criminals so that
they could be enrolled in the Special Organization; that these bands were stationed at
precise points on the roads in order to attack convoys, kill, rape, and plunder; this was
done openly; consequently, those who delivered the Armenians up to these criminals
are just as responsible as those who committed the murders.
2) Every Turkish official was absolutely certain that the Armenians he dispatched were
going to die in one way or another; no one can be expected to walk from Samsun to Mosul
hungry and survive. There is no doubt about the intention to kill and, consequently, no
doubt that all who put these people on the road are criminals like the others.
3) The Turks knew perfectly well that there was no military imperative to deport the
Armenians, but that this initially served as a pretext to liquidate a nation; it is a question
of a crime committed by a whole nation, and everyone participated in carrying it out.
4) No force majeure mandated such acts: certain valis and lower-ranking officials resigned
and did not commit such crimes, such as the valis of Konya, Angora, and Kastamonu,
Celal Bey, Mazhar Bey, and Reşid Pasha. Other did not resign, but also did not obey
orders, such as Faik Ali in Kütahya. We have before us a case of intentional homicide by
thousands of criminals.

5) Most officials who played an active role in the liquidation measures and the pillage
have not showed any signs of repentance.
Dr. Nakashian concluded that Ottoman society did not have “the same conception of
justice.” “There are millions of people in this country,” he wrote, “who consider what hap-
pened a punishment that had to be meted out, as one would have punished an animal.”92
This position, which put the accent on “collective responsibility,” was also that of the
Armenian authorities. In order to defend the interests of the victims with a single voice, the
Patriarchate concluded an agreement with the Catholic and Protestant authorities that led
to the creation of a joint council in which the leaders of all three communities held seats.93 It
also cooperated rather closely with the Ecumenical Patriarchate. The two prelates even sent
a common declaration to the peace conference on 24 February 1919 in which they called for
the creation of a court of justice to try the Young Turk criminals.94 This, of course, did not
fail to excite the hostility of Young Turk circles.
The Restoration of “Abandoned Property”

The second thorny issue that the Patriarchate had to handle dealt with the restoration of
property illegally seized during the genocide. It brought in its wake the question of repara-
tions for the material damages that the Armenian population had suffered. It challenged,
in other words, the idea of constructing a “National Economy” and also the transfer of
Armenian assets of which circles bound up with the Young Turk movement had been the pri-
mary beneficiaries. The first step to take was, obviously, to abrogate the Law on Abandoned
Property, decreed on 26 September 1915, which had legalized the seizure of these assets.95
In February 1919, a mixed commission, comprising representatives of the Armenian-Greek
committee set up by the British, submitted to the Council of Ministers a draft bill suppress-
ing the September 1915 law; it sought to provide a legal mechanism for the restoration of
the property illegally held by the state or private individuals.96 It is easy to imagine the host
of problems thrown up by such a measure, particularly in regions in which muhacirs had
been settled in Armenian homes, and it will readily be understood that the prospect that
the Armenians’ property might be restored to them did much to unite the local notables
and tribal chiefs who held the bulk of the assets in question. The murders and intimidation
of which the survivors who had returned to their homes were the targets – we have offered
a few examples – were no doubt motivated, first and foremost, by economic considerations.
Abrogating the Law on Abandoned Property was tantamount to attacking local elites, call-
ing into question the ownership of goods that their owners believed that they had definitely
acquired, and raising a hue and cry in these circles. It was thus an extremely hazardous opera-
tion for the Ottoman government to give satisfaction to the survivors. The government was
therefore careful not to ratify the law that would have enabled the survivors to recover their
property throughout the empire and regularly pushed back the date on which it would, even
while making a show of its good faith,97 thereby exasperating the Armenians and Greeks.
It must further be emphasized that these acts of confiscation had involved not just personal
assets, but also “national property,” in theory inalienable and the legal proprietor of which
was the Constantinople Armenian Patriarchate. There was a good deal of such property:
around 2,500 churches; 400 monasteries, with the lands belonging to them; 2,000 schools;
and land and rental properties.98 In July 1919, the Political Council of the Patriarchate sent
an official note to the government demanding material aid and the transfer of revenues that
had accrued to the national property confiscated during the war, so that it could assume
the enormous costs engendered by the return of the survivors concentrated in the capital.
According to the patriarch, the council never received a reply from the Sublime Porte.99

In the absence of a law, the Patriarchate tried to recover its assets as best it could. When
it learned that there were still warehouses in Istanbul and the provinces in which Armenian
property was stocked, it did not hesitate to make use of “illegal” means to recover this prop-
erty. But it never managed to win its case as far as personal property was concerned,100 the
more so as the Entente powers demonstrated a certain reticence on this point so as not
to promote the development of the Kemalist-Unionist movement and to preserve social
peace.
Thus, an Information Bureau report indicates that the warehouse of the Central
Commission for Abandoned Property, located in Istanbul, in the Grand Bazar, Kurkci Han,
second floor, still held after the armistice some 30 safes that had remained “without a propri-
etor,” some of which had not been cracked open. Also stocked on the same floor of the han
were antiquities, ancient manuscripts, and sacred vases, some of the booty plundered during
the war.101 Only after hemming and hawing for a year did the authorities ultimately adopt,
on 8/21 January 1920, in response to a final complaint lodged by the Patriarchate,102 the Law
on the Restoration of Abandoned Armenian Property. It comprised 33 articles.103 Those
concerning moveable assets constitute a sort of legal, post-genocidal vade-mecum:
Article 1. Any letter of indemnity or receipt issued by a deported Armenian, and any
alienation of his moveable assets made by his own hand, is null and void if the letter
of indemnity or receipt was issued, or rights to the property were acquired, during the
deportation or in the month preceding it.
Article 2. Every deported Armenian, and, in the case of his death, his heir, is entitled to
lodge a claim to a moveable asset of which he was deprived, in one manner or another,
by the administration or an ad hoc committee, against the person in whose possession
he discovers said asset, except against the administration or the committee.
Article 3. Every deported Armenian, and, in the case of his death, his heir, is entitled
to demand compensation from the government for any loss that he may have suffered
in consequence of the sale of his moveable assets by the ad hoc committees. A com-
mission comprising the presiding judge of the civil court, the president of the local
municipality, and a delegate from the Armenian Patriarchate shall assess the value of
the objects of which the plaintiff may have been deprived.
Article 4. Any violation of the stipulations of Articles 1, 2, and 3 shall be punishable
by a fine of five hundred Turkish pounds and two years in prison.104
The minister of finance sent the text of this law to the provincial authorities,105 but for
obvious reasons it was never applied in regions over which the central government had long
since ceded its authority to the Kemalist-Unionist movement. It was the non-application of
this law that made it necessary to include a special clause about abandoned property in the
Treaty of Sèvres.106
Armenian Prisoners
Even after the armistice was signed, there remained a considerable number of “political”
prisoners in Ottoman prisons, notwithstanding the fourth article of the armistice that pro-
vided for their release. We have already seen that the courts martial operated unceasingly
throughout the war and condemned a number of Armenians to death or to prison terms of
varying lengths that were generally commuted into deportation. For obscure reasons, the
administration continued to hold a few hundred men (above all deserters) and a few dozen
women in detention. A February 1919 report lists 25 prisoners, five of them women, in the
Ismit prison; 48 in Kayseri, condemned to sentence of from 5 to 15 years in prison; 32 in

Konya, 22 of them imprisoned for “ordinary” offenses; 15 in Bolu; 18 in Bursa; and 6 in the
prison of the Istanbul court-martial, called the Bekirağa Section.107
These cases – limited in number, to be sure – are puzzling. If it had been a question of
common-law prisoners, it might be supposed that the Ottoman administration was simply
executing a sentence and that the deportation law did not apply to them. However, the
handful of details provided in a file that an Armenian organization sent to the Turkish
authorities indicates that many of these prisoners were accused of, or had been condemned
for, desertion. These were exclusively prisoners held in western Anatolia, where Armenian
men had not been systematically massacred. This might explain the fact that the prisoners
in question were held until February 1919, as if nothing had changed in the empire of the
sultans.
Abducted Women and Children and the

Construction of a Turkish Nation
The fate reserved for the women and children abducted during the genocide of the Armenians
constitutes a dimension of the Young Turk plan which is essential in understanding the fun-
damental nature of the crime. The Turkish program called for a demographic homogeniza-
tion that would also take the form of assimiliationist policies, conceived as an alternative to
physical elimination. Such assimilation was premised on conversion to Islam, equivalent for
the Young Turks to an acceptance of Turkism, which implied that the victims abandon their
Armenian identity in order to melt into the dominant group. It must, moreover, be pointed
out that, behind the discourse demonizing the Armenian nation, there lay concealed a para-
doxical esteem for the victimized group, or at least certain of its members taken individually.
We have already seen how certain categories of women and children were treated, in particu-
lar that a number of officers and Unionist officials sought to “marry” educated young women
in order to found “Turkish” families with them. In other words, Turkism did not impose any
“racial” prohibitions and even encouraged modernizing society by assimilating selected vic-
tims. A number of Ittihadists were convinced that these women could create the ideal fam-
ily environment in which they could fashion the modern Turkish household of which they
dreamed. To put it differently, the CUP’s objective was to eliminate Armenian identity and
its territorial bases, while taking over its cultural achievements as well as its material property
in order to construct Turkism. At work here, then, was an ideology not based on the rejec-
tion of a race, but on the desire to eliminate the foundations of an identity that implied the
physical elimination of some and the assimilation of others. What the “Ottomanism” that was
characteristic of the beginnings of the Young Turk revolution had not succeeded in bringing
about for lack of a common cultural base would be accomplished by physical elimination or
coercion. The will to assimilate part of the victimized group constitutes one of the particulari-
ties of the Armenian genocide. The consequence of this particularity was that some of the
victims experienced or became a part of the private lives of their victimizers, on the basis of a
temporarily or permanently imposed identity. This group made up a large proportion of those
who survived to the end of the war. In other words, a good part of the human resources, with
which the Armenian nation reconstructed itself as best it could, was previously supposed to
have served the construction of the Turkish nation as a factor of modernity and an element of
the Ittihadists’ demographic politics.
That said, it should be pointed out that the plan to assimilate Armenian women and
children did not always yield the expected results because of resistance on the part of some
victims or the lack of enthusiasm of certain victimizers.
The deportees’ fate varied with the category into which they fell. Among those who
survived, we may distinguish, on the one hand, the women and children abducted during

the first phase of the genocide and held in Turkish and Kurdish families, and, on the other,
women and children taken captive in the second phase of the genocide by Arab families or
Bedouin tribes. The former were above all victims of a Turkish logic of assimilation, while
the latter were perceived as products endowed with a certain commercial value. Common to
people in both categories was the fact that they had survived for objective reasons, ideologi-
cal or material, even while they underwent radically different experiences, depending on the
environment in which they found themselves.
The young women, who were invariably converts and were transformed into slaves, held
in harems, or “married,” often gave birth to children whose fathers were simultaneously the
women’s torturers and their saviors. Thus, at war’s end, scattered throughout the Near East,
children of converted Armenian mothers were to be found in Turkish, Kurdish, and Arab
environments, while older, abducted children were to be found in families or tribes, or else
in Turkish orphanages.
Gathering Up Women and Children

Held in Syria and Mesopotamia
The fate of the Armenian women and children held in tribes or families is an aspect of
the genocide that was ignored prior to the work of Vahe Tachjian. It proved impossible to
determine how many there were or where they were to be found, geographically speaking.
However, thanks to the British intelligence service, there exist lists of women and children,
identified by name, which also provide the names of the Bedouin chiefs who refused to give
up their hostages. With the help of these documents, we can establish the typical profile
of these victims. They were, for the most part, young women around 20 years old, held in
the Wadi Musa, Maan, or elsewhere,108 who served as objects of a lucrative trade that went
beyond the bounds of Transjordan. Thus, these young women were often sold in the slave
markets in Arabia. Traces of some of them can even be found in Tunisia or Algeria, where
they were taken by pilgrims returning from Mecca.109
On the basis of this information, reconnaissance and recovery groups, supervised by
Egyptian Armenians,110 were formed in spring 1918 out of deserters from the Ottoman Army,
most of them from Urfa.111 The first group, led by Levon Yotneghperian, a soldier who had
served in the Fourth Ottoman Army in Damascus,112 benefited from the support of Emir Faysal
and the British General Staff and was able to pursue its operations after the armistice.113
Further north, in the Syrian Desert around Zor, another reconnaissance and recovery
group had been formed in April 1919 under the command of Rupen Herian. The opera-
tions of retrieval here met with an undisguised reluctance to cooperate on the part of the
Bedouins. The Mufettish el-Ermen (“Inspector of the Armenians,” as was nicknamed by the
native population) had sometimes to make use of strong-arm tactics to convince tribal chiefs
to give up the Armenians they were holding.114 Between June and August 1919, Herian suc-
ceeded in sending no fewer than 533 women and children back to Aleppo.115 He also carried
out missions in the vicinity of Mosul, where he recovered hundreds of people, including 400
orphans admitted to the orphanage in Bakuba.116
In 1919, on the initiative of the French military authorities, Armenian investigators were
sent to Upper Mesopotamia in order to continue looking for captive Armenians there. Levon
Ajemian, the former Persian consul in Aleppo, was thus charged with recovering the hos-
tages held in Ras ul-Ayn and Nisibin.117
On the eve of the Treaty of Sèvres in July 1920, the Constantinople Patriarchate esti-
mated the number of orphans still living scattered throughout the Syrian and Mesopotamian
deserts, among the Jibur and Shammar tribes, at 5,800.118 The Patriarchate did not know
how many young women were still to be found there. The children were taken in hand by,

notably, Armenian institutions119 and American Near East Relief, which opened a number of
orphanages in Aleppo, Beirut, and Jerusalem.120 The Armenian General Benevolent Union
in particular made a commitment to create shelters for young women and their children that
were assigned the task of rehabilitating these deeply traumatized people.121
The Recovery and Maintenance of Women and Children

Found in Asia Minor and Constantinople
In letter written in January 1920 – that is, more than a year after the armistice was signed, the
Armenian Patriarchate put the number of orphans cared for by its services at around 100,000;
another 100,000 women and children, it estimated, were still being held captive.122 A few
months later, it estimated that 6,000 women and children were still being held against their
will in the regions of Constantinople, Ismit, Bursa, and Eskişehir; 2,000 in Karahisar; 1,500 in
the district of Bolu; 3,000 in Konya; 5,000 in Kastamonu; 2,000 in Trebizond; 3,500 in Sıvas;
3,500 in Kayseri; 3,000 in Erzerum; 25,000 in Dyarbekir-Mardin; 3,000 in Harput; and 5,000 in
the vilayets of Bitlis and Van.123 The Patriarchate had to organize, in short order, a relief effort
for the refugees concentrated in Istanbul while also opening orphanages. To run so vast an
undertaking, it founded a Vorpakhnam (Committee for Orphan Relief) and a Darakrelots getro-
nagan hantsnazhoghov (Central Committee for Deportees), which together created, in mid-May
1919, a Azkayin khnamadarutiun (National Relief Mission), whose operations were financed out
of the revenues generated by a newly instituted national tax. Patriarch Zaven observes in his
memoirs that the means of the Constantinople and Smyrna Armenian communities, the only
ones that were still organized, did not suffice to cover the considerable costs of the program to
rehabilitate the survivors.124 Fortunately, American Near East Relief took an active part in the
relief operations not only in Syria, but also in Asia Minor, notably by opening orphanages in
Harput and Sıvas that cared for several thousand children.125 The Azkayin Khnamadarutiun
itself founded some fifteen orphanages in Constantinople in 1919–20:
1) the central orphanage in Kuleli, on the Asian side of the city, which was opened in
July 1920 and cared for 1,000 children, on average;
2) the orphanage in Beylerbey, also on the city’s Asian side, a former training school
for policemen and gendarmes requisitioned by the English that provided shelter to
some 250 children;
3) the orphanage attached to the National Surp Prgich Hospital in Yedi-Kule, which
took in 300 children, many of whom were ill;
4) the girls’ orphanage in Beşiktaş (120 wards);
5) the girls’ orphanage in Kumkapı (100 girls);
6) the girls’ orphanage in Uskudar (100 girls);
7) the girls’ orphanage in Hasköy (130 girls);
8) the girls’ orphanage and trade school in Arnavud Köy (100 young women);
9) the girls’ orphanage in Balat (100 girls);
10) the girls’ orphanage in Kuruçeşme (50 girls);
11) the orphanage for boys and girls in Makriköy (attached to the Bezazian middle
school, with 80 wards);
12) and 13) the orphanages of the Sisters of the Immaculate Conception in Pera and
Samatia (500 girls);
14) the agricultural orphanage in Armash (60 boys).
The Tbrotsaser Association took responsibility for hundreds of other orphans who were
placed with foster families. Two more orphanages were run by the Lord Mayor’s fund,

a British charitable organization (later transferred to Corfu) and a Swiss-Armenian

organization.126
All of these institutions admitted children found in the orphanages created by the Young
Turk regime or in Muslim families, in the capital or the provinces. A 30 December 1918
French intelligence report provides an initial list of more than 50 orphans who were being
held in Istanbul or the vicinity, as a rule by officers or state officials, or even by pashas.
These orphans generally had forenames indicating that they had been converted. Thus,
Azaduhi/Ayşe, a girl of around ten years of age, was living in the home of Cemal Bey at 31
Bekmez Tarlasi Street in Kadiköy. Sometimes (see no. 24) these captives were young women
“married” to an officer whose father had killed the parents of his Armenian daughter-in-law
with his own hands.127
The situations of these children and young women held in Turkish homes were extremely
varied. While some of them were sexual objects, others were very officially married; still
others were simply domestics or were treated like the children of the family. Alarmed by the
arrival of the British, certain families spontaneously handed over the children whom they
had been holding. According to Patriarch Zaven, the English high commissioner played a
pivotal role in the search for these orphans.128 However, the Armenian authorities them-
selves had to organize to carry out the rescue missions, somewhat like the groups operating
in Transjordan, Syria, and Mesopotamia.
The group charged with conducting these operations was led by a young man, Arakel
Chakrian, a former chemistry professor at the University of Istanbul. In the months fol-
lowing the armistice, he recovered no fewer than 750 children from state orphanages and
Turkish homes in the capital.129 Registers that came into the possession of the Patriarchal
authorities seem to attest the existence of an organized system since they list the original
names, place of origin, and new identities of the Armenian children who had been entrusted
to Turkish families.130 In other words, there certainly existed an official adoption program
and, alongside it, unregulated kidnappings.
The Patriarchate’s initiatives were soon the subject of complaints from the Turkish author-
ities, who argued in particular that the children taken from households were “true Turks.”
The High Commission consequently decided to create a “neutral home” in which the chil-
dren involved in doubtful cases would be temporarily lodged, pending the results of inves-
tigations into their origins. This home was co-administered by two women, one Armenian,
the other Turkish. According to statistics compiled by the Armenian Patriarchate, around
3,000 children were thus recovered in the space of three years; it proved impossible to locate
or identify 1,000 to 2,000 others.131
In early June 1919, a vehement polemic sprang up in the capital’s newspapers around
the question of these children. It merits close attention, for it was certainly initiated, as the
tone of the discourse attests, by Young Turk circles. An initial, anonymous article, “The
Patriarchate’s Mistreated Children,” which appeared on 3 June 1919 in the daily Ileri,132 was
the opening shot in a smear campaign aimed at the Armenian authorities; it indicated that
Unionist activity was again on the increase in the capital. “We reported,” Ileri wrote,
that two hundred twenty Muslim orphans who had been living in Kayseri were brought
to Constantinople and turned over to the Patriarchate. Yesterday, we obtained very
unpleasant information on this subject: the Patriarchate’s staff has made energetic
efforts to make these children admit that they are of Armenian origin, subjecting its
victims to very harsh treatment, with the result that many were bruised and battered.
The staff told these children that all Muslims had been killed, and that they had no
choice but to agree to accept Armenian nationality and would be killed if they refused.
One of our editors, who saw some of the children in question, observed that there were

marks on their bodies and that their faces were covered with wounds. Only forty-two of
the children insisted that they were Turks, while the others, yielding to these threats,
were carried off. The medical report on them affirms that the children who had been
beaten required medical treatment and had to be hospitalized. We would like to know
what measures the government plans to take in the face of facts like these.133
The reports of death threats and other forms of abuse to which the Patriarchate is sup-
posed to have resorted to bring these “Turkish” orphans to convert is reminiscent of the
Turkism in which CUP cadres were steeped. The outrageous nature of the accusations offers
a rather faithful reflection of the state of public opinion. The restitution of children con-
verted during the genocide was perceived as a serious blow to the Turkish nation.
As proof of what it said, Ileri presented the case of a young woman of 22, “Jemile Hanum,”
who had been placed in the “Neutral Home” on the presumption that she was Armenian.
According to the newspaper, “to convince her to agree that she was Armenian, propagan-
dists promised to give her in marriage to a rich Greek,” but Jemile “categorically refused this
offer.” The author of the article asked, in conclusion, “by what right Armenians strive to
Christianize a young Muslim woman of twenty-two, certainly old enough to have complete
freedom of conscience.”134 It seems safe to assume that the fate of this unfortunate woman
moved the paper’s readers and helped convince them that they were the victims of oppres-
sion brought to bear by “the” Armenians. In updated form, this discourse manifestly sought
to prolong the campaign to stigmatize the Armenian population launched in 1915. It con-
firms the cynicism of certain circles, which cast the “Turkish nation” in the role of victim.
A 5 June article by Süleyman Nazıf, a cousin of Ziya Gökalp’s and one of the CUP cadres
charged with reorganizing the party,135 rules out all doubt about the fact that this was a cam-
paign orchestrated by Karakol or one of its satellite organizations.136 In the article, the Young
Turk leader describes the “tragic story” of a 12-year-old boy originally from Şabinkarahisar
living in the orphanage in Ortaköy who says that his name is Salem. The child was suppos-
edly first admitted to the orphanage in Konya and then brought to Constantinople. “When
they arrived in Haydarpaşa,” Nazıf writes,
they were received by a certain number of Armenians, men and women. The Muslim
children, despite their innocent protests and tears, were led off with the Armenian
children. For these children, the orphanage in Shishli became a place of temptations
and, at the same time, tortures. Young six-year-old and seven-year-old children, tempted
by cakes and grapes, said that they were Armenians. These children were petted and
given a rug on which to sleep. Those who did not wish to renounce their religion were
beaten and deprived of food; they were placed on a hard sofa and tortured. There is
no doubt about these facts. These children, boys and girls, aged from six to sixteen,
raised their teary, trembling voices and related their misadventures with expressions
of pain and revolt. It would be impossible to overestimate the sentiments of faith and
amour-propre that have developed in so striking a fashion in these tender, cultivated
hearts. They have already brought their martyrdom to the attention of the pubic and
demanded the release of those of their comrades whom it has not yet been possible to
liberate from pitiless hands. Among those comrades, there existed not only the senti-
ment that they were brothers in religion, but also blood brothers. “I got away, but my
brother and my sister are still in their hands,” some of them said, sighing. The merciful
Armenian mission that is supposedly seeing to feeding these children and watching
over their welfare does not have the time to concern itself with their physical condi-
tions of existence, absorbed as it is by discussions of faith and religion. Disease, such
as leprosy, eye ailments, and so on, from which the Muslims are suffering, continue to

consume their victims and prolong their ordeal. Some may imagine that we are exag-
gerating, but the affair has been referred to the police and an official investigation
is underway. We would be happy to see the foreigners in our city take an interest in
these matters, if only for humanitarian reasons. It would then be possible to give the
world a fair, accurate idea of the Turks and their enemies. Can the Armenians, who
broadcast laments about their suffering to the four corners of the globe in order to
attain their goal, prove their innocence in the court before which these small, inno-
cent children have arraigned them? If so, we will drop all our complaints and admit all
the allegations.137
To round off his demonstration, Süleyman Nazıf mentioned one of his visits to the orphan-
age in Ayntura, in November 1918. Armenian children “with no one to support them ... were
fed, comforted, and educated in this institution,” he said, “which was spotlessly clean”; this
had not failed to “strengthen” his “love ... and respect for his race.”138 The underlying sources
of his discourse recall the accusations of ritual murder of children of which anti-Semites in
the same period accused the Jews.
In the 6 June 1919 edition of Jagadamard, an Armenian editorialist wrote: “from the
moment that Alemdar, too, joined Tasvir, Ileri, Hadisat, and so on, all that remains is to shout:
continue, gentlemen, to lie, cheat, massacre and loot, for, in that way, you will certainly be
able to save what is left of your fatherland.” The 6 June 1919 issue of Zhamanag remarked
that “those who invent or echo all these lies and slanders are the same people who, yesterday,
accused the Armenians of massacring millions of Muslims.”139
Thus, one sees that, far from turning over a new leaf, Young Turk circles continued to
produce Turkist propaganda and clung firmly to the positions developed by the Unionist
Central Committee in 1915. As on other issues, such as that of abandoned property or the
indictment of the party cadres who were the authors of the genocide, they apparently had no
intention of yielding to the claims of the victims or the victors.

Chapter 6
The Great Powers and the Question of

“Crimes Against Humanity”
I
n a joint declaration published on 24 May 1915, the members of the Triple Entente
denounced the first massacres carried out in the rural areas of the vilayet of Van (“this
new crime against humanity and civilization committed by Turkey”) and warned “the
Sublime Porte that they [would] hold all members of the Turkish government as well as civil
servants who participate in the massacres of Armenians personally responsible.”1 Although
this warning was issued in wartime, it is indisputably historic because it introduces the con-
cept of a “crime against humanity” into the juridical lexicon. It is also innovative in that it
points to a government’s collective responsibility for a mass crime. That said, it is not at all
certain that France and Great Britain were aware, when they issued this declaration, that
they were confronting a crime of modernity inspired by a nationalist ideology. It is even
probable, given the early date of the warning, that they had in mind the kind of traditional
massacres that had been committed under Abdülhamid.
At war’s end, the victors had a much more precise idea of the events and, of course, won-
dered how they should treat acts of this sort and of such scope at the political and legal levels.
Great Britain, which had negotiated the armistice of Mudros virtually single-handedly, won-
dered from early October 1918 on what clauses should be included in the peace conditions.
Initially, it was above all intent on obtaining guarantees that there would be no “future
massacres,” particularly in the eastern provinces of Asia Minor and the Caucasus, where it
did not have significant military forces.2 While strategic objectives continued to be the top
priorities for Britain and France, they also contemplated instituting a system to apprehend
war criminals and bring them to justice.3 The British high commissioner in Constantinople,
Admiral Calthorpe, rapidly created an Armenian-Greek committee to help him assemble
files in support of the indictments of the Young Turk criminals.4 It was, however, in the
framework of the peace conference that the procedure to be used in order to bring members
of the CUP to justice had to be decided.
The Work of the Committees of the Preliminary Peace Conference

From the outset, beginning in January 1919, the Preliminary Peace Conference set up sev-
eral specialized committees charged with examining complex questions and reporting their
conclusions.5 On 3 February 1919, a Committee on the Responsibility of the Authors of
the War and on Sanctions was created. It engendered in turn several subcommittees: 1) the
Subcommittee on Criminal Matters, which was supposed to determine the acts, with their
proofs, that led to the war, as well as the acts committed during it; and 2) the Subcommittee
on Responsibility for the War, the task of which was to study “violations of the laws and cus-
toms of war and the laws of humanity.” Another study group, the Committee on Reparations

and Compensation, set up on 25 January 1919, was charged, as its name indicates, with
evaluating the material damages caused by the war.6
The Committee on the Responsibility of the Authors of the War and on Sanctions, which
is of particular interest to us here, announced its intentions from its very first working session,
held on 3 February. Its provisional president, André Tardieu, recalled that the committee was
to “translate the principles of justice, equality, and peace into acts.” How, he exclaimed,
can we turn a deaf ear to the appeal that comes from the graves to punish the guilty
and protect humanity from a repetition of the crime? The committee must study the
facts, using the victims’ accounts, in order to establish that the guilty acted with pre-
meditation and violated treaties, both those governing human rights and those estab-
lishing the laws of war. The committee’s objective is to find those responsible for the
crimes committed, that is to say, those who organized them and those who carried
them out; finally, it is to establish the rules in accordance with which sanctions will be
defined and applied.7
Beyond “human rights” and the “laws of war,” the jurists present were doubtless aware that
they had to establish norms for “new” crimes. As at the two Conferences of The Hague (held
in 1899 and 1907), the jurists understood that, as the famous “Martens Clause” puts it, they
were confronted with “cases not covered by the customary dispositions of the law” because
they went beyond the war crimes that had already been codified. On the committee, which
was chaired by the American Secretary of State, Robert Lansing, were Nicolas Politis, the
Greek foreign minister, who was also a jurist, and a general rapporteur, the Belgian Edouard
Rolin-Jaequemyns; they were seconded by Sir Ernest Pollock and M. Amelio.8 Placed under
the authority of this group, the third subcommittee (known as the “Committee of Fifteen”),
which was charged with examining violations of the laws and customs of war, held six sessions
between 14 February and 8 March 1919. Very quickly, a unanimous decision was reached to
demand that sanctions be applied for the crimes committed and the violation of the laws and
customs of war defined at The Hague.9
At the 7 February 1919 session of the Subcommittee on Criminal Matters, Nicolas Politis
took the floor to spell out that “criminal matters” should be understood in the more general
sense of criminal acts. As an example, he cited “the massacres organized by the Turkish author-
ities in Armenia” that did not enter “into the categories covered by the provisions of the Penal
Code.” The Subcommittee therefore had to look for “all acts that should be condemned, even
if they do not constitute crimes in the proper sense of the word; one of its tasks would be to
define, for the conference, the limits on persecution and de facto criminality or guilt.”10
The Committee on Responsibility defined, in Point 3 of its 5 March 1919 report, the “acts
constituting violations of the laws and customs of war,” referring to norms already established
in Section IV E of The Hague Convention of 1907: systematic terrorism; murders and mas-
sacres (Article 46); torture (Article 46); the use of civilians as human shields (Article 46);
[violations of the] honor of women (Article 46); confiscation of private property (Article 53);
pillage; collective punishments, including taking and executing hostages (Article 50); con-
tributions without written orders, receipts, or a basis in law (Article 51); requisitions leading
to forced participation in military operations (Article 52); confiscation of property belonging
to communities or educational and charitable institutions (Article 56); wanton destruction
of public or private property; deportation and forced labor (Article 46); and executions of
civilians on false allegations of war crimes.11 To punish these infractions, the report advo-
cated, in its resolutions, creation of a “High Court.”12
The memorandum presented on 1 March 1919 by J.B. Scott on behalf of the “Committee
of Fifteen” identified questions hitherto ignored or that had been only inadequately taken into

Great Powers, “Crimes Against Humanity” 765
account in international conventions: 1) massacre and mutilation of human beings; 2) cases in

which the methods of destroying human life and property are deemed unjustifiable; 3) the need
to utilize physical force in order to guarantee national security or the preservation of national
rights; 4) the reprehensible character of acts of cruelty is a question of degree that cannot be
accurately determined by a fixed line of demarcation; 5) the criterion of guilt in the accom-
plishment of an act that is inhuman or improper; 6) the assertion, by the author of an act, that
that act was necessary for military reasons does not exonerate him of guilt; 7) an arbitrary act is
a crime against civilization and does not admit of any excuse; 8) it is a question of determining
to what extent such an act is criminal and the improper motives that inspired it.13
The work of these committees bears witness to a desire to refine existing legal categories
or develop new concepts. However, the jurists were hard put to abstract from “acts consti-
tuting violations of the laws and customs of war” – that is, from the context – in order to
perceive crimes committed against civilian populations as autonomous categories.
To a certain extent, the 14 March 1919 memorandum submitted by the Greek delegation
perceived this problem in exposing its grievances and distinguishing “common-law crimes,
such as murder, rape, arson, theft, or kidnapping” from “public-law crimes,” such as “the
maintenance of famines, deportation, ill treatment, and ‘crimes against the laws and customs
of war,’ such as mass deportations and illegal abductions.”14
The memorandum that the Armenian delegation submitted to the peace conference
through the intermediary of the Greek delegation – the Armenians had not been invited to
participate in this phase of the conference’s work – stressed that the object of the crime that
had been committed against them had been the liquidation of the entire civilian population.
The Armenian delegation accordingly insisted that those responsible for these massacres
be judged by the Allied governments in accordance with the category into which they fell:
those who conceived of the plan, those who issued the orders or organized the killings,
those who directed the massacres, and those who carried them out. For reasons of principle,
the Armenian memorandum contested the judicial procedure put in place by the Ottoman
government and “earnestly” besought “the Allied governments to take the task of rendering
justice into their own hands as soon as possible, so as to forestall the new, terrible catastrophe
threatening the Christian populations in the East”15 as a result of the operations conducted
by Mustafa Kemal. In its final, 29 March 1919 report, the Committee on Responsibility laid
out its views on 1) the responsibility of the authors of the war; 2) violations of the laws and
customs of war; 3) personal responsibility; 4) the constitution of an appropriate court and its
procedures; and 5) questions related to the creation of a High Court.16 On the third point,
the report concluded: “all people from enemy countries, however important their positions,
regardless of rank, chiefs of state included, who are responsible for infractions of the laws
and customs of war or the laws of humanity, are liable to legal prosecution.”17 The principal
innovation in the project, of course, was constituted by the fact that state officials, including
chiefs of state, could also be punished.
The problem of choosing the competent jurisdiction for this type of crime occasioned the
proposal to create a “High Court” empowered to judge “charges brought against individuals from
enemy countries, civilian or military authorities.” The project envisaged the formation of a court
comprising American, English, French, Italian, and Japanese magistrates, as well as magistrates
from smaller countries chosen from among “the members of their national military or civilian
courts or tribunals, already existing or specially created.”18 The report suggested, furthermore,
that “no national court should proceed to judge an individual, whoever he may be, designated to
be judged by the High Court.” Finally, it recommended that the peace treaty stipulate
that the enemy governments must, even after peace is declared, recognize the juris-
diction of the national courts and the High Court, and that all enemy individuals

presumed guilty of crimes against the laws and customs of war and the laws of human-
ity shall be excluded from any amnesty accepted by the belligerents and that the gov-
ernments to which these individuals belong shall engage to deliver them up to be
judged.19
Rules were also proposed that would require “enemy governments” to communicate the
“names of persons entrusted with a command or a charge”; “all orders, instructions, copies of
orders, reports, and documents presumed to have been produced or executed in violation of
the laws and customs of war or the laws of humanity”; and “information tending to indicate
which individuals committed these acts or operations, or were responsible for them.”20
The work of the committees and their conclusions, while they did not set out openly and
exclusively to sanction the crimes committed against the Greek, Armenians, Syriac, or even
Belgian civilian populations, were certainly influenced by the information at the disposal of
the committee members. A few points even seem to have been inspired by the Armenian
experience.
The “Council of Four” and the Trial of

the Young Turk Criminals
Obviously, it was incumbent on the “Council of Four” – made up of Woodrow Wilson, David
Lloyd George, Georges Clemenceau, and Vittorio Emanuele Orlando – who took de facto
the decisions that the peace conference would impose on the defeated countries, to trans-
late these legal principles into political practice. From 24 March to 28 June 1919, these men
daily exchanged ideas on the future of the world.21 While the national interests of the four
powers comprised the basic subject of their discussions, legal and even moral questions were
not altogether absent from them. In the 2 April session, the question of responsibility was
raised and there was a discussion of the principle of creating a court of justice as proposed
in the conclusions of the Committee on Responsibility. Lloyd George accepted the principle
of such a court, stating that he had no objection “to the idea that the court should be cre-
ated by the League of Nations.” “If we want,” he added, “ the League of Nations to have the
power we hope it will, it must show from the outset that it is capable of punishing crime.”22
When the question of “punishable” crimes was broached again, on 8 April, the British prime
minister suggested distinguishing between two categories of punishable acts: “first, criminal
acts properly so called; secondly, general orders in violation of human rights.” Wilson took
what he regarded as a more pragmatic stance: “I fear,” he said, “that it will be hard to punish
those who are truly guilty, for nothing is easier than to destroy the trace of orders given. I
fear that we will not have sufficient evidence.”23 In spring 1919, the Allies were aware that
they would not find it easy to indict criminals who had taken care to wipe out the traces of
their crimes.
In mid-June, the “Council of Ten” had to deal with the unforeseen arrival of an Ottoman
delegation. It was invited to express its views on 17 June 1919. This first contact is particularly
interesting because it allows us to observe the positions adopted by the Istanbul government
and the reactions it called forth from the “four.” Wilson noted, during a meeting of the four,
that “a sort of general protest of the kind we just heard is absolutely worthless. The Turkish
delegates say: ‘Do not judge on the basis of what happened in the past few years, but on that
of the whole history of the Ottoman Empire.’ ” “I believe,” Wilson observed, “that that would
be still worse” – a remark that speaks volumes about the Allies’ opinion of Turkey and its
past. What most irritated Wilson, however, was the discourse developed by the delegation in
order to exonerate itself of guilt for past events. The delegation had in fact insisted that “the
tyrannical government of a single party is responsible for the errors and crimes committed;

we are innocent.” As Wilson saw it, “all they did was complain. They were the ones who
asked to come here to present their case and that is all they had to say. It doesn’t amount
to anything.” Lloyd George suggested that they be given a response. Georges Clemenceau
even proposed that they “do so in writing”; in his view, it was necessary that the Turkish del-
egates “leave with an answer to their document, which is a veritable confession.”24 About the
Turkish delegation’s memorandum, the Council of Four noted that it “glorified Turkey’s past,
recalling that Turkey had been able to create and administer a great empire and that it had
respected the existence of every religious community.” Lloyd George exclaimed about this
subject: “This delegation and its memorandum are good jokes.” He was followed by Wilson,
who added: “I have never seen anything stupider.” “It is,” said Lloyd George, “the best possible
proof of the Turks’ utter political incapacity.”25
The strategy of the liberal Ottoman government, which sought to put all the blame for
the liquidation of the Armenians on the Young Turk Central Committee and to present the
policy implemented vis-a-vis the minorities as an accident, had obviously not convinced the
“four.” Later, during one of their final discussions, which took place on 25 June 1919, Lloyd
George showed that he harbored no further illusions about Turkey’s intentions: “If we tell the
Turks that ‘from 1 July on, Armenia is no longer yours,’ they will immediately send people
there to start massacring again.”26
A few months later in March 1920, a “Committee for the Protection of the Minorities in
Turkey,” created by the League of Nations, presented a series of recommendations that it sug-
gested should be inserted among the clauses of the peace treaty with Turkey.27 In an accom-
panying letter, the delegates emphasized “the experience of the armistice and, especially,
the recent massacres of Armenians clearly show that there is a need for certain guarantees
for the effective performance in the interior of paper pledges signed by the Government
of Constantinople.”28 Certain of the articles proposed summed up the problems facing the
genocide survivors and put forward proposals. Article 3 reads:
In view of the fact that, from 1 November 1914 to the date of signature of the armistice,
a terrorist regime was in existence in the Ottoman Empire, and given that no conver-
sions to Islam could take place under normal circumstances, no conversion that took
place between those two dates is acknowledged as valid ... The Ottoman government
shall assist in every possible way the recovery of men, women, and children wholly or
partially of non-Muslim origin who have embraced Islam since 1 November 1914 and
have been reclaimed by their communities or families. It shall also, by virtue of the
present treaty, acknowledge all rights to visit or search either private homes or institu-
tions of any kind whatsoever for the purpose of looking for missing persons. These
searches shall be conducted by a representative of the interested community and an
official of the Ottoman government, in the presence of a delegate or representative of
the League of Nations (see Article 12).29
Article 5 reads as follows:
The Ottoman government acknowledges the inequitable nature of the 1915 law on
abandoned property (Emvali metruke) and the related regulations and declares them
null and void, in the past as well as the future. It solemnly pledges to facilitate, as fully
as possible, the return to their homes of Ottoman subjects of non-Turkish races who
have been violently driven from them since 1 August 1914, whether for fear of being
massacred or by all other forms of constraint, and also to facilitate the resumption of
their business or commerce. It acknowledges that the real estate or moveable assets
of said Ottoman subjects of non-Turkish races or of the communities to which these

subjects belong must, to the extent that they can be discovered, regardless of who
has possession of them, be restored with all possible speed, free of all charges or liens
to which they may have been subject and without compensation of any sort for the
present owners of said property, transactions between the present owner and the seller
of the property excepted ... The Ottoman government admits the creation of arbitra-
tion commissions designated by the League of Nations or its representative (as provided
for by Article 12) whenever that shall be deemed necessary. Each such commission
shall be composed of a representative of the Ottoman government, a representative of
the community affected or one of whose members has been affected, and a president
appointed by the representative of the League of Nations ... These commissions of arbi-
tration shall have power to mandate ... the removal of all persons who, after inquiry,
shall be acknowledged to have taken an active part in massacres or expulsions, or to
have precipitated them, with specification of the measures to be taken as to his prop-
erty, including the possibility of ordering the transfer of all goods and assets having
belonged to any and all members of a community who have died or disappeared since
1 August 1914 without leaving heirs to said community rather than to the state ... . No
decision by the Ottoman judiciary or administrative authorities can contravene the
decisions of the commission of arbitration.30
Article 6 further suggests recalling that it is absolutely necessary that the empire grant “all
Ottoman nationals equal rights before the law.”31 These measures, which sought to impose
the rehabilitation of the survivors, show that, 17 months after the armistice, the Ottoman
government and Turkish society had, far from moving in the direction of reform, refused to
resolve basic issues, and that the Allies found themselves facing a “front of refusal” organized
by the Young Turk network, Kemalists included. Indeed, the British high commissioner, John
de Robeck, notes in a 17 March 1920 dispatch to London that the law on abandoned prop-
erty adopted by the Ottoman government in January has not produced “satisfactory results,”
and that he accordingly plans to recommend including these questions in the peace treaty
currently being drawn up.32
As for the punishment of the Young Turk criminals, the February–March 1920 London
Conference suggested that the Allies submit to the Ottoman government draft articles on
sanctions for inclusion in a future peace treaty. The government would recognize, in the
first article of such a treaty, the freedom to try people accused of acts contrary to the laws
or customs of war before the military courts. In the second article, it would further pledge
to “deliver up all individuals deemed responsible for the massacres that, in the course of the
war, were committed on former Ottoman territory and to recognize the right of the Allied
Powers to designate the Tribunal charged with judging these crimes.”33 In March 1920, the
Allied powers were still advertising their intention to bring those responsible for crimes “con-
trary to the laws or customs of war and the laws of humanity” before an International High
Court. In an 11 March 1920 letter, Jules Cambon, the French foreign minister, submitted
“draft articles” completing the propositions made in London to the British prime minister,
Lloyd George, “to be inserted in the conditions for peace and submitted to Turkey.” Cambon
pointed out to Lloyd George that Article 2b had been drawn up separately “in case the
Supreme Allied Council intends to include, among the said conditions for peace, a clause
mandating a search for those responsible for the massacres committed in Asiatic Turkey.” It
would seem to follow that all were agreed about Articles 1 and 2, but that the Frenchmen
contemplated adopting a more active policy mandating the pursuit of fugitive criminals.
Article 4 even looked ahead to something like an obligation to extradite criminals, or to
“take all necessary measures to ensure, at the request of the Allied powers and in accord with
them, that they are prosecuted and punished.” Article 2b further stipulated that the “Allied

powers reserve the right to designate the court to be charged with judging the ... accused.
Should the League of Nations have created, at the appropriate time, a court with the com-
petency to judge the aforementioned massacres, the Allied Powers reserve the right to bring
the accused aforesaid before this court.”34
Ultimately, the Allies sent the Ottoman government, on 11 May 1920, a draft treaty that,
generally speaking, contained the points we have just reviewed. In its response, the Ottoman
government expressed, in the chapter devoted to “responsibility,” a viewpoint that rather
clearly reveals its line of defense:
Turkey acknowledges the principle that there exists an obligation to make amends for
damages resulting from acts that violate human rights ... If, contrary to its will and, no
less, its patent interests, the Turkish people were dragged into the international confla-
gration, this was due to an oligarchy that took its orders from abroad. And if inhuman
acts for which there is no excuse were perpetrated, they are entirely imputable to the
same political clan. They are in no way a manifestation of religious fanaticism, but
exclusively the work of a revolutionary faction that wrought havoc in Turkey ... The
Turkish people, however, even as it acknowledges this responsibility toward human
rights, has the right to distance itself morally from acts that it vigorously condemns.
To make reparations for unjustly caused damages and to prevent them from occurring
again – such is the twofold obligation recognized by Turkey.35
This minimalist approach, which sought to put responsibility on the shoulders of the
Unionist leaders, who were supposed to have been manipulated by Germany to boot, sparked
a response from the Allies, who were apparently not disposed to clemency. On behalf of all
of them, the president of the peace conference, Lloyd George, sent a stinging reply to the
“observations” of the Ottoman delegation on 16 July:
The Ottoman government seems to be of the opinion that its responsibility for the
war is less than that of its allies and that it can, consequently, expect to be treated
less severely. The Allies cannot accept this pretension ... It would seem that the
Ottoman Delegation has not taken the full measure of the losses and suffering that
Turkey’s intervention has caused mankind ... The Allies see clearly that the time has
come to put an end, for good and all, to Turkey’s domination over other nations.
The history of the relations between the Porte and the Great Powers in the long
years before the war is nothing other than a series of repeated but vain attempts
to put an end to the atrocities in Bulgaria, Macedonia, Armenia, and elsewhere,
atrocities that have shocked and revolted the conscience of all mankind ... In the
past twenty years, the Armenians have been massacred under unspeakably barbarous
circumstances. During the war, the Ottoman government’s exploits in the way of
massacres, deportations, and ill treatment of prisoners of war transcended even their
previous accomplishments in crimes of this kind. It is estimated that, since 1914,
the Ottoman Government has massacred, on the flimsy pretext of a putative revolt,
800,000 Armenians, men, women, and children ... The Turkish Government did not
only fail to perform its duty to protect its subjects of non-Turkish races against plun-
der, violence, and murder; there is a great deal of proof that it took it upon itself to
organize and lead attacks of the most savage kind on a population that it ought to
have protected.36
These exchanges show that, on the eve of the conclusion of the Treaty of Sèvres, the Turkish
government and the Allies had irreconcilable positions.37

The memorandum that the grand vizier, Damad Ferid Pasha, presented to the peace
conference did not reveal any fundamental changes in the Turkish positions. Ferid began
his address by admitting that, “in the course of the war, virtually the entire civilized world
was troubled by the stories of the crimes that the Turks are supposed to have committed.
I do not wish – perish the thought – to make light of these crimes, which were such as to
make the human conscience tremble forever. I am even less inclined to diminish the guilt
of the authors of this great tragedy.” The grand vizier was, however, quick to add that he
wanted to “show the world, offering proof of what [he said], who was really responsible for
these dreadful crimes.” He “deplored the murder of a large number of his Christian com-
patriots,” but also “the murder of Muslims properly so called.”38 To make such a confession
in public, even with restrictions, called for a certain political courage that, be it added,
immediately cost Ferid Pasha his post. It doubtless constitutes, down to our own day, the
fullest confession to have come from any Turkish authority whatsoever. At the same time,
this confession takes up the thesis of the limited guilt of the CUP leaders, who, according
to Ferid, supposedly also perpetrated mass crimes against “Muslims properly so called.”
The British and the Question of the

Young Turk Criminals
In circumstances prevailing in the first postwar years, whether an international court would
be created depended largely on the political will of the Allies, particularly Britain and
France. As soon as their High Commission had been set up in Constantinople, the British
demonstrated their resolve to bring the Young Turk criminals to justice. On 18 January 1919,
Admiral Arthur Calthorpe informed the Sublime Porte that his government was “resolved
that those responsible for the massacres of the Armenians be duly punished.”39 It would even
appear that the British Crown was determined to pursue its logic to the end, with or without
the international community, by punishing the criminals individually and collective punish-
ing the Ottoman Empire by dismembering it.40
Translating this political will into deeds, to be sure, called for the creation of an authority
capable of conducting the requisite legal action. As we have seen, the work of the commit-
tees and subcommittees that had operated within the framework of the Preliminary Peace
Conference from February 1919 on culminated in a recommendation that a “High Court”
be created and placed under the auspices of the League of Nations. To the extent that one
can judge on the basis of the available sources, the British were not hostile to this idea,
which would have made it possible for the first time in history to try political leaders for
criminal acts perpetrated against a segment of their own population. The Armenian-Greek
Committee working alongside the High Commission was supposed to second the British
Crown’s efforts. Admiral Calthorpe, however, had clearly requested that the Armenian and
Greek authorities follow the recommendations of the Foreign Office and restrict themselves
to identifying Turkish criminals and performing investigative tasks.41 The recommended
procedure suggested that the arrests should be carried out “in every case” by the Turkish
authorities, on their own initiative, “on our formal demand made in writing” or on “our
verbal suggestions made through” Mr. Ryan (a British intelligence officer). On Calthorpe’s
account, 30 CUP members were apprehended “for complicity in massacres either by direct
or indirect action,” while others were arrested at the demand of his services.42 Calthorpe
also reminded London that, in compliance with instructions from the Foreign Office, he
had demanded in a 5 February telegram (no. 233) that the Turkish government turn over
the “prisoners selected by us for detention in Malta,” but that the government had not
responded to his demand because it was then in the process of inaugurating their trials
before the court-martial.43

All these apparently insignificant details show that the British authorities did not wish
to see a Turkish court-martial take on the task of judging war criminals; they simply wanted
Constantinople to collaborate with them in furnishing evidence and apprehending sus-
pects. It is even probable that it was the fact that the first trial against those who had
organized the massacres in Yozgat had already begun on 5 February 1919, which induced
the Foreign Office to demand that the Turkish authorities turn over their prisoners so that
they could be transferred to Malta. In early February, London envisaged nothing less than
the creation of a “High Court,” while Istanbul was manifestly determined to do all in its
power to avoid one, so that it could conduct the trials as it saw fit. It could thus validate
its thesis that responsibility was limited to the Young Turk party, thereby exonerating the
Ottoman state.
Several factors suggest that that the Turkish government was then trying to make its
judicial project seem credible in order the more effectively to thwart the Allies’ plans.
The fact that it asked countries such as Spain, the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, and
Norway to send it two judges who could serve on the Istanbul court-martial is one good
indication of this.44 It is quite as revealing that the European countries politely refused
the Turkish request, whose political implications they had probably understood. It is not,
on the other hand, known why the British waited until May 1919 to bring the accused
back to Turkey and set the first trial in motion. Moreover, Admiral Calthorpe notes in a
message that he sent to Balfour on 26 March 1919 that two members of the investigating
committee were implicated “in the massacres of Armenians.”45 In other words, certain
judges were not in a position to preside over legal proceedings of this type or, again, the
administration was still under the control of Young Turk networks. Indeed, in August 1919
the high commissioner concluded that the trial conducted by the “Turkish” court-martial
was nothing more than “une farce et une insulte à notre prestige.”46 He went so far as to
call the judges who presided over the trial “incompetents” and the “methods of guarding
the offenders so inadequate.”47 He also noted, however, that his French colleague was of
the opinion that “the trial and punishment of these offenders was a matter for Turkish
Authorities under the supervision and control of the Allied Military Authorities.”48 Thus,
it is probable that the British plans to have the Young Turk criminals tried before a High
Court were brought to naught by France’s lack of enthusiasm for the idea. The jurists in
the Foreign Office were also reluctant to create British courts martial in the occupied
zone, and authorized judging suspects in only two categories – those who interfered with
the application of clauses of the armistice and those supposed to have shown insubordi-
nation toward British officers. The jurists of the Crown thought, on the other hand, that
these courts martial could not judge people accused of “outrages to Armenians or other
subject races both in Turkey and Transcaucasia” – stipulations that bore on crimes com-
mitted after the Armistice.49
The increasing frequency with which suspects were released from prison – 41 people
under indictment were freed on 22 May 1919 – and escapes occurred with official complicity
convinced the British high commissioner to react. He had proposed that his government
deport the criminals held by the court-martial in a “safe” place.”50 On 28 May, the Young
Turk cadres were put aboard a war ship and sent to Malta.51 This operation led to the arrests
of several dozen more Young Turk criminals, who were also deported to the British island.
It seems reasonable to suppose that London proceeded in this fashion in order to show that
it would no longer put up with what increasingly seemed to it to be a “farce” undermining
its credibility. The British could hardly reconcile themselves to the fact that the Turkish
authorities were, on the one hand, proceeding to arrest war criminals and, on the other,
releasing them from prison – to say nothing of the “escapes” that had certainly been engi-
neered by Karakol networks. By stepping in promptly, the British wished to make certain that

the Ittihadists would face judgement when the moment came. The Turkish Justice Minister’s
explanations to the effect that “the English took the Unionist prisoners in hand only because
we went about judging them too slowly”52 were obviously not credible and could not have
convinced too many.
What is more, a letter than Admiral Calthorpe wrote Lord Curzon on 21 September 1919
shows that the high commissioner was still studying the case of the “Turks of every degree
implicated in the deportations and massacres of Christians during the war.” He reminded his
superiors that it was of “the great importance of obtaining some guidance as to the intentions
of His Majesty’s Government and their Allies,”53 as if the trials of the Young Turk leaders
had never taken place. Furthermore, the British were working with the Greek and Armenian
committees to amass as many incriminating documents as they could in anticipation of trials
of the Young Turk criminals before a high court or some other tribunal.54 In the course of a
debate that took place in the House of Commons on 4 March 1920, the question of the trials
of the Turks who had been deported to Malta was raised once again. Certain MPs recalled
that the “majority of those interned were implicated in massacres [...] The question of their
trial was “under consideration.”55 In an 11 March 1920 cable to Lord Curzon, the high com-
missioner John de Robeck “recommended for continued detention [in Malta] could not be
prosecuted for participation in atrocities but in some cases their return to Constantinople
would be inexpedient.”56
After 18 months, during which the British had left the Turkish authorities with a cer-
tain latitude to take initiatives, putting faith in their sense of responsibility, the Allies had
come to the conclusion that they could not impose the least peace treaty on Turkey if they
left the Young Turkish networks intact. To struggle against the omnipresence of the Young
Turks and put an end to their criminal activities in the Anatolian provinces, the British had
to cut them off from their bases in the capital by taking military control of it. According
to Erik Zürcher, the British had long known that the minister of war was working together
with the nationalists; in January 1920, they called for the resignation of Cemal Pasha and
Cevad Pasha, the chief of staff. The telegrams exchanged between the War Ministry and the
provincial military commanders illustrate the development of Istanbul’s collaboration with
Anatolia and, more particularly, with Karakol, whose liaison officer with the ministry was
none other than Colonel Galatalı Şevket. Moreover, the head of Karakol, Kara Vasıf, had
been communicating directly with Cemal Pasha when Cemal was War Minister.57 Under
these circumstances, the 16 March 1920 Franco-British occupation of the capital by 50,000
men58 was virtually inevitable, as was the arrest, by the British security services, of Hüseyin
Rauf and Kara Vasıf, two of the main leaders of the Ittihad’s networks, together with 11 other
party leaders including General Cemal Pasha, a former war minister, and Hasan Tahsin, a
former vali of Erzerum.59 Cemal and Tahsin were transferred to Malta, where they were soon
followed by Celal Nuri Bey, General Ali Said, Ebuziyazâde Velid Bey, and, most importantly,
Süleyman Nazıf Bey.60
Later, the 16 May 1922 Daily Telegraph published a declaration of Chamberlain’s before
the House of Commons in which he read two telegrams, dated 10 May 1922, from the British
high commissioner in Constantinople. One had been written after a conversation with
Dr. Ward, a member of the Near East Relief committee who had just arrived from Harput.
In it, the high commissioner reported, “The Turks seem to be acting in accordance with a
deliberate plan to get rid of the minorities ... The Turkish official who heads the department
of education in Harput told Dr. Ward, in order to illustrate the Turks’ incompetence, that
they had not done a good job of carrying the massacres through to the end in 1915, but that,
this time, they would do things to perfection.”61
In a 9 April 1924 debate in the House of Commons about the ratification of the Treaty
of Lausanne, Lloyd George no doubt felt the need to justify his country’s Turkish policy as

well as the fact, minimized by the success of the Kemalist movement, that it had finally been
dismantled. “We negotiated,” he said,
a series of treaties with Russia, Italy, France, and the Arabs; in all these treaties, it
was stipulated that the non-Turkish areas of Asia Minor and European Turkey would
be detached from Turkey. I maintain that that was a good policy ... Was it a sound
decision? I ask the honorable members whether they can show me a single province
governed by Turkey whose wealth, population, freedom, happiness, and all that makes
a country great and prosperous have not declined under Turkish rule. There is not a
single one! Can they name me a single province detached from Turkey in the last fifty
or more years that is not richer, more populous, and has not increased in power and
prosperity, and, above all, become more free? There is not a single one! That consti-
tutes a serious accusation against an empire.62
This statement of Lloyd George’s, refocusing the debate on Turkey’s incapacity to respect the
groups making it up and increase their prosperity barely veils the bitterness of the British
politician, who did not succeed in enforcing the principle he evokes and in punishing those
responsible for crimes “against human rights.”
The 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of

the Crime of Genocide and the Experience of 1919
A number of authors have observed that Raphael Lemkin knew about the crimes commit-
ted against the Armenians in the First World War and that he had paid particular attention
to the trial of Soghomon Tehlirian.63 Annette Becker notes, however, that he made no
reference to these matters in his seminal work, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, in which he
cites “the destruction of Carthage in 146 B.C.; the destruction of Jerusalem by Titus in 72
A.D.; the religion wars of Islam and the Crusades; the massacres of the Albigenses,” round-
ing off his list with the horrors committed by Tamurlane.64 In an essay published two years
later, Lemkin repeated his list of early cases of mass murder. This time, however, he adds:
“et plus près de nous encore, celui des Arméniens.”65 He further observes that “There were
also diplomatic representations by various states in favor of the Greeks and the Armenians,
when the latter were massacred, specifying the obligations which they were committed
assuming as for the treatment of their own nationals,”66 without, however, adding that these
crimes were also examined by the jurists of the committees created by the preliminary peace
conference. However, in an unpublished talk that he gave in New Haven in 1949, when the
convention on the prevention and punishment of genocide was adopted, he observed that
“it was only after the extermination of 1,200,000 Armenians during the First World War
that the victorious Allies promised to the survivors of this abominable massacre an ade-
quate law and a court. But that did not happen.” Referring to the assassination of Talât by
Soghomon Tehlirian, who was judged “not responsible for his acts” and acquitted, Lemkin
underscored the irony of the situation: “A man, to have acted in the name of the human
conscience, a conscience which had not found yet its legal expression in the international
law, was declared insane.”67 Thus, Lemkin pointed out the fact that the crime against the
Armenians had gone unpunished because the Allies had not carried their logic through to
the end, while the international community had not yet provided a legal definition of that
crime.
This last affirmation is open to question. An examination of the discussions and reports
of the committees of jurists who worked within the framework of the preliminary peace
conference show that these delegates were plainly aware that they were faced with “cases not

covered by the customary dispositions of the law” and consequently sought to define “crimes
against humanity,” henceforth distinguished from war crimes.
Moreover, Resolution 96 (I), which was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly
on 11 December 1946, repeats the formula “offense against human rights.” The 9 December
1948 Genocide Convention is still more directly inspired by the conclusions of the Committee
on Responsibility, which were published on 29 March 1919: Article 3 of this convention pro-
vides a similar definition of the categories of criminals involved in a genocide; Article 4 takes
up the idea of punishing the culprits regardless of their rank in the state hierarchy; finally,
Article 6 provides for the creation of an international judicial body, the formation and pre-
rogatives of which are described in virtually the same terms as those already found in the 29
March 1919 report proposing the creation of a “High Court.”68 While the recommendations
bearing on crimes “against human rights” were not translated into realities in their day, they
did serve as the basis for the rules adopted by the U.N. after the Second World War. There is
even every reason to believe that failed attempt to create an international jurisdiction imme-
diately after the First World War was still on everyone’s mind when the Allies decided not to
leave the crime that the Nazi had committed against the Jews unpunished.
In the interwar period, moreover, the Fifth Commission of the League of Nations contin-
ued to work on the subject. It was no doubt aware that insufficient progress had been made
in 1919.69

Chapter 7
The First Trial of the Young

Turk Criminals Before the
Istanbul Court-Martial
I
n May 1919, while the trial of the members of the Ittihadist Central Committee was in
progress, Dr. Cemal Şehabeddin Bey, a writer whenever he had a little time to spare,
published in Alemdar one of the rare texts that expressed what no one dared to – or
wanted to – say: “Those who have even slightly open minds can understand that at all levels
of the country, the mortal disease of Unionism continues to rage.”1 Sabah’s editorialist, for
his part, sought to understand why a court-martial had been created: “We stand accused of
a crime and are suffering from a disease worse than the plague ... Yes, we are infected with
the plague. Humanity hesitates to come close to us ... That is why we have organized an
extraordinary court-martial to punish the culprits among us, depending on the degree of
their guilt, as justice demands.”2 Ali Münîf Bey, prisoner no. 2762 and a former undersec-
retary of state3 who had efficaciously assisted Mehmed Talât during the genocide, naively
attempted to exonerate himself in a 19 October 1919 letter to the British authorities written
in Malta. Yet he did not deny that the party-sate had committed a collective crime: “During
the massacres that took place in 1915,” he wrote, “I was not in a position to decide on or
to commit these acts, directly or indirectly. Consequently, I cannot be held responsible for
them; I had neither decision-making power nor the means to carry out decisions.”4 This
Young Turk leader, held by the British far from home, understood that it was not possible in
this context to deny the crime in the usual manner. Unable to claim that he had not held
his post when the events took place, he tried to convince the high commissioner that his
position as second-in-command at the Interior Ministry meant that he had been incapable
of acting.
These three reactions suggest that Turkish public opinion was to some extent aware of the
consequences of the mass crime organized by the CUP, particularly of the fact that it would
be necessary to give accounts to the victims and the Great Powers. This, however, should
not be allowed to mask the existence of the denialist camp – that is, the CUP networks –
which rejected all accusations across the board and immediately laid plans to transform the
trials into a tribune for the defense of Turkism, while preventing revelations of this kind
from coming out; the methods envisaged included threats and blackmail. Only if we take
this unremitting pressure into account can we grasp the way Istanbul’s court-martial no. 1
functioned from February 1919 on, as well as some of its decisions.
That said, it may be asked why the court-martial chose to begin with the trial of the
organizers of the Yozgat massacres – that is, with crimes committed in one particular area –
rather than taking on the case of the decision-makers at the very outset. This choice may
be explained by the scope of the Boğazlian massacres known to one and all. But it was also,

perhaps, the result of a strategy that aimed to pin the blame for the “excesses” that had
occurred in the course of the deportations on local government officials.
The Yozgat Trial

We have already discussed the conditions surrounding the liquidation of the Armenian
population of the sancak of Yozgat, stressing that they were distinctly different from those
observed in Anatolia.5 We shall now examine the Yozgat trial with an eye to what it reveals
about the line of defense adopted by the accused, the government’s legal delay tactics, and
the way public opinion reacted to the trial.
From the very first trial session, held on 5 February 1919, the lawyer defending Kemal
Bey, Yozgat’s interim mutesarif, objected that the court-martial was illegitimate. He argued
that the sultan’s decree provided for the creation of ten courts martial to judge acts com-
mitted in the different provinces and that, consequently, the trial should take place where
the crime had been committed or the accused had been arrested.6 The defense lawyers also
contested the legitimacy of the plaintiff’s lawyers, especially Hayg (Hmayag) Khosrovian,
who supposedly had no mandate to counsel his clients. In this particular case, the Armenian
Patriarchate, which had assumed the plaintiff’s role, represented the people who had been
liquidated; the dates and places of whose deaths were as a rule unknown.7 After overruling
the defense’s objections, the court-martial proceed to identify the accused: Kemal Bey, 35
years old, born in Beirut, who had recently acted as general inspector of the deportations
from Konya; Mehmed Tevfik, 44 years old, born in Istanbul, the commander of the gendar-
merie in Yozgat; and Feyaz Bey, the head of Yozgat’s Land Registration Office. All three were
accused of crimes committed during the deportation of the Armenians. The presiding judge
then had the list of Armenian and Turkish witnesses read out, among them the parliamen-
tary deputy from Yozgat, Şakir Bey, and Halil Recayi, the inspector general of the prison
camps, after which he presented the exhibits, consisting notably of documents sent to the
Mazhar Commission by Şakir on 8 December 1918; these had been certified authentic by the
civil inspector in Official Document No. 233, dated 14 December 1918. Finally, the prosecu-
tor, Sâmi Bey, read out the indictment in which he observed that “the ongoing develop-
ment of the intellectual and financial situation of the non-Muslim elements and the religious
privileges that they enjoyed did not prevent them from constantly complaining that they
did not have equal rights.” The prosecutor’s review of the historical context was followed by
rather revealing remarks about the movements created by the “Armenian traitors” who had
disturbed “public order.” According to the prosecutor,
It became clear that they wished to free themselves from Ottoman domination; the
Armenian Committees’ publications in foreign languages contributed to creating
problems both domestically and in our foreign relations; in the early stages of the gen-
eral mobilization, the Armenians put up armed resistance to military service; a group
of Armenians crossed the frontier to join the enemy forces; they destroyed bridges and
put our military equipment and supplies in danger. The authorities accordingly took
preventive measures. The decision to deport the Armenians bore only on the vilayets
of Erzerum, Bitlis, and Van; however, on 24 May 1915, the military authorities author-
ized the deportation of the non-Muslim populations of Kayseri.
Under these conditions, it was “natural,” the prosecutor went on, that “certain elements
should take advantage of the situation ... to plunder and commit other crimes.”8 The French
intelligence services, which had closely followed this first trial, noted that the indictment
read out by the chief prosecutor, which was reproduced in the newspapers the next day, “was

The First Trial of the Young Turk Criminals 777
more like an indictment of the victims, and paved the way, at the same time, for an acquittal
or acknowledgement of attenuating circumstances.”9
At the 8 February and 10 February trial sessions, the court took due note of the complaint
of Garabed Kuyumjian: converted to Islam by force, he demanded retribution for the massa-
cre of his family. Three young Armenian survivors, represented by the lawyer Levon Remzi,
had also lodged complaints: during the deportations, the three brothers had been soldiers,
but their families had been deported in violation of the official orders. The evidence given by
Mustafa Remzi, a judge, at the 10 February trial session confirmed the role of supervisors of
the extirpation of the local Armenian populations played by the responsible secretaries del-
egated to each province. Remzi also testified to the criminal nature of these party militants,
revealing that the CUP’s responsible secretary in Angora, Necati Bey, went to Yozgat three
days before the deportations began, that he had been the mayor’s guest while there, and that
he returned in the company of the new vali of Angora, Necmeddin Bey, on his way back
from Samsun, after the deportees had set out.10
The parliamentary deputy from Yozgat, Şakir Bey, testified at the fourth trial session on
11 February. He said that “the massacres were already a fait accompli” when he tried to inter-
vene with Atıf Bey, the interim vali of Angora, who “did not take my protest into account.”
When the lawyer for the defense, Levon Remzi, asked him whether the Armenians had com-
mitted acts of banditry at this time, he answered that, to the best of his knowledge, it had hap-
pened “only near the border,” as the refugees told it. It was, however, the evidence given by the
18-year-old Eugénie Varvarian, a native of Yozgat, that rendered Feyaz’s and Kemal’s position
untenable: she testified that her convoy had been plundered at Çiftlik and massacred in Keller.
The kasab kaymakam (“butcher kaymakam”) protested that “the girl is a liar, she doesn’t know
what she’s talking about.” Varvarian responded by reminding him of certain precise facts, and
then asked him: “Did all the Armenians commit suicide? Where are most of them now?” This
face-to-face between victim and executioner was, however, broken off by the prosecutor, who
suggested that the young woman be given a medical examination. Kemal’s lawyer, Saadeddin
Bey, said that “Eugénie is seventeen years old today; she was too young at the time of the
deportations to remember what happened.” The witness nevertheless continued to cite the
names of many criminals “who are today free to come and go as they please in Yozgat,” notably
that of Feyaz, one of the Unionist leaders in Yozgat who gave orders to the çetes.11
At the fifth trial session on 15 February, the court heard the testimony of a peasant from
Elekciler, Stepan, who had found refuge with a Greek in Ankara for nine months after being
deported to Keller. He explained that Kemal had a trumpet with which he gave the signal to
begin the massacres.12 Several high-ranking military men testified at the following sessions,
such as the interim commander-in-chief of the Fourth Army, Halil Recayi, based in Angora,
and Colonel Şehabeddin, based in Kayseri; we have already discussed the telegrams that they
exchanged as well as their confessions.13 The examination of these witnesses showed how
closely the military brass and local state officials were associated with the operations. Finally,
the Yozgat trial indicates that the declarations promising that those Armenians who agreed
to convert to Islam would not be killed were above all intended to facilitate the departure of
the convoys; that the plan was to liquidate these converts thereafter; and that, in any case,
one rule had to be respected: the proportion of converted Armenians allowed to remain in a
locality was never to exceed 5 per cent of its total population.
The makeup of the first court-martial was altered after an imperial decree reforming it was
signed on 8 March. Were these alterations due to incidents that occurred during the Yozgat
trial? This is unlikely since the reform of the court statutes was ready by 5 March.14 But we
can, in any event, observe the effects that the decree had on this trial, which was suspended
at the end of the twelfth trial session on 6 March 1919, after an intervention by the lawyer
Levon Remzi that attracted considerable attention.15

According to Colonel Hüsameddin Ertürk, a Special Organization officer who helped

organize Kemal Bey’s funeral, the presiding judge at the court-martial, Mahmud Hayret, was
opposed to sentencing Kemal to death and ultimately decided to resign after an acrimonious
discussion with Colonel Receb Ferdi.16 Thus, it is clear that the presiding judge endorsed
the Unionsts’ positions to the effect that there could be no question of punishing these
high-ranking officials or officers who had merely carried out the party’s orders. At the very
least, it may be said that he was swayed by the pressure to which Unionist circles must have
subjected him.
When the trial resumed on 24 March 1919, the composition of the court had been con-
siderably altered. General Nâzım Pasha was the new presiding judge, and military men had
replaced his civilian magistrates. Furthermore, the chief prosecutor had asked the lawyers of
the Armenian plaintiffs to leave the courtroom, since the court was now purely military and
he would take it upon himself, in his capacity as chief prosecutor, to defend their interests.
The lawyers argued in vain that the court-martial was not exclusively military, even if the
judges were, since it was to judge not only officers, but also civilian officials, ministers, and
politicians from the rank of vali to grand vizier, in accordance with the civil law code.17 The
lawyers then withdrew.
The fourteenth trial session on 26 March 1919, during which Kemal Bey and Tevfik Bey
were examined, made it possible to establish the facts of the case. It showed in particular
that the “revolt” taken to justify the massacres had been an invention carefully prepared
by Kemal Bey himself. The examination of other witnesses at the fifteenth, sixteenth, and
seventeenth sessions led to confrontations with the accused and a painful exchange between
victims and their victimizers. The conclusions of the civil inspector Nedim Bey, who had
been charged with investigating the massacres perpetrated in the sancak of Yozgat, drove yet
another nail into the coffin of the accused. “I solemnly declare, with absolutely certainty
about what I affirm,” Nedim wrote, “that the Armenians were liquidated in groups and that
the kaymakam, Kemal Bey, was the author of these crimes. It was, specifically, Kemal Bey
who gave the secret orders and informed the commanders of the gendarmerie, who were
constantly called upon to carry out these crimes.”18
The court-martial, under the presiding judge General Mustafa Nâzım Pasha, withdrew for
deliberations on 8 April 1919. The verdict it pronounced caused a sensation: it condemned
the kaymakam, Kemal Bey, to death, and sentenced the commander of the gendarmerie
Tevfik Bey to 15 years at hard labor.19 After reiterating the customary formulas, the verdict
pointed out that,
although the accused and their counsel have denied all wrongdoing and demanded to
be acquitted, the court is respectful of Islamic law and especially those of its provisions
that protect the life, honor, and property of all the nation’s subjects, without discrimi-
nation, against all forms of violence and expropriation, with a view to guaranteeing
justice for all.
The verdict further stated:
A deportation order was communicated to Kemal Bey, the kaymakam of Boğazlian and
interim mutesarif of Yozgat, as well as Major Tevfik Bey, commander of the gendarmerie
in Yozgat. In the exercise of their functions, they exiled defenseless women, the weak,
and young women whom they had been ordered to deport; they exiled individuals who
had been exempted from deportation; they plundered money, jewels, and other valu-
ables belonging to the deportees in the Armenian convoys, without respect for per-
sonal rights; and they capriciously expedited certain individuals and gave secret orders

and illegal instructions to certain cunning people. They never saw the need to take
measures to preserve and protect the population they were sending into exile. They not
only refused to take the least measure of that kind, but wholly deprived [the deportees]
of all means of defending themselves. They separated the men from the others so as
to be able to commit their misdeeds. After their crimes were exposed, when they were
asked to provide an explanation for them, they denied the truth. Rather than apply
the law, they ordered irresponsible gendarmes to commit atrocities, guaranteeing them
full impunity ... They were responsible for massacres and looting, which Muslims con-
sider to be the greatest of crimes. The witnesses’ statements show, without the least
doubt, that certain military officials exchanged numerous telegrams whose contents
the accused have denied. An examination of the various questions put to them shows
that the women and children in the convoys were deprived of their protectors and
parents and that crimes of massacre and plunder were committed ... The defense has
argued that subversive activity took place. Reference was made to the fact that certain
members of the [Armenian] committees, in areas under enemy occupation, urged [the
Armenian population] to go over to the enemy and participate in the agitation, with
the result that the Armenians rose up in revolt and pursued the treacherous objectives
set for them by their compatriots living on the other side of the Ottoman borders. The
cases cited do not constitute sufficient justification for the crimes committed. Even if
a certain proportion of the Armenian population joined them, the rest demonstrated
its loyalty ... In his defense, Kemal Bey has accused the Armenians of Van, Erzerum,
and Bitlis of acts of cruelty against Muslims. With respect to the Armenians of Yozgat,
in whose case we have no proof of a subversive movement, there is no legal or moral
foundation for the charges leveled by the accused. Beside the fact that he acted in a
spirit of revenge and for personal gain, he did so not only with the intention of inciting
the district’s Muslims, but also of inducing the Muslim population in general to kill
Armenians; they took the massacres to be something natural and necessary. The con-
tent of the documents proves that these three irresponsible individuals controlled the
activities of the government officials who escorted the convoys and obeyed the orders
they received [from their superiors]. Documents written in their own hand prove that
the gendarmes accompanied the convoys for the purpose of liquidating them. This has
been proved beyond the shadow of a doubt. The proofs and the documents mentioned
earlier definitely establish the guilt of the accused. The arguments put forward by the
defense are worthless. The prosecutor has demanded that the accused be condemned
in conformity with Article 56 of the Penal Code, but this Article has been judged
inapplicable to the case before us. The accused, Kemal Bey and Tevfik Bey, have been
condemned on the basis of Article 45, by a unanimous vote of the judges: death for
Kemal and fifteen years at hard labor for Tevfik, military code, Article 170 and 171.20
Along with this sentence, the presiding judge produced a commentary that strongly sug-
gested that the accused were motivated by a desire to avenge the suffering of Muslims in the
vilayets of Van, Bitlis, and Mush. Above all, it should be noted that the verdict confirms
the thesis of local excess, thereby absolving the central authorities, and breathes not a word
about the role played by the CUP and its responsible secretaries, although the evidence pre-
sented at the trial leaves no doubt about their involvement.
This first trial, which took place at a time when the nationalist movement was still reel-
ing under the effect of the recent defeat, established the limits of what the Ottoman court
system was prepared to accept. Indeed, the reactions observed when the most important of
the accused, Kemal, was executed, mark the Young Turk networks’ first public manifestation
against the very idea of bringing the men who carried out the liquidation orders to justice.

The British intelligence services, like the press of the day, fully grasped the import of these
reactions. Kemal was executed on 10 April on Bayazid Square, in the presence of the com-
mander of the Constantinople gendarmerie accompanied by an honor guard. Also present
were the police chief, Halil Bey; the military governor of the capital, General Osman Şakir,
accompanied by many high-ranking officers; the prefect of the capital, Yusuf Ziya; the presid-
ing judge of the tribunal; magistrates; Constantinople’s mayor; a number of leaders of çete
squadrons; religious leaders; and a throng made up of members of Teceddüt Fırkası. In all,
more than 10,000 people witnessed the execution. The “martyr” was buried the next day
in the cemetery in Kadiköy, where a ceremony was organized at which a bouquet bearing
the inscription “for the innocent Muslim martyr” was laid on his tomb.21 All these groups
considered the execution of Kemal to be an injustice because he had obeyed the govern-
ment’s and the party’s orders. Hüsameddin Ertürk, a colonel in the cavalry and an officer in
Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa, made a remark to Samih Hafız Tansu that probably reflected what all the
members of the Young Turk networks felt, doubtless together with a segment of public opin-
ion: “This hero, a son of the Turkish nation, is a victim of the enemy occupation; he has been
hanged, but his memory will live forever in nation’s heart.”22 A moment later, however, Ertürk
dropped this conventional discourse to reveal why he found Kemal’s execution inadmissible.
“The order came from high-ranking authorities,” he pointed out, “the headquarters of the
party of Union and Progress. No one could oppose such an order.”23 “How,” he added, “could
the kaymakam of a little town have opposed the order given in this encrypted telegram? How
could he have disobeyed his instructions? The guilt of Boğazlian’s kaymakam [resides in] this:
he carried the order out.”24 The question of personal responsibility was thus posed for those
who endorsed the liquidation plan and patriotically put themselves in its service. Kemal’s
last words before his execution carried the same message: “Dear citizens: I am a Turkish
official. I carried out the orders I was given; I conscientiously did my duty. I swear that I am
innocent. This is my last declaration for today and tomorrow. To please foreign peoples, [our
government] is hanging me. If this is justice, may justice perish forever.”25 Here lay the core
of the criticisms leveled by the Young Turk networks at the governments that succeeded
one another at the Sublime Porte: namely, that they were collaborating with “foreigners.” In
seeking to put the blame on the CUP’s leaders, the different governments hoped to save the
empire from being radically dismembered. The national movement, for its part, had opted for
uncompromising resistance and a blanket refusal to assume its responsibilities. Hüsameddin
Ertürk remarks: “The Unionist activists were worried, for the threat of arrest hung over their
heads like a sword of Damocles. Every Unionist responsible for deporting and massacring
Armenians expected to be arrested at any moment, imprisoned, and hanged.”26
According to the French intelligence services, certain “Turkish circles” attributed the
death sentence to “pressure from the English, and others to the government’s desire to pro-
vide proofs of its good faith by punishing the guilty.” The Armenian daily Jagadamard, for
its part, published an article under the title, “He Has Commended his Soul to God.” The
editorialist here recalls that the Armenians
[have no] confidence in the justice of the Turkish government, for they are well aware
that it means only to play one more clever trick to pull the wool over Europe’s eyes ... We
feel no joy ... However, the simple word hadisat, “he has commended his soul to God,”
reflects the Turkish mentality, which can never change or forgive the fact that a Turk,
even a monster, should be hanged for the Armenians’ sake.
The editorialist further remarks that Sabah “is calling, in this connection, for punishment for
the Armenians who have massacred thousands of Muslims. Thus it is playing out the time-
honored farce of accusing the victims.”27 The very least one can say is that the execution of

Kemal, the first and nearly the last execution, generated sharp tensions and most certainly
contributed to reviving the Young Turk movement in Anatolia.
A few months after these events, Kürd Mustafa Pasha, the only member of the court-
martial to have sat on it both before and after 8 March 1919, summed up the course of events
and the difficulties encountered by the courts martial in a declaration to the daily Peyam:28
The [members] of the commission of inquiry were designated in advance by the Justice
Ministry, the Interior Ministry, and the Ministry of War, and their choices were con-
firmed by the grand vizier. We, the members of the court, did not have the right to
interfere with their prerogatives. These commissions sent us their investigative files for
examination; we studied them in order to do what was necessary straightaway. The
court did not neglect a single document. However, whenever we opened the trial of an
[accused] state official, exchanges of correspondence and reports considerably slowed
things down and interfered with the usual procedures. A number of those accused and
summoned to appear before the court were remanded to us either late or not at all.
Moreover, as a result of regrettable escapes from the War Ministry prison, we had to
postpone making certain judgements and fell further and further behind in our work.
I remember very well that we had ordered a certain number of officers to appear before
the court: they stood accused of the deportations in Büyükdere. But these accused
officers were never turned over to us. This is just a minor case. There were far more
serious cases.29

Chapter 8
The Truncated Trial of the

Main Young Turk Leaders
T
he main trial, that of those directly responsible for the genocide – the members
of the Council of Ministers and the Ittihad’s Central Committee, that is, the
heads of the party-state – was opened on 27 April 1919 before the extraordinary
court-martial of Istanbul. These legal proceedings should have brought together the 23
titular members of the Ittihad’s Central Committee and its Political Bureau, most of whom
had held posts as ministers or administrators. But, 12 of them – Mehmed Talât (a member
of the Central Committee), İsmail Enver (a member of the Central Committee), Ahmed
Cemal (a member of the Central Committee), Dr. Bahaeddin Şakir (a member of the
Central Committee), Dr. Ahmed Nâzım (a member of the Central Committee), Aziz Bey
(the head of the Department of State Security), Bedri Bey (the police prefect in the capi-
tal), Cemal Azmi (the vali of Trebizond), İsmail Hakkı (a state secretary in the Ministry of
War in charge of food and supplies), Dr. Rüsûhi (a member of the Central Committee who
had operated in Azerbaijan and the Van region), Eyub Sabri [Akgöl], (a fedayi and member
of the Central Committee without interruption from 1908 to 1918), Filibeli Ahmed Hilmi
(the vice-president of the Special Organization who was in charge of its operations in
Erzerum and a member of the Central Committee) – had fled abroad or already withdrawn
to Anatolia. Nevertheless, when the “trial of the Unionists” – a formula widely used in the
press of the day – opened on 27 April, ranking personalities were to be found in the dock:
Halil [Menteşe] (a former president of parliament, former foreign minister, and member of
the Central Committee), Midhat Şükrü (the Central Committee’s secretary general), Ziya
Gökalp (the rector of the University of Istanbul and a member of the Central Committee),
Kara Kemal (a former minister of supplies and a member of the Central Committee),
Yusuf Rıza (a member of the Central Committee’s Bureau and the head of the Special
Organization in the Trebizond region), Said Halim (a former grand vizier and a member of
the Central Committee), Ahmed Şükrü (a former minister of education and a member of
the Central Committee), Giritli Ahmed Nesimi [Sayman] (a former Foreign Minister and a
member of the Central Committee), Atıf Bey (CUP delegate and, later, vali of Angora and
Kastamonu, and a member of the Central Committee), Ahmed Cevad Bey (the military
commander of the capital), İbrahim Bey (a former justice minister, and, at the time, presi-
dent of the Council of State), and Küçük Talât Bey (a member of the Central Committee).1
To this group were added, somewhat later, on 3 June, Hayri Effendi (a former şeyh ul-Islam
and a member of the Central Committee), Musa Kâzım (a former şeyh ul-Islam and a mem-
ber of the Central Committee), Mustafa Şerif Bey (a former minister of commerce and
agriculture and a member of the Central Committee), as well as İsmail Canbolat (gen-
eral director of the Department of State Security and a CUP cadre), Abbas Halim Pasha
(minister of public works, Said Halim’s brother), Ali Münîf Bey (a former state secretary

in the Interior Ministry), Hüseyin Haşim (minister of the post and telegraph office), and
Rifât Bey (the president of the Senate).2
These two exhaustive lists show that the chief prosecutor of the extraordinary court-
martial initially concentrated on indicting members of the CUP’s leading bodies, including
the leadership of Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa,3 probably in line with the strategy of Damad Ferid’s
government, which consisted in blaming them for the deportations and massacres of the
Armenian population in order to exonerate the state. The indictment, which was read out
at the first trial session, began by pointing to the existence, within the CUP, of two “Special
Organizations, one of which was publicly acknowledged and, thus, official, and another that
was secret and based on oral instructions.” It went on to accuse “the moral person of this
Committee” of a “series of massacres, acts of plunder, and financial abuse” for which its “lead-
ers” were responsible.4 In other words, the moral person represented by the Ittihad was the
object of the indictment.
The rest of the indictment, a sort of detailed presentation of several dozen documents and
depositions, sought illustrate the operating method that the CUP used to “fulfill” its “secret
goals,” especially the creation of Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa, whose leading members are mentioned
by name. About this corpus, systematically utilized in Parts Three and Four of the present
study, the indictment states:
The essential point that emerges from the recent investigation is that the crimes com-
mitted in various places and at various times during the deportation of the Armenians
were not isolated, local occurrences; rather, a central, organized force, made up of the
above-mentioned individuals, planned them in advance and issued secret orders or
gave oral instructions to carry them out.5
The last part of the indictment responded to the question about the competency of the
extraordinary court-martial that had been posed by the accused who had exercised ministe-
rial functions. Their request to be tried before the “High Court” created by the parliament
was rejected on the grounds that their acts were not “offenses of a political nature committed
during the exercise of their functions,” but “common-law offenses” for which they “did not
have the benefit of any legal privileges.”6
“In view of the participation in the massacres ... of the accused Bahaeddin Şakir, Nâzım,
Atıf, Yusuf Rıza, Cevad, Aziz Bey, and Enver, Cemal, and Talât Pasha,” the chief prosecutor
concluded, “it has been decided to judge them on an indictment for criminal activity,” in
accordance with the first paragraph of Article 45 and Article 170 of the penal code. For their
part, Midhat Şükrü, Dr. Rüsûhi, Küçük Talât, Ziya Gökalp, Kara Kemal, Said Halim, Ahmed
Nesimi, Ahmed Şükrü, and İbrahim and Halil [Menteşe] were charged with complicity and
judged in accordance with Article 45, Paragraph 2 of the Penal Code.7 Thus, from the out-
set, a clear hierarchy of responsibilities was established between those who organized the
crime while working in a secret organization, and their accomplices, who represented the
CUP’s official face. However, in contrast to the hearings conducted by the Fifth Commission
of the Ottoman parliament, the domain examined by the judges in this case was largely
restricted to the liquidation of the Armenians. The accused were nevertheless also charged
with manipulating public opinion in order the better to carry out their secret plans; confis-
cating to their advantage all the internal mechanisms of the state; taking advantage of the
situation in order to enrich themselves; and, finally, hiding the disastrous course of the mili-
tary campaigns. In a word, the Ittihadists were accused of having dragged the empire into an
adventure and of violating all the articles of the Ottoman Constitution.
The head of the French navy’s intelligence service, Lieutenant Rollin, noted in an assess-
ment of the situation drawn up after the first trial session: “The indictment charges the

Trial of the Main Young Turk Leaders 785
accused with common-law offenses or crimes alone, but mentions no political questions.”8
Rollin also pointed out that the lawyers for the defense had demanded, despite the reasons
adduced in the indictment, that the case of their clients, most of whom had been ministers,
be referred to the High Court of Justice.9 The defense lawyers argued, notably, that involved
here were acts of state and they should be treated as such. After deliberating for a few days,
the court held a second session on 4 May, at which it rejected the defense’s arguments and
published a decree about its competency that is not without interest.10 Dated 4 May 1335
[1919], this document recalls that it was the moral person represented by the CUP “that [had
been] charged with various crimes and that the accused [were] charged with having been
the cause of these crimes in their capacity as members of the Committee’s central body.”
The decree accordingly rejected as inadmissible the defense’s argument to the effect that
it was a question of “abuses and errors committed by members of the Council of Ministers
in the exercise of their functions.” It went on: As for the special organizations [Teşkilât-ı
Mahsusa], whether they were under the immediate control of the Committee’s central body
or attached to an official department, they were, while ostensibly pursuing war aims, in fact
exclusively concerned with deportations and massacres.” After rebutting the defense’s four
objections, the court deemed itself “competent to discover and punish the authors of the
crimes that shocked all Ottomans and also foreigners.”11 While admitting that the massacres
were an extension of the deportations, the court deemed that these crimes were not second-
ary, unintentional effects of an act of state but, on the contrary, acts planned and ordered
by the country’s supreme authorities within the framework of a comprehensive plan one of
the objectives of which was the liquidation of civilian populations. The angle of approach
taken by the court-martial, doubtless on instructions from Damad Ferid’s government, was
probably designed to root out the Ittihad’s networks and purge the administration and army
of their members and sympathizers.
More surprising is the fact that the court decided to separate the trial of the Central
Committee members from that of the former ministers, who were also affiliated with the
Ittihad’s highest body. It justified this decision by declaring that it wished to conduct com-
plementary investigations of the accomplices of the most important of the accused, so that
they could be judged at the same time as their hierarchical superiors. A French intelligence
officer wrote: “it seems – such is the general impression called forth by this measure – that
they are trying to save the former ministers’ skins.” “This is,” the same witness noted, “the
vicious circle characteristic of the trial now underway; it has been traced clearly enough to
allow everyone to pull his chestnuts from the fire.”12 Formally speaking, this decision came
down to judging separately, for the same acts and by means of two distinct trials, the CUP
considered as a moral person on the one hand, and the members of the government on the
other.
The Unionists’ Trial

From 4 May to 17 May 1919, there took place seven sessions of the trial of six members
of the Ittihad’s Central Committee – Midhat Şükrü, Ziya Gökalp, Ahmed Cevad, Küçük
Talât, Yusuf Rıza, and Atıf Bey – all of whom were still in the capital.13 The last part of
the 4 May trial session was taken up by a very technical examination of Şükrü,14 Gökalp,15
Küçük Talât,16 and Atıf Bey17 centered on the question of the codes employed for the orders
that the Central Committee or Special Organization sent to the provinces. The next trial
session, held on 6 May, involved nothing of fundamental importance, except perhaps for
the fact that Atıf Bey corroborated the nature of the activities carried out by Bahaeddin
Şakir and Yusuf Rıza in Erzerum and Trebizond.18 A journalist described this session of the
trial as a “pantomime ... with words,” observing, somewhat ironically, that Rıza, “who was a

member of the Special Organization, does not know whether he belonged to it or not.” Atıf
contradicted the presiding judge when the latter reminded him that, at the War Ministry, it
was said, “this organization had two sections, one based in the Ministry and the other in the
Committee itself.”19
The debate seems to have become livelier at the fourth, 8 May trial session.20 Gökalp, the
first to be examined, declared that he had known nothing about Atıf’s activities in Angora;
the strong-arm interventions of the party’s responsible secretaries in Trebizond, Erzerum,
Erzincan, or Sıvas; or, again, the fact that Şakir used a specific code. He also denied knowing
anything at all about the committee’s relations with the Milli enterprises or the “humani-
tarian corporations” that engaged in speculation.21 His colleague Midhat Şükrü admitted,
however, that Kara Kemal took his orders from Talât Pasha.22
In this curious confrontation with accused men who had lost their memories, the presid-
ing judge nevertheless succeeded, at the fifth trial session on 12 May,23 in bringing Cevad
to admit that there had indeed existed a system within the Special Organization whereby
the originals of orders were sent out and copies of them were destroyed; he did so by hold-
ing up before him documents that Cevad himself had signed.24 Later the same day, Şükrü
found himself hard put to explain why he had received wires from the leaders of Teşkilât-ı
Mahsusa that attested to the relations that the headquarters of the Central Committee had
maintained with this organization.25 The transcript of the exchange between the presiding
judge and Şükrü gives some idea of the attitude of the accused:
The judge: Certain responsible secretaries took part in the massacres; when they did so,
they sent secret instructions to both the valis of the provinces and the mutesarifs. They
immediately had the valis who did not want to obey them dismissed. Are you aware of
all this?
Şükrü: Yes, we dismissed a few of our delegates who interfered in government business.
The judge: That is not what I am asking you: for example, Mazhar Bey, the vali of Angora,
was dismissed the very next day, because he had refused to carry out the secret orders
that he had received, and Atıf Bey was appointed vali in his place. The same thing
happened to Reşid Pasha, the vali of Kastamonu.
Şükrü: Your Honor, how can a delegate dismiss a vali? The secretaries, moreover, did not
have the right to appeal to the interior minister. If Bahaeddin Şakir Bey and Dr. Nâzım
did appeal to him, that happened without our knowledge.
The judge: Do you know where Aziz Bey, the former head of State Security, is now?
Şükrü: No.
The presiding judge then had a lettercard that Aziz Bey had sent Şükrü from Vienna,
as well as a telegram sent to him by the CUP’s inspector in Balıkeser, Musa Bey, and sub-
sequently sent to Dr. Nâzım, whose answer to it read: “Collect money, dress bandits in the
uniforms of the soldiers of the regular army, send them to Constantinople. We will arm them
here. Yakub Bey will tell you when to send them.” The presiding judge then said: “These doc-
uments prove, very precisely, that you were part of Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa.”26 In the evening, the
presiding judge even brought Atıf Bey to confess that “under cover of the law, [the Unionists]
released thieves and other criminals from the prisons.”27
A few minor revelations were also made at the sixth trial session on 17 May. Yusuf Rıza
finally admitted that there had indeed existed two Teşkilât-ı Mahsusas functioning “inde-
pendently of each other.”28 The seventh and last trial session was more productive: Şükrü
acknowledged that three of the ten members of the Central Committee had participated

materially in the creation of the Special Organization, which had the mission of liquidating
the Armenians, and that the seven others had not “reacted.”29
The Trial of the Young Turk Ministers

When the court-martial resumed its work on 3 June 1919, the situation had changed con-
siderably. To begin with, the chief prosecutor, Nazmi, had been dismissed for mysterious
reasons. Rumor had it that he had received relatives and representatives of the accused
in his home and collaborated with them on a strategy for lightening the charges brought
against them.30 A second, much more decisive event also took place: on 28 May, most of the
Young Turk ministers were apprehended by the British and sent to Mudros or Malta.31 Of
the accused sent back to be tried with the ministers, only three second fiddles remained in
the dock, as the prosecutor’s replacement, Feridun Bey, remarked at the 3 June trial session:
Musa Kâzım, a former şeyh ul-Islam, Hüseyin Haşim, the minister of the post and telegraph
office, and Rifât Bey, the president of the Senate.32 The trial that now began could only seem
like a judicial “farce” as a result of the absence of Said Halim, Hayri Effendi, Halil [Menteşe],
Ahmed Nesimi, İsmail Canbolat, Abbas Halim, İbrahim Bey, Ali Münif, Ahmed Şükrü,
Mustafa Şerif, and Kara Kemal, which came on top of the absence of Talât, Cemal, Enver,
and Nâzım.33 The British high commissioner, in putting these prisoners out of reach of the
Ottoman courts, was reacting to a government decision to release 41 of the accused following
demonstrations that had taken place in the streets of the capital from 20 May on – a decision
rendered urgent by the fact that the demonstrators were threatening to take the prison of the
court-martial, Bekirağa, by assault.34
Under these conditions, the public prosecutor’s indictment, presented in a courtroom in
which the accused were no longer present, was thrown into still sharper relief. The charges
brought against the absent prisoners had been stiffened and were now formulated in much
less ambiguous terms. After stressing that “the government was not at all concerned to pre-
vent massacres and acts of pillage or to punish those guilty of them,” the prosecutor Haydar
Bey recalled, “the massacre and destruction of an entire community and the pillaging of its
assets can only have been the consequence of bloodthirsty measures taken by a secret asso-
ciation.” There followed an order requiring the accused to appear before the court-martial;
it stated that “Talât Pasha, Cemal, Enver and Company, leading members of Union and
Progress, are summoned to appear before the court-martial on charges of massacre, pillage,
destruction by fire of buildings and of corpses, devastation of villages, indecent assault, and
torture.”35 The same document affirms that,
one manifestation of the Committee’s activity is the role it played while the deporta-
tion law was being carried out. The deportations, especially in places where they were
conducted with greater intensity, that is, the eastern vilayets, took the same form.
They were directed by delegates and responsible secretaries of Union and Progress. In
these districts of the eastern vilayets, the task of supervising them was entrusted to
Bahaeddin Şakir Bey, appointed head of the Special Organization, which comprised
the leaders of Union and Progress.36
Thus, it was in the framework of these trials, in line with the additional charges brought by
the Public Ministry, that the main Young Turk leaders were tried in absentia. The examina-
tions of the former şeyh ul-Islam, Musa Kâzım, Hüseyin Haşim, and Rifât Bey were, unsurpris-
ingly, altogether unproductive.37 In the absence of the main authors of the crime, the court
asked Hüseyin Haşim at the next trial session on 5 June 1919 why the Central Committee
had issued the deportation order and burned documents. It received no answer.38 Musa

Kâzım was embarrassed when the presiding judge showed him a “sentence to deport and
massacre Armenians” (Ermenilerin Tehcir ve Taktili fetvasını) that he had issued during his
tenure as şeyh ul-Islam.39 The record of the third,40 fourth,41 and fifth42 sessions of the minis-
ters’ trial, held on 9, 12, and 24 June, does not provide any significant new information about
the facts. The court’s inspiration appears to have dried up in the face of the wall of silence
that nothing seemed capable of piercing. The next, 25 June trial session was livelier, because
at this session the chief prosecutor Reşid Bey appeared instead of his substitute, Feridun
Bey, and delivered an indictment aimed not at the culprits but at the victims. Nevertheless,
this indictment provides, in passing, corroboration of the fact that the CUP’s plans for the
Armenian population were worked out in the first half of February 1914 – that is, immedi-
ately the reform plan for the eastern provinces was adopted.43 The prosecutor mentioned the
antecedents of this plan, massacres “of hundreds of thousands of Muslim women, children,
and old people” (omitting to say where they are supposed to have taken place), but conceded
that “that was no reason to massacre other innocent people in their turn.”44
Musa Kâzım had the last word. At the seventh and last trial session held on 26 June,
he recalled that “the cabinet and the leaders of the party, when the party is in power, are
nothing but a ‘phonograph of the [party] caucus’; the ministry is completely deprived of its
independence and responsibility. Parliamentary debates are just a formality; everything is
decided before hand in the caucus.”45
On 5 July 1919, after more than two months of proceedings marked by several modifi-
cations of the initial indictment, the court delivered a verdict that applied only to those
accused in the trial of the ministers,46 ignoring those in the trial of the Unionists, whose fate
seems to have disappeared in the meanders of the Turkish court system.
The court-martial’s verdict recalls the various indictments affirming “that the disbanded
association known as Union and Progress committed numerous offenses and crimes and
that the members of the General Council representing said association were the authors of
these crimes.” The document then launches into a long historical account of the succes-
sive setbacks suffered by the Ottoman Empire. It recalls that “the Ottomans, thirsting for
freedom and justice, considered the pure waters of freedom as, and perceived the movement
that sprang up on 9 July 1324 as manna from heaven.” However, it went on, they also saw
the “disastrous consequences of the Italian and Balkan wars” and observed that the Young
Turks had “led the government astray and, while pretending to respect freedom, succeeded
in putting together a committee” that seized power and reached its “goal by subsuming the
Council of Ministers under the General Council, making the former a slave” to the decisions
of the latter.
As the finance minister, Cavid Bey, openly said in the declarations that he read into
the record of the fifth section of the Chamber of Deputies, dated 24 and 26 October
1334, this group of activists within Union and Progress was so bold and infallible in
making decisions concerning the destiny of the nation and the country that they [the
CUP leaders] saw no reason to submit the decision to declare war to the Council of
Ministers, although even sovereigns do not make such decisions on their own. Since
everyone had understood that this method of governing could not produce positive
results, the acts of the Committee that even the opposition had respected seemed
objectionable to people of sound judgment ... Competent, honest, and experienced
state officials were dismissed and replaced by people affiliated with the committee.
The result was justified general complaints about a government so arbitrary and tyran-
nical as to make people regret the despotic regime, to give offense, in particular, to the
non-Muslim nationalities, and, especially, to lead the Armenians, who now realized
that nothing justified their conviction that freedom was a guarantee for security and

justice, to look for the first favorable opportunity to realize the national aspirations that
they had nursed earlier. The fact that the national question came between the diverse
elements and even between Muslims sowed division and distrust among them. Thus
a serious blow was dealt to Ottoman unity ... Given that these facts have been estab-
lished by research and inquiries as well as the aforementioned indictments, and that it
is impossible to refute the five points exposed and examined by our court-martial, or to
affirm that they are null and void, we have come unanimously to the solemn convic-
tion that the aforementioned personal crimes, attributed to the Committee of Union
and Progress, were committed in a way that sullies that Committee’s honor ... It has
consequently been decided, after deliberation, that, considering the phases of this trial,
the aforementioned assertions of the defense counsel are an inadequate defense.
The five charges were as follows: 1) The crimes represented by the massacres whose
reality has been established before the court-martial, massacres that were perpetrated
in Trebizond, Yozgat, and Boğazlian, were organized and carried out by the leaders of
Union and Progress; 2) The decision to enter the war was taken by the Committee
without “deliberation of the Council of Ministers”; 3) The party interfered in gov-
ernment business for the purpose of obtaining the resignation of a minister of war,
Ahmed İzzet; 4) The party congress decided to entrust [Kara] Kemal Bey, “who had
been charged by the headquarters of Union and Progress with supervising questions
involving supplies,” with the mission of creating “a council of commerce and, later, a
few companies and associations that gained a monopoly over commercial transactions,
enabling them to confiscate all the wealth of the population,” and 5) The party had
interfered in affairs of state.47
The court accordingly condemned Talât, Enver, Cemal, and Dr. Nâzım to death in absentia,
and Cavid, Mustafa Şerif, and Musa Kâzım to 15 years at hard labor. It acquitted Hüseyin
Haşim and Rifât Bey.48
The only sentence that could be executed was that of Musa Kâzım, who had perhaps
spoken too freely at the last trial session. The court-martial’s verdict calls for a few remarks.
Although the core of the trial consisted in shedding light on the massacres perpetrated by
the Ittihadist leaders, the principal charge was included in a sort of contextualization of their
criminal activities; the identity of the victimized groups, Armenian, Syriac, and Greek, was
quite simply ignored.
This judicial episode, which anticipates the experience of the Leipzig trials, shows that,
after committing a mass crime such as genocide, a state cannot find within itself the strength
required to bring its own nationals to justice.

Chapter 9
The Trial of the Responsible Secretaries

and the Vicissitudes of the Subsidiary
Trials in the Provinces
T
he eagerly awaited trial of the CUP’s responsible secretaries and delegated inspectors
began on 21 June 1919,1 before the trial of the ministers had come to an end. It was,
however, interrupted at the end of the third session, on 28 June 1919.2 As Vahakn
Dadrian rightly observes, only 11 of the 29 accused were responsible secretaries, and many
were absent.3
Among those in the dock on 21 June were Dr. Ahmed Midhat, the Constantinople police
chief, who was delegated by the CUP to Bolu and then to Bursa to supervise the deportations
there;4 Dr. Besim Zühtü, the responsible secretary in Eskişehir;5 Avni Bey, the responsible
secretary in Manisa;6 Abdül Gani Bey, the responsible secretary in Edirne;7 Hasan Salâheddin
Bey, the responsible secretary in Beyoğlu/Istanbul; Hüseyin Cevdet Bey, the inspector in
Mürgün; and Mehmed Cemal Bey, the responsible secretary in Aleppo.8
These men, who had had a direct hand in implementing their party’s policy in the prov-
inces, could have provided essential details about the mechanisms of liquidation and the
seizure of assets, and could probably also have furnished precise statistics on the operations
they had carried out. In any event, many new elements emerged from the proceedings at
this trial. We do not know why it was interrupted on 28 June, to be resumed in November
and concluded with a verdict pronounced on 8 January 1920.9 This verdict confirmed that
the Ittihad’s Central Committee had created an executive leadership charged with liquidat-
ing the Armenians and “managing” their assets, which communicated directly with the
responsible secretaries and delegates in order to implement its decisions in the area under the
jurisdiction of the Third Army. The verdict also reveals that these “responsible secretaries,”
who were directly dispatched by the party, also had authority over the valis and could take
all measures required to execute the orders they received: “they were free to conduct their
criminal activities as they saw fit; these activities [implied] the organization and utilization of
bands of brigands [çetes] whose task it was to massacre.”10
Among the 13 accused still present in January 1920,11 Midhat and Fehmi were condemned
to ten years of prison, Avni was given nine months, and Gani’s trial was adjourned. All the
others were acquitted.12
For reasons that escape us, Cemal Oğuz, the responsible secretary in Çanğırı, was tried
separately at a later date. It is true that Oğuz had organized the murder of the capital’s
Armenian elites, who had been held for a few weeks in the area under his control.13 His
trial before the court-martial did not truly begin until 26 January 1920. He had tried to pass
himself off as insane and then as deaf, but witnesses affirmed that he had been guilty of major
abuses in the supply scandal.14 He was, moreover, tried for his involvement in that scandal.

At the 3 February 1920 session of his trial, he contended that he had never had anything to
do with the “Armenian business”; the magistrates did not see the need to look any further
into the matter. A witness recalled, however, the influence he had had over state officials
and the way he had, in concert with the interim vali and commander of the gendarme-
rie, extracted between 600 and 800 Turkish pounds gold from the Armenian population in
exchange for a promise not to deport it. Despite this transaction, the Armenians were put on
the road and massacred at the Tüney station.15 The court-martial finally condemned Oğuz,
in a verdict rendered on 8 February 1920, to five years of hard labor,16 ; he remained, however,
in the hospital of Gümüş Su.17
The Trial of Those Who Organized the Massacres in Trebizond

In addition to the trial of the criminals of Yozgat, the court-martial initiated a number of
different proceedings against other people responsible for liquidating Armenians in other
regions. The accused in Trebizond were among the first targets of these proceedings. The pres-
ence in this port of British forces and many diplomats goes part of the way toward explaining
the haste with which the Trebizond trial was organized. Begun in April, it was brought to
and end on 22 May 1919 in circumstances that we have discussed at length.18 It culminated
in a death sentence in absentia for the former vali of Trebizond, Cemal Azmi Bey, and the
CUP’s delegate in the city, Nail Bey.19 It should be added that Dr. Ali Saib, indicted in the
Trebizond affair for poisoning, was tried much later, between 16 and 21 December 1919,20 and
that Major Tevfik was tried still later, in September 1920.21
The Trial of Those Who Organized the

Massacres in Mamuret ul-Aziz
Bahaeddin Şakir was, his flight to Germany notwithstanding, the most important of those
facing indictment in this trial.22 Accused along with him were Boşnak Resneli Nâzım, the
CUP’s inspector in Mamuret ul-Aziz; his assistant Ferid Bey, a responsible secretary and
the head of Public Education in the region, Haci Baloşzâde Mehmed Nuri, a parliamentary
deputy from Dersim and the head of the region’s Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa;23 and the vali, Sabit
Cemal Sağiroğlu, then detained in Malta.24 There was never any question at this trial of the
killing fields south of Malatia.
According to the Istanbul press, the pretrial investigation had been concluded by mid-June
and the trial of these men was imminent;25 yet it did not begin, before Court-Martial No. 1,
until 22 October 1919, in the presence of two of the accused, Ferid and the parliamentary
deputy Nuri, who had been indicted “for massacres and deportations.”26 The proceedings
were conducted briskly, on 30 October, 21 November, and 10 January, but the facts of the case
were not really broached.27 The only element that deserves mention is the famous 4 July 1915
telegram that Şakir sent the CUP’s inspector in Harput, Resneli Nâzım; it constitutes one of
the rare documents from the archives of Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa the authenticity of which has been
certified.28 It was probably the presence of this exhibit in the investigative file compiled for the
Mamuret ul-Aziz trial that explains why Şakir’s case was included in these proceedings.
The verdict, handed down by the court-martial on 13 January 1920, imposed the death
sentence on the man who had incontestably been the most zealous organizer of the liquida-
tion of the Ottoman Armenians. General Vehib Pasha’s written deposition also contributed
heavily to attesting the Şakir’s role as well as the fact that these crimes stemmed from deci-
sions made by the CUP’s Central Committee. “The state contributed to the commission of
these crimes,” the verdict added. “No state official, no judge, no gendarme ever stepped in to
protect the populations that fell victim to these atrocities.”29 At the moment when the British

Trial of the Responsible Secretaries and the Vicissitudes 793
high commissioner, John de Robeck, learned that Şakir had been condemned, he believed
that Şakir was in Germany or Holland. “Bahaeddin Şakir,” he wrote, “is one of the members
of a small secret committee known as Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa, or Special Organization, which was
created by the CUP Central Committee to organize the liquidation of the Armenian race.”30
Resneli Nâzım, for his part, was sentenced to 15 years in prison; two of his underlings, who
were present, received light sentences.
The Trial of Those Who Organized the Massacres in Bayburt

After these secondary trials, in which the accused who were present received particularly light
treatment, Damad Ferid’s return to power on 18 April 1920 made it possible to set the judicial
machine back in motion. Immediately, the grand vizier appointed General Nemrud Kürd
Mustafa31 as presiding judge of the extraordinary court-martial. Mustafa was the only member
of the team that had condemned the kaymakam of Boğazlian, Kemal Bey, to death one year
earlier who was still in place. The first case to be judged by the new court involved two people
whose role in the massacre of the Armenians of Bayburt was common knowledge – Mehmed
Nusret Bey from Janina, the kaymakam of Bayburt and, subsequently, mutesarif of Arğana
Maden, and Lieutenant Piri Mehmed Necati Bey, the leader of a squadron of çetes32 who were
accused of having “committed crimes during the deportation of the Armenians of the kaza:
murders, massacres, pillage, abductions.”33 The verdict, made public on 20 July 1920, unsur-
prisingly condemned Nusret and Necati to death; both had been found guilty of perpetrating
massacres in the kaza of Bayburt. The verdict emphasized that the massacres carried out in
this area were the first to be debated and decided upon by “CUP Party headquarters,” and that
they had been organized under Şakir’s authority. The verdict further noted that Nusret “had
subsequently been promoted to the post of mutesarif of the sancak of Arğana Maden (in the
vilayet of Dyarbekir); [there] he had abducted the 24-year-old Philomene Nurian of Trebizond
and her younger sister ‘Nayime.’ ” With regard to Mehmed Necati, “thirty-five, an officer who
[had] resigned his commission and [was] accused of organizing the deportation and massacre
of the Armenians in the kaza of Bayburt,” the court observed that most of the mobile units of
the gendarmerie were voluntarily transferred to the front “and that the task of escorting the
convoys had been entrusted to Mehmed Necati Bey.”34
It should be noted that, unlike the other verdicts, the decree containing the court-martial’s
verdict was not published in the Official Gazette, but in an Istanbul daily, Tercüman-ı Hakikat,
some two weeks later. Still more revealing, the Censorship Office stepped in to stop distribu-
tion of this issue of the paper.35 Presumably, Damad Ferid’s government, then in the midst of
preparing the Treaty of Sèvres, was worried about the predictable public reactions that a new
death sentence would arouse and opted to execute the sentence as quietly as possible. After
Nusret was hanged in Bayazid Square, certain newspapers affirmed that these officials had
been hanged after being denounced by the Armenian Patriarch, Zaven.
The Trial of Those Who Organized the Massacres in Erzincan

Another trial of local officials, the Erzincan trial, was held at almost exactly the same time
as the Bayburt trial; General Nemrud Mustafa was the presiding judge in this case, too. The
sentence, which was published on 27 July 1920, confirmed that the kaymakam of Erzincan,
Memduh Bey, had ordered the gendarmes and policemen to massacre the Armenians in
the convoys of deportees.36 It nevertheless imposed the death sentence on the only indicted
man present, Hafız Abdüllah Avni, the general secretary of the Erzincan gendarmerie
(and the brother of Abdül Gani Bey, the party’s responsible secretary in Edirne), who was
accused of having “personally committed a number of atrocities, including infanticide.”37

Avni was executed on 22 July 1920, again in Bayazid Square, after declaring: “Long live the
party of Union and Progress. In massacring the Armenians, I did my country a great serv-
ice.”38 Avni was the third and last “martyr” of the trials held before Court-Martial No. 1 in
Constantinople.
The Other Subsidiary Trials, Judicial “Farces”

On 10 April 1919, the “Mosul trial” began before Court-Martial No. 1. The most important
of the men facing indictment were Halil Pasha [Kut] and Nevzâde Bey, who were accused
of having organized the massacre of deportees in Mosul and the Armenian soldiers in a
labor battalion, as well as the murder of Bedirkhanzâde Abdül Rezak Bey.39 This trial was,
however, suspended in early June, in the wake of tensions spawned by the deportation of
the Young Turk criminals to Mudros and Malta. When it resumed, only a few subalterns
were still facing judgement;40 Halil Pasha had managed to escape from the prison of the
court-martial and flee to Anatolia in August 1919.41
In November 1919, there began a series of trials of the authors of exactions committed
in the Ismit and Bursa areas. From 6 November 1919 to 17 February 1920 the court-martial,
now presided over by Esad pasha, first tried Hamid Bey, under indictment for having
acquired, in his capacity as the CUP’s responsible secretary in Adabazar, the assets of
3,000 deported Armenian families at derisory prices. Despite the incriminating evidence
provided by the former kaymakam, Necati Bey, the accused was acquitted on 17 February
1920.42 On 15 January 1920, Court-Martial No. 1 opened the trial of people implicated in
the acts committed in Ismit and Bağçecik.43 The sentences were somewhat harsher in this
case. In its verdict, rendered on Sunday, 29 February 1920, the court condemned İbrahim
Bey, the prison warden, to 15 years at hard labor; Faik Çavuş, his accomplice, to three
years and 200 days in prison; Ali Sururi Bey, müdir of the nahie of Derbend, to one year at
hard labor; Vecihi Bey, müdir of the nahie of Bağçecik, to two years of prison; and Ahmed
Çavuş and Hasan Effendi to four months of prison and 20 strokes of the rod each. The
accusations referred to in this verdict show that this team, which had been charged with
organizing the deportations, had in fact systematically pillaged Armenian assets for its
personal profit.44 In other words, it had contravened state interests and been condemned
for “financial abuses.”
The Karamursal-Yalakdere trial was held simultaneously; the accused were also charged
with having committed “abuses” in the course of the deportations. Since the most important
of those under indictment, Hoca Rifât, the CUP’s delegate in Ismit, had been deported to
Malta, he was tried in absentia. İbrahim Bey, the warden of the Ismit prison; İmam Salaheddin,
Ali; and the navigation agent İsmail Bey were notably accused of having speculated on sales
of wheat; they were, however, cleared of accusations of exactions against the Armenian depor-
tees.45 On 3 March, the court-martial rendered its verdict. İbrahim, who had been condemned
in the Ismit trial, was not given a heavier sentence. Two of his accomplices were acquitted, and
İmam Salaheddin, implicated in the “grain affair,” was referred to a competent court.46
The court also took up the cases of 40 people involved in the deportation and massacres of
Armenians from Bursa. However, only the fugitives among those indicted were condemned.
The Unionist delegate, Mehmedce Bey, a member of the First Section of the Department of
State Security, was condemned to death in absentia; the police lieutenant Haci Tevfik, the
policemen Yahia and Sadık Süleyman Fevzi, and the gendarme Hasan were given ten years at
hard labor; and the CUP’s responsible secretary İbrahim received eight years in prison.47
Among the criticisms leveled at the court-martial until it was taken back in hand by
Nemrud Mustafa in April 1920, the 30 March acquittal of Colonel Şakir Bey, who had been
accused of massacring Armenians in Kayseri, caused a sensation.48 The indictment of Bedros

Halajian, a former minister and former member of the Ittihadist Central Committee, for
having been deeply involved in the deportation of Armenians and “attempting to modify
the form of government,” illustrates the cynicism of the court presided over by Esad Pasha,
an Ittihadist. It acquitted the former deputy on 5 February 1920, but only after attaining
its objective of encouraging the belief that an Armenian could have helped organize the
massacres.
Also noteworthy is the court-martial’s treatment of the deportations in Büyükdere/San
Stefano. The verdict in this case, delivered on 24 May 1919, considered only charges for finan-
cial “abuse.” It nevertheless reveals how Selanikli Refik Bey, the kaymakam of Büyükdere,
Hafız Mehmed, the police chief Abdül Kerim, and Rizeli Celal Effendi “shortened the period
set by the government for the deportation of non-Muslims from the Büyükdere area and the
appropriation of the assets of the deportees.”49 The court-martial did not see fit to judge the
substantial issues here – that is, the deportations and murders – and did all it could to limit
the grounds for the indictment; it also omitted to broach the question of the damages and
property losses sustained by the Armenian deportees.
Among other legal oddities, the case of Sabancali Hakkı Bey, a senior officer who belonged
to the exclusive circle of the CUP’s military cadres, is worth mentioning.50 Among the rare
people who demonstrated hostility to his party’s plan to deport the Armenians,51 Hakkı was
brought before Court-Martial No. 1 on 9 August 1919,52 at a time when dozens of other party
cadres deeply implicated in the massacres were left untouched. After five trial sessions, which
brought no serious charge against the officer to light,53 Hakkı was acquitted.54 In view of the
practices cultivated by postwar Turkish governments, we are inclined to explain this indict-
ment as a show for public consumption, designed to prove that an important party leader
was not implicated in the liquidation of the Armenians. Much later, in February 1921, before
Court-Martial No. 1 was dissolved, the Istanbul press reported other trials based on events
that had taken place in Koçhisar, Sıvas, Kıği, and Agn, all of which culminated in acquit-
tals.55 It was as if Turkey felt an obligation symbolically to settle its scores with this violent
past – or, if one prefers, to carry out a massive whitewash of those under indictment. Finally,
to round off our succinct account of the results of the Turkish legal proceedings, we need to
glance at the work of the provincial courts martial. The documented example of Trebizond,
where the local authorities systematically thwarted the chief prosecutor’s pretrial investiga-
tions,56 shows that the Ittihadist networks made all local action virtually impossible. Of
the ten regional courts martial initially created to judge crimes committed in the prov-
ince, we know of only two that actually functioned – the court in Çorum, which tried and
acquitted the Unionist Ziya Şakir, an editor of Ertogrul in Bursa who was implicated in the
deportation of the local Armenians;57 and the court in Eskişehir, which indicted 40 people
involved in the deportations in Mihalıcık and Sivrihisar. Four of the accused were present
at the Eskişehir trial, but those who had acquired the biggest fortunes, such as Sayaklı Emin,
Çaputlı Hüseyin, and Mihalicıklı Safet, were not inconvenienced and even threatened survi-
vors who had returned to the city.58 Still more clearly than in the Istanbul, it was impossible
in the provinces – with the exception of the immediate vicinity of the capital and the zones
occupied by the Allies – to bring notables to trial. It was out of the question that the courts
should require them to render accounts for their crimes or for the goods they had acquired at
the Armenians’ expense.
The Judicial Vicissitudes of the Presiding Judge of the

Court-Martial and a Discomfiting Witness, General Vehib
We have already seen that, in December 1919, Vehib Pasha was detained while awaiting trial
after the court reached a unanimous decision to indict him, while carefully avoiding giving

clear indications of its reasons for doing so. Adeptly, Court-Martial No. 3, which was respon-
sible for trying senior officers, even created the impression that he had been implicated in
the Armenian massacres.59 There is, however, little room for doubt that his Young Turk col-
leagues wished to “punish” him in this way for having broken the law of silence. A still more
flagrant case of the Kemalist-Unionist network’s interference in legal matters came to light
in summer 1920, at the trial, before the court-martial then presided over by General Nemrud
Mustafa, of people implicated in the massacres and deportations in the Aleppo region. One
of the accused, who had been arrested in the capital in August 1920 at the request of the
parliamentary deputy and physician Avedis Nakashian, was none other than Abdüllahad
Nuri, the former director of the Sub-Directorate for Deportees in Aleppo, whose role in Syria
we have already discussed.60 Nuri’s brother, Yusuf Kemal, a parliamentary deputy and CUP
leader, was working alongside Mustafa Kemal in Angora at this time. Given the major role
that Nuri played in liquidating deportees in Syria, many expected that the presiding judge at
the court-martial, Nemrud Mustafa, would have him condemned to death. Indeed, a journal-
ist reports that Nuri, overwhelmed by the charges against him, broke into tears before the
court. At this point, an Armenian priest from Kastamonu arrived in Istanbul with a message
from the “foreign minister” in Angora, Yusuf Kemal, in which Kemal threatened to execute
the 2,000 to 3,000 Armenians under his control if his brother was not released from prison
in very short order.61
The fall of Damad Ferid’s government, brought on by its signature of the Treaty of Sèvres,
and its replacement by a government favorable to the Milli movement, made it possible to
change the make-up of the court-martial and, in the process, “save” the last of the men
facing prosecution. Hardly had the Tevfik government taken the helm of state than it con-
cerned itself with the case, of General Mustafa in particular. Mustafa, who had sat on the
court-martial since its February 1919 creation and had a reputation for honesty, was indicted
by the court, now presided over by Esad Pasha, of which he himself was a member. No official
reason was given for the indictment. The accused profited from the tribune this offered him
in order to read a memorandum, after first pointing out that he, for his part, had “not steeped
his hands in blood.” This barely veiled accusation addressed to his colleagues on the court
apparently produced the desired effect: they declared themselves incompetent to judge one
of their own members. Mustafa’s memorandum was nevertheless published in two Istanbul
newspapers, causing a stir. We read there that
the pashas who have perpetrated unheard-of, unthinkable crimes and dragged the
country into its present situation in order to protect their personal interests continue
to wreak havoc. They have established tyrannies of all kinds, organized deportations
and massacres, burned suckling infants to death with oil, raped women and girls in
front of their wounded parents, after tying them up, separated young women from their
mothers and fathers, confiscated their real estate and moveable assets, and exiled them
to Mosul in a pitiable plight, subjecting them to violent acts of all sorts in the process.
They have put thousands of innocent people on sailboats and thrown them into the
sea; they have forced others to convert; they have made famished old people to walk
for months on end; they have used them as slaves; they have cast young women into
houses of prostitution established under appalling conditions, unprecedented in the
history of any nation on earth.
Mustafa concluded that, in such conditions, he considered it an honor to be tried by the

court-martial.62 Even if the general never once uttered the word “Armenian” in his speech,
the Unionist press did not neglect the opportunity to point out that he was acting as a
“champion of the Armenians.”63

Unmistakably alluding to the indictment of General Mustafa, the daily Peyam Eyam
remarked:
We have not been able to hold anybody responsible for these tragedies that make the
whole universe shudder, and we have not been able to punish anyone; we have either
helped the pashas and beys whom we have haphazardly arrested escape from prison or
have set them free on purely formal conditions and guarantees. If, after fulfilling our
duty to render justice in rather lukewarm fashion, or, to tell the truth, failing to fulfill
it at all, we go on to condemn a Mustafa Pasha for what the French call ‘a crime of
opinion,’ we will be the laughingstocks of the whole world.
“General Mustafa’s first crime,” the editorialist concluded,
is not to have defended the interests of the sacred Committee; his second crime is to
have acted, on the contrary, in diametrically opposed fashion.” The same source indi-
cated, moreover, that there was no longer anyone “in the prison of the court-martial,
but [that] Vehib Pasha has been left there, because, during his detention, he dared
express himself irreverently about the aforementioned sacred Committee. In our coun-
try, all crimes can be forgiven, but that audacity is unforgivable ... Our judgements and
decisions do not go past the ends of our noses; it is probable that, tomorrow, they won’t
get even that far. In the face of such misfortune, we would do well to give ourselves a
shake, throw off our famous ocak mentality, and behave like men, if only where the
question of justice is involved.64
Thus, one can see more easily why Ferid Pasha, as soon as he took up the reins of govern-
ment again, appointed General Mustafa presiding judge of the extraordinary court-martial
on 18 April 1920 – doubtless in the hope that he could thus restore the credibility of the
Turkish judicial apparatus. One can also see that with Ferid’s fall and the nomination of a
government favorable to the Milli movement, Mustafa’s days at the head of the court-martial
were numbered.
In its 25 October 1920 issue, Le Bosphore declared that rumors were making the rounds
about the imminent “dismissal” of this judge who had, “in the course of the proceedings, pro-
vided an example of independence of spirit and a desire to see justice done which, although
they did not carry the day, are nonetheless deserving of the highest praise.” Queried on this
subject, the judge said that he had received no information about it, but declared that
such a decision, if it is taken by the Council of Ministers, can have been taken for
only two reasons: first, the fact that [he was] of Kurdish nationality; second, the fact
that [he] considered it [his] duty to subject Avni Pasha, the minister of the navy and
son-in-law of Şakir Pasha, the minister of war, to a long interrogation in the matter of
the massacres and deportations in Trebizond, the province whose military forces were
under Avni’s command when these events took place.65
The suspense did not last for long. By a 27 October 1920 imperial decree, signed by the
grand vizier, Tevfik, and the minister of war, Ziyaeddin, General Hurşid Pasha was named
presiding judge of Court-Martial No. 1, with the following judges to assist him: General
Abdülkerim; the commander of the Twelfth Army Corps on the Caucasian front during
the war, and thereafter the representative of the Ottoman military mission in Georgia;
Tevfik Bey; General Ömer Cemil Bey, who served in the Third and Fourth Armies; and
others.66

On 30 October, Hurşid and his team assumed their functions at the court-martial.
Mustafa, for this part, was arrested along with certain of his collaborators67 at the request of
the minister of war, Şakir Pasha.
On 6 November, the War Council examined Mustafa Pasha, who “reiterated” his protest
against his “illegal arrest” and demanded to be released.68 A few days later, the former presid-
ing judge of the court-martial and his colleagues were transferred to the Sareskerat prison.69
Bit by bit, the Istanbul press revealed a few of the general’s character traits. Thus, it was
revealed that, during the war, he had refused all command posts because he was opposed to
the Ottoman Empire’s entry into the war; that he had already been arrested on charges of
having made “subversive” political declarations – a charge he denied publicly by way of the
press; and that he had threatened to make “sensational revelations about the massacres and
deportations.” The reporter at Le Bosphore was hardly exaggerating when he wrote that “the
former presiding judge of the court-martial has many documents pertaining to this tragedy
in his possession, documents that throw a great deal of light on the responsibilities in this
affair, and on just who is responsible.” According to Le Bosphore, Mustafa had also earned
the hostility of certain Unionist circles after he initiated proceedings against the authors
of thefts committed in Yıldız from the imperial treasury.70 The general was, manifestly, the
Young Turks’ bête noire. This time, the proceedings initiated against him were conducted
by the War Council. It seems, however, that they were not to the taste of the council’s
president, Marshal Kâzım Pasha, who resigned from it, thereby postponing ratification of
the sentence.71 Mustafa was charged, as were two other members of the court, with having
rendered two distinct verdicts in the Bayburt trial, one of which declared that the court had
unanimously found Nusret guilty and condemned him to death, while the other condemned
him, without unanimity, to 15 years at hard labor. On 9 January 1921, the presiding judge at
Court-Martial No. 1, Nemrud Kürd Mustafa, was finally sentenced to three months in prison;
the verdict of 20 July 1920 was overturned and Nusret was officially cleared, posthumously,
of the charges against him.
The neutralization of the general and the appointment to the court-martial of ranking
officers devoted to the Young Turk cause marked the effective end of the symbolic efforts
of the capital’s liberal circles to render justice to the non-Turkish victims. Among the con-
crete effects of the changes in the makeup of the court-martial was the fact that Mustafa
Abdülhalik, whose role in the liquidation of the Armenians was known to one and all, was
set free after paying 1,250 Turkish pounds in bail,72 as was Mustafa Reşad Bey, the former
head of the political department of the police force.73
A few central features emerge from the evolution of the different kinds of legal pro-
cedures initiated by the Ottoman authorities after the signature of the Mudros armistice
to autumn 1920 Mudros armistice. Manifestly, the different governments that succeeded
each other in Constantinople were, with a few minor variations, all concerned to fit the
Ottoman Empire out with a more decent image on the eve of a peace conference that was
going to seal their country’s fate. In the eyes of Turkish political leaders, strong domestic
opposition notwithstanding, it was preferable to institute national legal proceedings that
were likely to play down the crime or even veil its most monstrous episodes than to be
forced to collaborate with a foreign court and comply with its demands – for example, to
furnish it with the official documents it might ask for and turn indicted Ottoman subjects
over to it.
The harassment campaign orchestrated against General Nemrud Mustafa and General
Vehib Pasha marked the limits beyond which it was not possible to go. It shows that there
was never any question of revealing the full scope of the crimes that had been committed
during the war. It stands as one index of a consensus in Turkish society, which refused to
assume its responsibilities and remained firmly rooted in its ethnic-nationalistic logic.

Chapter 10
Mustafa Kemal: From the Young

Turk Connection to the Construction
of the Nation-State
T
here can obviously be no question of discussing the vast subject of the development
of Kemalism and the formation of the Turkish nation-state here. Yet it is impos-
sible to bring the present study to an end without briefly examining the connec-
tions between Kemalism and the Young Turk movement, which official historiography has
studiously ignored. Without entering into the construction of the myth around Mustafa
Kemal, the excesses and silences of which have been laid bare by the pioneering work of Erik
Zürcher, it should be pointed out that, as soon as he had returned to Istanbul in November
1918, the future Turkish leader drew closer to the Young Turk leaders in whose hands Talât
and Enver had put the movement before going into voluntary exile. He joined the Osmanlı
Hürriyetperver Avam Fırkası (Liberal Party of the Ottoman people), the CUP’s successor
organization, alongside Ali Fethi, Hüseyin Rauf, and İsmail Canbolat, and immediately initi-
ated a campaign to bring down Ahmed Tevfik’s government.1 He also established relations
with Kara Kemal, in charge of the CUP’s finances, and Sevkiyatçi Rıza, considered one of
the founding members of Karakol, although it has not been proven that he collaborated
directly with this underground agency of the Unionist movement.2 In any event, the exac-
tions that Turkish bands committed against Christian villages in the Samsun region were
not unrelated to his appointment as inspector of the Ninth Army. The Entente supposedly
demanded that Damad Ferid put an end to these attacks, whereupon Ferid came up with the
idea of sending a senior officer capable of restoring order to Samsun – that is to say, one who
could call a halt to the operations that had certainly been planned by the Unionist network.3
Zürcher suggests that the arrest of several of Kemal’s close associates, such as Ali Fethi (on
17 April) induced him to accept the post, probably with Karakol’s approval. Karakol was
then looking, according to Şeref [Çavuşoğlu], for an eminent personality capable of heading
up the resistance in Anatolia. The first person approached to take on the task, the former
grand vizier Ahmed İzzet, is said to have refused the offer, paving the way for the nomina-
tion of Mustafa Kemal, who had the support, notably, of Dr. Esad [Işık], one of the leaders
of Karakol.4 Kemal, who is known to have been a Unionist from the early days of the move-
ment, but who had no part in the genocidal policies implemented by Talât and Enver, was a
logical “second choice.”5 But what calculations led Ferid to appoint a Young Turk inspector
in Anatolia and to give him full powers? It is hard to imagine that the grand vizier was una-
ware of the general’s long-standing ties to the CUP. Was he deceived by his entourage or even
influenced by Unionist networks? Did he underestimate Kemal’s capacities or did he think,
rather, that his authority would lead to a conflict with the existing networks? There seems to
be no satisfactory explanation for the choice, unless we supposed that Ferid was not hostile

to the emergence of a resistance movement in Anatolia, even if the Young Turks control-
led it. He doubtless hoped to take advantage of this situation to wring concessions from the
Allies during the peace conference.
At any rate, the Congress of Erzerum, which Kemal convened two months after his arrival
in Samsun on 19 May, was held, symbolically, on 23 July 1919, the anniversary of the 1908
revolution.6 It may therefore be safely said that, given the urgency of the situation, the gen-
eral had from the onset rallied the support of a part of the Unionist movement that had
withdrawn to Anatolia, even if the movement did not recognize him as its legitimate leader.
According to Zürcher, the Young Turk networks were of the view that Kemal owed his posi-
tion to them and that this unprecedented situation could not last long. Kemal, for his part,
was aware of the fact that he had no legitimacy within the Unionist movement and that,
in order to acquire the authority he needed, he would have gradually to eliminate all those
who contested his power: Karakol in April 1920, Enver’s supporters in 1921, and the surviving
Unionist leaders in 1926.7
Hardly had the Congress of Erzerum ended then Kemal found himself confronting an
initiative by the Karakol that had been no doubt calculated to remind him that that organi-
zation alone was the legitimate successor to the Young Turk heritage and thus had consider-
able military and financial means. In August 1919, it sent a circular to all military units in
which it announced that it had its own civilian and military structures, with officers, central
headquarters, and general staff. Kemal was unaware at the time that the organization had
decided to use him as a figurehead in hopes of acquiring a more presentable image. It was
probably with a certain irritation that the general learned from Kara Vasıf, the head of the
Karakol, that he had become, unbeknown to himself, the commander-in-chief of a group
that took its orders from Berlin – that is, from Talât in person.8 Thus, in refusing to submit
to the Karakol’s orders, Kemal entered into conflict with the Central Committee members in
exile. He thus effectively joined the already existing current of Unionist cadres who wanted
to free themselves from the control of the organization’s old leadership, which was labor-
ing under the burden of its recent crimes and whose credibility was open to question. We
can sum up the situation by saying that the current that came together around Kemal had
wanted to pursue the Ittihad’s national Turkish plan without having to assume responsibility
for the atrocities perpetrated by its elders. The strategy of drawing closer to the Bolsheviks
that the Karakol put into practice in January 1920 no doubt also contributed to accentuating
the rupture between the two nationalist movements. In this instance, the Kemalists were
not necessarily hostile to this policy as such, which took concrete form in the retreat from
Azerbaijan of forces led by Nuri Pasha and Halil [Kut], respectively Enver’s brother and his
uncle, leaving the way open for the Red Army.9 These concessions, imposed by the circum-
stances, were no doubt intended to strengthen Azerbaijan’s position in Moscow and at the
same time leave independent Armenia in an untenable position on the eve of the Treaty of
Sèvres. Kemal’s perceptible irritation thus had more to do with form than with substance. He
doubtless found it intolerable that the exiles continued to exert an influence from abroad on
the policies adopted by Turkey and had an organization that was supposed to be acting along
the same lines as he was under their direct orders. In deciding to dissolve the Karakol in April
1920,10 Kemal patently sought to assert his authority and unify the nationalist movement. In
so doing, he took the risk of offending the CUP’s military leaders, especially those who had
worked in the Special Organization during the war, with whom Enver remained very popu-
lar.11 In other words, in the first year of its existence, the Kemalist movement was far from
enjoying unanimous support and had to wage a stiff battle in order to assert itself vis-a-vis the
partisans of the Berlin exiles who had been reconverted into left-wing militants.
A misadventure of Filibeli Ahmed Hilmi’s, the vice-president of the Special Organization
and Şakir’s right-hand man in Erzerum in 1915, shows that Kemal was suspicious of the

Mustafa Kemal 801
exiles’ close associates. In November 1920, when Hilmi arrived in Trebizond, intending to go
to the Caucasus in order to convince Enver not to get involved in Anatolian affairs, Kâzım
Karabekir, the commander-in-chief of the eastern front, prevented him from carrying out his
plan.12 There is good reason to suppose that Hilmi did not let him go north on orders from
Kemal.
The result of the January 1920 elections to the Ottoman parliament shows, however, that
the exiles’ supporters continued to control political life in both the provinces and the capital.
Furthermore, a report emanating from the British intelligence services indicates that, of the
164 newly elected deputies, a majority “as such approved of the Policy of extermination of the
Armenian population, but their names have not been included in this list,” and that 24 had
been directly implicated in the violence:13 Adıl Bey and his son Rahmi, elected in Tekirdağ;14
Süleyman Sirri, released from prison on 6 April 1919 and elected in Ismit;15 Bayrakdar Haci
Veli, elected in Eskişehir, who had murdered the former mutesarif of Siirt, Serfiçeli Hilmi
Bey;16 Yusuf Kemal, elected in Kastamonu, implicated, according to a report produced by
Lieutenant Slade on 29 December 1919, “in the policy of deportation”; Ahmed Şükrü, a
member of the Central Committee who had been deported to Malta, elected in Kastamonu;
Suad Bey, elected in Kastamonu, who had had a hand in the deportations; Besim Bey, elected
in Kastamonu, the former secretary of Atıf Bey, the vali of Angora during the massacres;
Bafrali Emin Bey, elected in Samsun; Kiresunli Eşref Bey, elected in Trebizond, who was
implicated in the atrocities perpetuated in Kirason; Hilmi Bey, elected in Angora, who had
been arrested on 16 March 1919 and then freed by the Kemalist forces; Hamitli Ali Rıza Bey,
elected in Kirşehir, a leader of çetes belonging to the Special Organization and the author
of the massacres that took place in Gölbaşi; Haci Tevfik, elected in Çanğırı, who was also
implicated in the deportations in his city; Ömer Lutfi Bey, elected in Amasia; Halil Bey,
elected in Erzincan; Mustafa Kemal, elected in Erzerum; Celal [Bayar], elected in Saruhan,
a former CUP delegate in Smyrna; Alizâde Reşid, elected in Saruhan, the former military
commander of Eskişehir, involved in the massacres and deportations; Hamdullah Subhi Bey,
elected in Adalia, in exile in Germany, where he assured Talât’s liaisons with Istanbul; Fayk
Bey, elected in Denizli; Yünüs Nadi, the editor of Yeni Gun, elected in Smyrna; Tahsin Bey,
the former vali of Erzerum, elected in Smyrna; Haydar Bey, the former vali of Mosul and
Bitlis, elected in Van; Hasim Bey, the former police chief of Smyrna, elected in Karasi; and
Fuad Bey, the former kaymakam of Burhaniye, also elected in Karasi.17
The outcome of these elections constitutes an excellent index of the state of Turkish pub-
lic opinion, which had rallied massively to the nationalist movement and refused to accept
the dismantling of the empire planned by the Allies. The elections also sanctioned the
Liberal Ottoman Entente and its conciliatory policy toward the victors. Far from disavowing
the Kemalist-Ittihadist movement, public opinion threw its support behind the movement’s
policy of harassing the Greeks and Armenians who were trying to reestablish themselves
in their homes and recover their assets. When one takes a close look at the nationalist
movement, it becomes clear that removing non-Turks from its Anatolian sanctuary contin-
ued to be one of its main activities: session after session, the Greek-Armenian committee
attached to the British High Commission compiled lists of the exactions committed by the
Kemalists-Ittihadists in the provinces.18 It is noteworthy that, early in March 1920, opera-
tions were even conducted in the immediate outskirts of Istanbul, in Üsküdar and Yalova,
whose Christian inhabitants continued moving to the European side of the Bosphorus.19
In the interior, the harassment of non-Turks took much more violent forms: massacres were
reported in Cilicia in February–March 1920, and acts of pillage and murder were committed
throughout the country.20 In Boğazlian and Kayseri in mid-April, the Kemalist forces even
proceed to conscript Armenians by force.21 In Bursa, the Milli set up committees that sum-
moned taxpayers and demanded 25 per cent of the estimated value of their assets. Those

who resisted were turned over to toughs who took on the task of ensuring that the directives
were carried out.22
In a report dated 10 March 1920, the British authorities attempted to evaluate the possible
effects of the drastic conditions imposed by the peace treaty with Turkey. They were of the
opinion that serious threats of massacres of Christians existed in the areas controlled by the
Kemalists.23
In other words, in mid-March 1920, the inter-allied forces had no choice but to take
military control of Istanbul24 by landing troops and increasing the size of their fleet there.25
Questions of security aside, the Allies were also acutely aware that they were going to have
to make a show of force should Turkey refuse to sign the peace treaty.26 This deployment
of Allied military forces, effected on the morning of 16 March 1920, did not meet with any
real resistance in Istanbul, where five Turkish soldiers were killed during the landing.27 The
deployment of French and English forces in the capital and the subsequent arrest of war
criminals did not, however, destabilize the nationalist movement. Apparently confident of
their capabilities, the nationalists were not convinced, according to the British intelligence
services, that the Allies were prepared to occupy more than just the capital.28 It is even prob-
able that the nationalist movement turned the repercussions of this operation to advantage in
order to reinforce its position in Anatolia, make its actions more credible, and distract atten-
tion from the heavy charges leveled at most of the leaders of the movement. The remarkably
well-orchestrated communications about the Anatolian resistance to European imperialism
made it possible to make many forget the accusations of mass murder. The progressive Islamic
posture adopted by the Milli movement also made it possible to mobilize support for Turkey
in the Muslim countries under the yoke of European imperialism. The position taken by the
“Young Turk government now in Berlin,” as described by a British diplomat stationed in the
German capital, was unambiguous: “The terrible war which broke out after the armistice in
Asia, it is the product of the English policy of the last eighteen months.”29 In other words, the
Kemalist-Ittihadist movement gave the British seeking to dismantle the Ottoman Empire as
good as it got, by attempting, in particular, to destabilize some of Britain’s colonies.
There can be no question of examining these matters in detail here. It may, however, be
observed that a French diplomat stationed in Berlin had no doubt that an alliance had been
forged between the Kemalist-Ittihadists and the Soviets, who were considering attacking the
Entente “in two direction: toward Asiatic Turkey and western Persia by way of Azerbaijan
and Georgia, and toward eastern Persia and India by way of Turkestan.” There had even
been discussion of the idea of putting “the leadership of the movement ... in the hands of
the Turkish leaders who were already present in the area: Enver Pasha in Tashkent and his
brother Nuri Pasha in Azerbaijan.” Also mentioned was “a sort of Pan-Islamist conference”
in Munich, in Bavaria, and another “in Partenskirschen, a small town near the border where
Cemal Pasha [was] living”; the participants included Talât, Dr. Nâzım, Bahaeddin Şakir,
Cemal Azmi, Bedri Bey, Aziz Bey, “three Russians, two of them officers, two former German
officers, a Tunisian, an Indian, a Persian, an Egyptian, and a Bulgarian.” During a meeting
of the Ittihadist Central Committee in which non-members also participated, Talât is sup-
posed to have declared: “Lenin and Trotsky have agreed, in a treaty concluded with Enver, to
provide 150,000 men for the Asian campaign,” including 40,000 Turkmen “whom the former
commander of the Army of Mesopotamia, Halil Pasha, is currently organizing with the help
of several German officers.” According to information obtained by the French diplomat just
mentioned, Talât “is said to have described this policy as revolutionary opportunism, affirm-
ing that the Young Turks had to try to sow confusion everywhere so as to cause the English
and French as many complications as possible.”30 Also worth noting is a short trip that Talât
made to Naples around 16 April 1920, and then to Florence between 22 and 24 April, where
he was to meet with a representative of Enver’s, Zami Bey, for the purpose of coordinating

Mustafa Kemal 803
their activities.31 These grand Islamic-progressive maneuvers were crowned by the famous
Baku Congress, which, the British S.I.S. reported served, above all, to strengthen the col-
laboration between Unionists and Bolsheviks. The terms of this collaboration, according
to the same source, were negotiated in Baku by Cemal Pasha, Bedri Bey, and Halil [Kut];
the main objective was an insurrection against the British in Afghanistan and an invasion
of northwestern Persia under Halil’s command. Another member of the Ittihadist Central
Committee, Küçük Talât, was appointed head of the Baku “translation bureau” – that is, a
propaganda agency.32 These operations were less an anti-imperialist campaign than a pro-
longation of the party’s Pan-Turkish ambitions. Another S.I.S. report, based on documents
confiscated from “a Turkish agent who had recently returned from Baku by way of Grozny,
Novorsik, and Trebizond,” shows that the Anatolian movement was in constant relation with
its Caucasian networks.33 It also reveals, citing “first-hand information,” that the Bolshevik-
Turkish agreement provided for “simultaneous attack upon Georgia and Armenia by the
Soviet and the Turks [...] in order, however, to ‘liquidate’ Armenia.”34
That said, it is by no means certain that Mustafa Kemal was associated with or even
informed of these projects, which show that at the time the members of the Young Turk
Central Committee believed that although they had briefly gone into exile, they and they
alone had legitimate authority over Turkey. There must, however, have been a degree of col-
laboration between the Ittihadist and Kemalist movements in Anatolia, where Kemal was
in the ascendant. It is, on the other hand, not certain that Kemal controlled the Ottoman
League, whose general secretariat, based in Geneva, sought to convince the peace confer-
ence of the validity of the Turkish point of view. A 6 January 1920 Ottoman League circular
declares that “300 million people, from the depths of Asia and the Pacific to the remotest
parts of Africa – a whole world – today have their eyes riveted on Constantinople and its
Caliph; a whole world is following, with breathless emotion, the great drama that will unfold
in Paris and the fate that the Conference will mete out to the valiant Turkish people.”35 The
June 1920 assassination of Grand Vizier Damad Ferid shows that the Kemalist organization
already had active branches in Istanbul that were independent of the Ittihad’s structures.36
In 1920, the competition between Ittihadists and Kemalists was obvious. Among the docu-
ments intercepted by the S.I.S. about “a Turkish Bolshevik delegate” who had gone from
Baku to Istanbul, the intelligence officers found a letter dated 27 July 1920 in Baku addressed
to “Herrn H-Jafer Sa’iyd,” Hardenburgstraße 4, Berlin. This was known to be Talât’s address.
The letter had been sent by a certain “Dr. Mehmed”; the British thought that Mehmed was
Bahaeddin Şakir. The letter alludes to the activities of a certain Ali – most probably Enver –
and a plan to create new “information organizations,” one of them in Bern, Switzerland.37
This suggests that the Ittihad also maintained a structured network in Istanbul, but did
not control the Ottoman League, which was based in Geneva and directed, rather, by the
Liberals.
The military operations targeting Armenia in fall 1920 were, in contrast, clearly con-
ducted by the Fourteenth Army Corps under the command of Kâzım Karabekir, which
received its orders from the Kemalist government. While these operations took place in the
strategy aimed to make the clauses of the Treaty of Sèvres inoperative, they had another
much more ambitious, albeit veiled, objective. “Armenia should be eliminated politically
and physically,” ordered a wire sent by the Kemalist government to Kâzım Karabekir on
8 November 1920.38 Another cabled order that was intercepted by Ottoman and British
intelligence services is just as revealing when it comes to the Kemalist regime’s intentions.
Dated 25 September 1920 and signed by Kemal in person, it gave the army commanders
instructions about the operations planned against Armenia39 (which is described in it as an
“obstacle to communications with the Muslim peoples” to which Turkey had “promised” aid)
and defined the mission of the “Army of the Arax,” charged with “opening and maintaining

communications with the Allied forces toward the east and northeast.”40 These orders were
supplemented by an encrypted 8 November telegram that recommended “achieving our goal
stage by stage ... while acting as if we wanted peace.”41 The military operations that followed,
culminating in the Sovietization of Armenia, were simply the logical consequence of these
orders. By offering itself to the Bolsheviks, Caucasian Armenia escaped a third phase of the
genocide, this time planned in advance by the Kemalist government. In a way, the Kemalists’
commitment to genocidal action against the Caucasian Armenians marked the passage from
witness of the original Young Turk movement to the new Unionist wave unified by Mustafa
Kemal. While there were manifest fine differences between the practices of these two, some-
times intermingled, groups, both had basically the same ethnic-nationalist ideology. Kemal
continued to build up the Turkish nation-state of which his predecessors had dreamed, even
if it did not have the proportions originally envisaged.
By executing Mehmed Talât in Berlin on 15 March 1921, Bahaeddin Şakir and Cemal
Azmi in Berlin on 17 April 1922, and Ahmed Cemal in Tiflis on 25 July 1922 – Enver
was killed on 4 August 1922 by a Bolshevik brigade – the Armenians quite involuntarily
rendered a service to the Kemalists, ridding them of their main Ittihadist rivals. Another
element doubtless helped strengthen Kemal’s position within the Young Turk movement:
the British liberated the criminals they had been holding on Malta. It was Kemal’s gov-
ernment that had negotiated the release of these men, from which the Young Turks of
the first generation profited. In mid-June 1921, the British military had suggested the idea
of an exchange of prisoners to Britain’s diplomats.42 The politicians agreed on the condi-
tion that the Young Turk be brought to trial before “Turkish or other” courts, the more so
as the S.I.S. was having “trouble amassing evidence” capable of ensuring that “exemplary
sentences” would be pronounced, in conformity with “the clauses about [the] sanctions”
provided for in the Treaty of Sèvres. H. Rumbold agreed, notwithstanding, that it would be
necessary to have the British prisoners released “before winter.”43 The intransigence of the
government in Ankara had paid off; in the end, London agreed to release, unconditionally,
the 112 prisoners on Malta. On the afternoon of 25 October, 70 men were put aboard the
Chrysanthemum and another 42 aboard the Montenol; both ships were bound for Istanbul.44
This unconditional liberation enhanced Mustafa Kemal’s growing prestige but at the same
time exposed him to the renewed ambitions of the Ittihadist leaders who had been freed
thanks to him. When Kara Kemal met with his namesake, the general, in Ismit between
16 and 20 January 1923 – Zürcher points out that Mustafa Kemal does not breathe a word
about this in his memoirs – he was invited to confer with his friends about the CUP’s
future role.45 A Congress of the “CUP” was organized in April 1923 in Constantinople in
the home of Mehmed Cavid, the biggest home. All the members of the Ittihad’s Central
Committee and Political Bureau came, except, of course, for those who had been executed
by the Armenians. In attendance, in addition to the man who hosted the congress, Mehmed
Cavid, were Dr. Nâzım, Dr. Rüsûhî, Ahmed Şükrü, Kara Kemal, Hüseyin Cahid [Yalçin],
Filibeli Ahmed Hilmi, Yenibahçeli Nail, Çolak Selâheddin, Vehbi Bey, Ahmed Nesimi
[Sayman], Hüseyinzâde Ali [Turan], Rahmi [Evranos], Küçük Talât [Muşkara], and, prob-
ably, İsmail Canbolat.46
After two days of deliberations, the congress decided not to take part in the upcoming
legislative elections and, rather, decided to establish a new program for the reformed CUP; it
offered to make Mustafa Kemal the leader of the party, in the hope that it would thus obtain
a chance to revive it. Kemal obviously refused, as was foreseeable. He did not pass up the
occasion to recall that the CUP had been dissolved in 1918, so that no one now had a right
to speak on its behalf; this was one way among others of telling these criminal “patriots”
that their time had passed. Zürcher observed that a new opposition, taking the form of an
Ittihadist network, nevertheless emerged shortly after the elections to the Grand Assembly,

Mustafa Kemal 805
in June 1923, although the candidates it put forward had all been approved of by Mustafa
Kemal in person.47
The adventure of the CUP did not really come to an end until 1926, when most of its rank-
ing leaders were executed. Officially, a plot on Kemal’s life was discovered in June 1926. It led
to the arrest of the Ittihadist leadership and gave rise to a first trial that took place from 26
June to 13 July 1926 before the court in Smyrna, with Kel Ali [Çetinkaya],48 a former member
of the Special Organization who had gone over to the Kemalists, as its presiding judge.49 The
man assigned the task of killing Kemal, Ziya Hurşid, ostensibly confessed that he had planned
the assassination with Abdülkadır and Ahmed Şükrü, a member of the Central Committee
who supposedly provided the conspirators with weapons and money. It clearly seems, how-
ever, that this “plot” involving members of the CUP’s Central Committee was nothing but a
show staged by the Kemalists, who wanted to rid themselves of the last Ittihadists “legally.”50
The first trial culminated in death sentences for 11 men, who were executed on 12 July, the
night after the verdict was handed down: İsmail Canbolat, Ahmed Şükrü, Ziya Hurşid, Halis
Turgut, Colonel Arif, Rüştü, Hafız Mehmed, Rasim, and Abdülkadır.51”
It was, however, the second part of the trial, which began in Ankara on 1 August 1926,
which made it possible to do away with the crème de la crème of the CUP for good and all.
In the dock this time were Hüseyin Rauf, Abdülhak Adnan, Mehmed Cavid, Dr. Nâzım,
Hüseyinzâde Ali [Turan], Yenibahçeli Nail, Filibeli Ahmed Hilmi, Hüseyin Cahid, Küçük
Talât, Hüseyin Avnı, Kara Vasıf, Midhat Sükrü [Bleda], and Ahmed Nesimi [Sayman].
Especially harsh treatment was meted out to these CUP leaders, who were judged on three
counts: 1) “the CUP’s irresponsible wartime” policies and “abuses of power”; 2) planning
to replace Mustafa Kemal in 1921; and 3) planning Kemal’s murder at the 1923 Unionist
Congress.52 Thus, Kemal did not hesitate to question the actions of the CUP leadership dur-
ing the first First World War; in so doing, he obviously wished to settle accounts with these
criminals and dissociate his regime from them, even while lending credibility to the thesis
that a conspiracy had been hatched against him. By having Cavid, Nâzım, Nail, and Hilmi
hanged on 26 August 1926 – the other accused men were given prison terms – he punished
the main organizers of the Armenian genocide still alive, without making direct reference to
it. Zürcher seems convinced that the “complot de Smyrne” was merely a pretext for liquidat-
ing the first generation of Young Turks.53 This internal purge of the Ittihad’s ranking hierar-
chy should not, however, be allowed to obscure the fact that the purge itself made it possible
for the CUP to survive under the new name “People’s Republican Party.” The party’s cadres
were basically Young Turks, almost all of whom had been implicated in the destruction of
the Ottoman Armenians: Colonel İsmet [Inönü], prime minister and, later, president of the
republic; Ali [Çetinkaya], the presiding judge at the supreme court; Celâl [Bayar], finance
minister and, later, president of the republic; Tevfik Rüştu [Aras], foreign minister; Cemil
[Urbaydın], interior minister; Ali Fethi [Okyar], prime minister; Kâzım [Özalp], president of
the National Assembly; Receb [Peker], the party’s secretary general and, , later, a minister;
and Şükrü [Kaya], foreign minister and, subsequently, minister of the interior.54
We could add the names of dozens of deputies and high-ranking state officials to the list,
among them Hüseyin Cahit [Yalçin], a former member of the Central Committee; Sabit
Sağıroğlu, the former vali of Mamuret ul-Aziz; and Mustafa Abdülhalik, the former vali of
Bitlis and Aleppo, who later became finance minister and then president of parliament.

Conclusion
A
t the end of the grueling task that writing a book like this one represents, I have the
feeling that I have made a new contribution to research on the subject, but I am also
well aware that many of the historical points touched on here will call for further
work from scholars for a long time to come. The corpus of documents that provides the basis
for the present volume is, to be sure, extensive, and helped me shed light on hitherto unex-
plored aspects of this outbreak of mass violence, but it did not allow me to penetrate to the
depths of the Young Turk system; many unknowns remain. I was able to observe the activities
of the Young Turk Central Committee only through indirect sources – as a rule, European
intelligence services – in the case of a revolutionary organization like the CUP, such activi-
ties are by nature secret. Similarly, such access as we have to the internal procedures of the
Special Organization continues to depend exclusively on the memoirs of its former members
or foreign observers. There are no known archival funds for these two organizations, the
veritable instigators and organizers of the destruction of the Ottoman Armenians, and this
constitutes a major lacuna. A few hints, however, as we have indicated now and again in the
course of this study, suggest that materials emanating from the Young Turk movement have
survived and are probably held in Ankara today. When the time comes, they will surely shed
decisive light on the circumstances surrounding the liquidation of the Armenians.
On the other hand, I believe that I have provided a very close analysis of the construc-
tion of the CUP’s ideology and the party’s ethno-nationalistic radicalization. I also think
that I have brought out the nature of the friendly or conflictual relations that the Armenian
Committees, Hnchak or Dashnak, maintained with the Ittihadist movement. When one
compares these experiences, one discovers a striking cultural and even, in certain respects,
ideological affinity between the groups in question. By exhuming the most important of the
texts that express the Armenian revolutionaries’ profound convictions about their Young
Turk colleagues, and vice versa, I think that I have seized their points of convergence and,
above all, the latent antagonism haunting them. It is clear that their respective conceptions
of the empire’s future were not all that different and that in both groups there were men con-
vinced of the possibility of going a part of the road together, before circumstances conspired
to promote a radicalization of the Young Turk Central Committee.
That said, it is no longer possible today to defend the thesis that a programmed destruc-
tion of the Armenian population was set in motion by Abdülhamid and brought to comple-
tion by the Young Turks. The Hamidian practice of partial amputation of the Armenian
social body for the purpose, as it were, of reducing it to politically acceptable proportions,
cannot be put on the same level as the policy of ethnic homogenization conceived by the
CUP. Moreover, it has been established that the process that culminated in the perpetration
of the genocide was signposted by a series of decisions that reveal the progressive radicaliza-
tion of the Young Turk party-state, motivated notably by the serious military setbacks that it
suffered on the Caucasian front. This affirmation must, however, be tempered in view of the
lessons furnished by an attentive examination of the ideological development of the men in

control of the state. Their desire to homogenize Asia Minor, to Turkify this territory, obvi-
ously went back a long way and certainly constituted the starting point for the collective
thought process that eventually culminated, after going through a number of stages, in the
plan for the physical destruction of the Ottoman Armenians. The plan to deport Greeks
from the Aegean seacoast and Armenians from the eastern provinces concocted by the
Young Turk Central Committee in February 1914 apparently reflected – as Taner Akçam
has clearly shown – its desire to modify the demographic makeup of Asia Minor, to make it
a “Turkish” space but not necessarily to liquidate its non-Turkish elements. The Armenians,
who were initially one of the party’s secondary priorities after the Greeks, were, it seems,
initially supposed to go settle the Syrian and Mesopotamian deserts, areas considered to lie
outside the Turkish heartland. But the CUP’s ambitions were not limited to these population
shifts alone. Muslim non-Turks, ranked according to their perceived capacities for assimila-
tion to the proposed “Turkish” model, were also deported in order to fill the vacuum left in
various places by the deportation of the Greek and Armenian populations. This vast inter-
nal manipulation of historical groups, reflecting a nationalist ideology and a geo-strategic
logic, took its place within a still more ambitious plan that sought to create a geographic and
demographic continuum with the Muslim or Turkish-speaking populations of the Caucasus.
The stinging defeat dealt out to the Ottoman army in Sarıkamiş in late December 1914 not
only convinced the Young Turk Central Committee of the impossibility of achieving its
ambitions, but no doubt also induced it to compensate for these reverses by adopting a more
radical policy toward the Armenian population. This stage in the radicalization process may
be dated 22–25 March 1915. If the new, more radical policy did not enjoy the unanimous sup-
port of the Young Turk Central Committee, it also did not elicit strong opposition.
The region-by-region examination of the process of deportation and extirpation also tends
to show that at the outset, the Young Turks’ liquidation plan bore only on the populations of
the six eastern vilayets considered to be the Armenians’ historical lands. However, the two-
month lag observable in the operations affecting the Armenian colonies in Anatolia, which
were integrated into their predominantly Turkish environment, can also be interpreted as
the consummation – late, to be sure – of the liquidation program. The difference in the
treatments meted out to conscripts enrolled in the Third Army and men from the eastern
provinces, almost all of whom were eliminated locally, whereas the recruits from the com-
munities of Anatolia served on the front in the Dardanelles or in the Fourth Army without
being subjected to serious mistreatment, plainly shows that the Young Turk plan had been
intelligently elaborated. Depending on where the people affected came from, the plan pro-
vided for immediate liquidation of the men, recruits or not, or rational exploitation of their
skills and labor-power. Differential treatment is also observable as far as the rest of the popu-
lation – women, children, and old people – is concerned. Study of the methods and means
employed to deport these people indicates that the convoys that set out from the eastern
vilayets were systematically destroyed en route and that only a small minority of deportees
arrived in their “places of relegation.” It can be seen, in contrast, that the Armenians from
the colonies in Anatolia or Thrace were sent to Syria with their families, often by rail, and
that they got at least as far as Cilicia.
The ultimate stage of the destruction process, which we have called the “second phase
of the genocide,” was aimed precisely at these survivors, most of who came from Anatolia
or Cilicia. The material context for these new acts of violence, the concentration camps in
Syria or Upper Mesopotamia, was long terra incognita for scholars. Returning to a preliminary
study of this subject, I have situated, on the basis of a few converging indices, the ultimate
decision to destroy these remaining deportees in late February or early March 1916. This deci-
sion affected some 500,000 surviving deportees who had reached Syria and Mesopotamia six
months and more earlier, and sometimes even adapted to their new environment so well as to

Conclusion 809
be able to support themselves there. In this precise case, two clashing logics – military needs
and the desire to liquidate all the survivors without exception – can clearly be discerned,
against the background of the rivalry between the leaders of the Central Committee and
the region’s military commander, Ahmed Cemal. The arrival of delegates of the Young Turk
party in Syria and the fact that the Council of Ministers appointed the main executioners
of the eastern vilayets to head the regions in which deportees were to be found are so many
concrete signs announcing the “second phase of the genocide,” which ran from April to
December 1916. In many respects, this phase illustrates the Young Turk Central Committee’s
genocidal will even better than the first, for the Central Committee could not, in this case,
take shelter behind its discourse about security and its theory about a plot against the Turkish
state. Concretely, it set out to liquidate a population of which the great majority was made
up of women and children. The general slaughter organized, notably, in Syria even seems to
flow from a virtually pathological animosity toward the survivors, at antipodes from anything
resembling rational governance.
More generally, it appears that the procedure elaborated by the Central Committee
was the fruit of extended reflection on the demographic composition of Anatolia and Asia
Minor, with the ambition of remodeling the human geography of these regions. It is this
geographer’s logic, the basis for the conception of the liquidation plan, on which we have
focused precisely in order to reconstitute the process of destruction itself, the object of the
fourth part of the present study.
A study of mass crimes such as genocide can obviously not be restricted to an examina-
tion of the acts of the “criminal state,” even if the circumstances that led to the unleashing
of such violence inevitably fascinate the historian. The historiography of the genocide of
the Armenians long left the victims’ experience to one side. Vahakn Dadrian, to whom we
owe a great deal, long affirmed that sources provided by the survivors themselves could not
be taken into account in so controversial a case. He himself deliberately limited himself to
Turkish sources on the one hand and German and Austro-Hungarian sources on the other,
all the better to “prove” that the genocide really occurred. In so doing, he focused his gaze
almost exclusively on the executioners and ignored the real fate of the victims. Their fate,
in contrast, has its place in my overall project. The aim here is to let the victims speak,
thereby recovering their lived experience, something that does not require proof of any
kind whatsoever. After steeping myself for several years in accounts produced “as the events
unfolded” – just what that means is defined in the present work – I came to the conclusion
that it was not only possible, but essential to exploit the Armenian sources, comparing them
with materials provided by diplomats and missionaries and also with each other. The two
main archives that I have exploited here, held respectively by the Armenian Patriarchate in
Jerusalem (the Monastery of Saint James) and the Nubar Library of the Armenian General
Benevolent Union in Paris, comprise a unique corpus that allowed me to make a compre-
hensive study of the geography of the genocide, thanks to some 10,000 pages of handwritten
documents. In other words, they enabled me to compile an account of the summary execu-
tions in the eastern regions, of each convoy of deportees, the routes they took, the killing
fields through which they passed, and, more generally, the experience of the “long march”;
it revealed the natural selection that took place en route and the characteristics of those
categories of Armenians whom the Young Turk Central Committee considered leaving alive,
the better to integrate them into its plan to Turkify Asia Minor. As the Young Turks saw
matters, young children – preferably little girls – and older girls or women were destined to
reinforce the “Turkish nation” after going through a ritual of integration into the dominant
group that was borrowed from the Muslim religion. As a Young Turk officer put it, Armenian
women with a certain level of education were predestined to accelerate the modernization
of the Turkish family and Turkish society. The many different cases described in the present

volume show that Young Turk nationalist ideology is rooted in a form of racism directed
against the collective identity of a group rather than in individual biological rejection of the
kind later practiced by the Nazi regime. Careful examination of all these secondary effects
of the genocide best illustrates how closely the murder of the Armenians was bound up with
the construction of the Turkish nation.
Another aspect of the Young Turk plan seems to me to have been brought out clearly here –
the systematic seizure of the individual and collective property of the Ottoman Armenians,
which went hand-in-hand with the attempt to form a Turkish middle class of businessmen.
The regime’s sociologist, Ziya Gökalp, provided the theory for this program, baptized Millî
İktisat (National Economy). We have analyzed the way it worked. It obviously constituted
the socio-economic complement to the mass crimes. It served as both a justification and an
incentive. It has been shown here that it benefited the Young Turk elite and the party-state
above all, but all other social strata as well, notably those who participated in the Young Turk
movement without necessarily sharing the extremist ideology of its leaders. The lust for gain
no doubt did much to radicalize men who under other circumstances would not have acted as
they did because they would have been held back by moral principles of religious inspiration.
The action of the party-state itself and the propaganda that it methodically orchestrated to
stigmatize the Armenians as a group did the rest.
On the basis of an inventory of those chiefly to blame for this genocide, whether civilian
and military officials or local notables, it can be affirmed that the individuals who were the
most deeply implicated in the mass violence often came from the most marginal social groups
and, it must be emphasized, were often members of minorities with roots in the Caucasus.
This holds for the Çerkez and Chechens in particular, who it seems safe to say had accounts
to settle with their painful history and were easily led to identify the Armenians with their
Russian oppressors. The major role played by “the” Kurds, which is stressed by Turkish his-
toriography and also by many Western scholars, turns out, upon examination, to be much
less clear-cut than has been affirmed. Indeed, it comes down to the active participation of
nomadic Kurdish tribes and only rarely involves sedentary villagers, who were encouraged
by the Special Organization to take what they could from deportees already stripped of their
most valuable assets. There can be no doubt that Turkish historiography ultimately contami-
nated independent scholars who were not necessarily in a position to assess the accuracy of
this dogma that had its practical uses for those seeking to shake off the burden of a violent
past at the expense of a group that is itself stigmatized in our day.
Examining the last issue discussed in the present study, the trials of the authors of the
genocide or, more specifically, the attempts to bring them to justice undertaken by both
the Ottoman authorities and international institutions, has allowed me to evaluate the
determination of the Ottoman state and Turkish society to assume their responsibility for
the liquidation of the Armenians. This chapter of the history treated here clearly illustrates
the incapacity of the great majority to consider these acts punishable crimes; it confronts us
with a self-justifying discourse that persists in our own day, a kind of denial of the “original
sin,” the act that gave birth to the Turkish nation, regenerated and re-centered in a puri-
fied space. That said, these parodies of justice made it possible to assemble a great deal of
judicial material – evidence given to a formalistic court-martial that was interested above
all in pinning the blame for the crimes committed on a small group of men, the better to
free the Ottoman state from its obligations and provide the nascent Turkish nation with a
certain “virginity.”
Parallel to these legal proceedings, the repeated attempts to interfere in them by Unionist
circles show that the new authorities never succeeded in throwing off the Young Turks’
tutelage. The sabotage of the legal proceedings, the theft of incriminating evidence, and the
organization of the flight and transfer to Anatolia of the accused that were undertaken from

Conclusion 811
the Anatolian and, soon, Kemalist sanctuary attest the influence of the Young Turk net-
work that at most sought, by promoting Mustafa Kemal, to flee the gaze of the international
community.
Finally, I would like to insist on the preparations made mainly by the British and French
governments to bring the Young Turk criminals before an international “High Court.” The
legal categories elaborated from February 1919 on by the Committee of Responsibilities and
its various subcommittees operating within the framework of the preliminary peace confer-
ence did not, it is true, find practical application. They did, however, provide direct inspi-
ration for the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide
adopted by the U.N. in 1948.
The mass of material1 emanating from the Information Bureau of the Patriarchate of
Constantinople that has been exploited throughout this study shows that the reconstructed
Armenian institutions were resolved to identify those responsible for the extirpation of the
Armenian population. The Armenians continued to be those best informed about the issue,
those most familiar with the Young Turk elites. In addition to numerous lists of those respon-
sible in the various regions, the Information Bureau also drew up lists of the “major culprits,”
while explaining the philosophy on which the compilation of such lists was based.2 The
Turks have elevated some of these individuals to the rank of national heroes; others formed
the exclusive circles that helped Mustafa Kemal forge contemporary Turkey.
The formula “destroying in order to build” perhaps best reflects, with only a touch of exag-
geration, the logic that dominated the Young Turk regime in 1915 and that still permeates
the ideological and cultural foundations of a society which rejects its past.

Notes
Introduction
1. The historian Fuat Dundar has just exhumed, from the Archives of the prime minister in Istanbul,
ethnographic maps and censuses carried out just before or during the First World War. Previously,
we knew of their existence only from accounts by those who had seen them (see especially the
report of the German diplomat H. Mordtmann, infra, p. 626, n. 7). These maps and censuses were
put to use in the effort to modify the demographic make-up of certain regions and eradicate cer-
tain populations in order to replace them with others: Fuat Dundar, “La dimension ingénierie de
la Turcisation de l’Anatolie: Les cartes ethnographiques et les recensements,” paper presented at a
conference in Salzburg, 14–17 April 2005.
2. Raymond Kévorkian, L’Extermination des déportés arméniens ottomans dans les camps de concentra-
tion de Syrie-Mésopotamie (1915–1916), la Deuxième phase du génocide, RHAC II (1998).
3. M. Şükrü Hanioğlu, The Young Turks in Opposition, Oxford University Press 1995; M. Şükrü
Hanioğlu, Preparation for a Revolution: The Young Turks, 1902–1908, Oxford University Press
2001.
4. Krieger, Եոզղատի Հայասպանութեան Վաւերագրական Պատմութիւնը [Documentary
History of the Massacre of the Armenians of Yozgat], New York 1980.
5. Vahakn Dadrian, Histoire du génocide arménien, Paris 1996; Vahakn Dadrian, “The Naïm-
Andonian Documents on the World War One Destruction of the Ottoman Armenians – The
Anatomy of a Genocide,” International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, vol. 18:3, pp. 311–60
(1986); Vahakn Dadrian, “The Role of Turkish Physicians in the World War I Genocide of the
Armenians,” Holocaust & Genocide Studies, vol. 1:2, pp. 169–92 (1986); Vahakn Dadrian, “The Role
of the Special Organization in the Armenian Genocide during the First World War,” in Minorities
in Wartime, P. Panayi (éd.), Oxford 1993; Vahakn Dadrian, “Documentation of the Armenian
Genocide in German and Austrian Sources,” in The Widening Circle of Genocide, I. Charny (ed.),
New Brunswick, NJ, 1994; The Armenian Genocide in Official Turkish Sources. Collected Essays,
special issue of Journal of Political and Military Sociology, 1995; Vahakn Dadrian, Հայկական
Ցեղասպանութիւնը Խորհրդարանային եւ Պատմագիտական Քննարկուﬓերով [The
Armenian Genocide in Parlementary and Historiographical Sources], Watertown 1995.
6. Erik J. Zürcher, The Unionist Factor: The Rôle of the Committee of Union and Progress in the Turkish
National Movement, 1905–1926, Leiden 1984; Erik J. Zürcher, Turkey: A Modern History, London
and New York 1999.
7. Cf. Takvim-ı Vakayi, no 2611, 28 July 1916, pp. 1–5, text of the decree modifying the internal
Constitution of the millet. The circumstances surrounding this dissolution are explained at
length below, pp. 850–851.
8. Public Record Office, FO 371/4174, n° 118377, letter from High Commissioner Calthorpe to Lord
Curzon, 1 August 1919. See infra, pp. 801, etc., on the activities of this committee.
9. Zaven Der Yéghiayan, Պատրիարքական Յուշերս [My Patriarchal Memoirs], Cairo 1947, p. 277.
10. Ibidem, pp. 301–2 at 304. Not until the session of 17/30 August 1919 did the Political Council
decide to put the Bureau under its direct authority.
11. Reports prepared by the Bureau were often published in the French-language daily The Renaissance,
which appeared from December 1918 to spring 1920 under the direction of Garabed Nurian and
Dikran Chayan, a former member of the Council of State; they were assisted by Dr. Topjian.

The patriarch informs us that the Patriarchate financed publication of this newspaper (ibidem,
pp. 302–3).
12. Ibidem, p. 304. Faits et documents. épisodes des massacres arméniens de Dyarbékir, Constantinople
1919; Thomas Mgrdichian, Տիգրանակերտի Նահանգին Ջարդերը [The Massacres in the
Province of Dyarbekir], Cairo 1919; Sebuh Aguni, Միլիոն մը Հայերու Ջարդի Պատմութիւնը
[History of the Massacre of One Million Armenians], Constantinople 1920. The author, the former
editor of the daily Zhamanag, was the first to publish a global study of the massacres, basing his
work “on a large number of documents at the Patriarchate’s disposal.”
13. On the formation of the commission of inquiry, see Taner Akçam, Insan Haklari ve Ermeni Sorunu,
Ankara 1999, pp. 445–6.
14. On 5 March 1919, the Council of Ministers nevertheless examined a report by Sâmi Bey that
suggested abolishing the provincial courts martial and bringing all the cases involving the mas-
sacres and deportations before an exclusively military (rather than a mixed) court-martial based
in Constantinople (La Renaissance, no. 82, 7 March 1919).
15. Zaven Der Yéghiayan, Memoirs, op. cit., p. 303. These archives are still there today. They were
“rediscovered” by Krieger in the 1960s, microfilmed, and then classified in some fifty boxes.
Part I Young Turks and Armenians Intertwined

in the Opposition (1895–1908)
1 Abdülhamid and the Ottoman Opposition

1. Hanioğlu, The Young Turks in Opposition, op. cit., p. 71.
2. Dr. Çerkez Mehmed Reşit Bey (1872–1919), vali of Dyarbekir in 1915. We shall later have occasion
to observe his impressive resolve to liquidate the Armenians of his vilayet.
3. Stephan H. Astourian, “Sur la formation de l’identité turque moderne et le génocide arménien:
du préjugé au nationalisme moderne,” acte du colloque L’Actualité du génocide des Arméniens, Paris
1999, pp. 35–7.
4. Sêlanikli Nâzım (c. 1870–1926), a physician trained in the Military Medical School in
Constantinople, an emblematic figure of the Committee of Union and Progress from 1905 to 1922
and, as we shall see, one of the main organizers of the eradication of the Armenians. On his pres-
ence in Paris, see Hanioğlu, The Young Turks in Opposition, op. cit., p. 74.
5. Ahmed Agayev (1869–1939) became one of the ideologues of Turkish nationalism and an eminent
member of the CUP’s Central Committee; as such, he was arrested and deported to Malta by the
British in 1919. A leader of the Social Democratic Hnchak Party, Stepanos Sapah-Giulian, often
met with Agayev during his stay in Paris: see Stepanos Sapah-Giulian, Պատասխանատուները
[The Responsibles], Providence 1916, p. 134.
6. S. Sapah-Giulian (1861, Shahuk [Nakhichevan]–1928, New York) was educated in Tiflis, where he
joined the SDHP; banished by the Czarist police, he fled to Paris, where he attended the Institute
of Political Science as a student of Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu’s: Sapah-Giulian, The Responsibles, op.
cit., p. 151.
7. This plan, which was made public on 11 May, had been prepared by the ambassadors of the pow-
ers stationed in Constantinople on the basis of Article 61 of the 1878 Treaty of Berlin, which
provided for limited autonomy for the eastern vilayets inhabited by Armenians.
8. Sapah-Giulian, The Responsibles, op. cit., p. 140.
10. Sapah-Giulian, The Responsibles, op. cit., p. 145. Nubar granted the SDHP an annual subsidy of
300 pounds sterling to help finance publication of its newspapers.
11. Ibidem, p. 148.
The fall 1895 massacres were aimed, first and foremost, at the Armenian population of the
six eastern vilayets. They were launched in October, at the very moment that the sultan
was signing (on 17 October) the reform plan of “11 May” after several months of resistance

Notes 815
to it. The correlation reform-massacre did not go unnoticed by the diplomats stationed in
the empire; it constituted a challenge for the Young Turks, who were seeking at the time to
create a unified organization against Abdülhamid around the themes of union and order.
13. Ahmed Rıza, “Chrétien, musulman et humanité,” Mechveret, I/11, 15 May 1896, p. 3.
14. Ahmed Rıza, “Atrocités contre les chrétiens,” Mechveret, I/14, 1 July 1896, p. 4.
15. Sapah-Giulian, The Responsibles, op. cit., pp. 150–1.
16. On 1 October 1895, the Hnchaks had organized a demonstration in front of the Sublime Porte
before presenting it with a petition bearing on the Sasun massacres the dismal plight of the
survivors. Four thousand people participated in this peaceful march, which the organizers had
announced to the authorities beforehand. The police, little accustomed to this type of protest –
Dadrian points out that it was the first of its kind in the empire – stepped in; it was soon followed
by the Muslim population. A general massacre was organized in all the neighborhoods of the
capital in which Armenians lived. Istanbul’s 40 Armenian churches were filled with refugees
for two weeks, until the Palace issued the order to bring the manhunt for Armenians to a halt:
V. Dadrian, Histoire du génocide arménien, Paris 1996, pp. 216–18, provides a general view of these
events based on reports by European diplomats stationed in the capital.
17. Ibidem, p. 151. The scholar did sound out the French minister of foreign affairs, Hanoteaux, before
agreeing to speak. Notwithstanding the negative response he received from Hanoteaux, who sug-
gested that his participation in the debte might perturb the negotiations then underway, Leroy-
Beaulieu decided to throw himself into the battle.
18. Ibidem.
19. Ibidem, p. 163. In his memoirs, Sapah-Giulian affirms that he felt at the time that Rıza needed
them and was no longer treating them with the scorn he usually reserved for them.
20. Dadrian [1996], pp. 245–65, summarizes the events and provides a good overview of the sources
available on both the act and its consequences.
22. Ibidem, pp. 166–7.
23. Ibidem, pp. 172–3.
24. Ibidem, p. 173.
25. Hanioğlu, The Young Turks in Opposition, op. cit., pp. 79–81. Murad Bey Mizanci (1853–1912), was a
Turkish speaker from the Caucasus, born in Tiflis. The editorial board reacted positively to Murad
Bey’s call for union with the Armenian revolutionary committees, launched in the first issue of
the Mizan published in Cairo. It appreciated, in particular, his clear condemnation of the large-
scale massacres organized by the sultan: “Բաց նամակ Մուրադ Բէին [Open letter to Murad
Bey],” Hnchak, no. 4, 29 February 1896, pp. 25–7.
26. Hanioğlu, The Young Turks in Opposition, op. cit., pp. 83–4. In the empire, branches of the CUP
were created, notably, in the towns to which the Young Turks had been exiled, such as Angora,
Kastamonu and Mamuret ul-Azîz; they were also created in garrison towns, such as Erzerum,
where the Local Committee established relations with the Armenian organizations. In March
1897, Setrak Pastermajian was arrested because he had received a sum of money from Europe and
distributed it to members of the Erzerum CUP: ibidem., p. 87.
27. Mikayèl Varantian, Հայ Յեղափոխական Դաշնակցութեան Պատմութիւն [History of the
Armenian Revolutionary Federation], II, Cairo 1950, p. 2, points out that in Geneva, where he
himself was living in 1896, Tunali Hilmi and his Young Turk friends often visited Droschak’s
editorial offices, adding that after the attack on the Banque Ottomane, Ahmed Rıza came to see
them in order to suggest that they join his struggle against the sultan, on condition that they
renounce both the reforms provided for by Article 61 of the Treaty of Berlin and also revolution-
ary methods.
29. A branch created in Salonika in 1897 provided the occasion for Talât Bey’s first appearance on
the historical stage; Talât was corresponding with Ahmed Rıza in 1902. From 1897 to 1906, the
branch failed to function properly: ibidem, p. 88.
30. Ibidem, p. 89.
31. Ibidem, pp. 100, 110. It was not until 1898 that Rıza again assumed leadership of the committee,
with the support, as in the past, of Dr. Nâzım.

32. Ibidem, p. 102. The local opposition movement, which was almost entirely under the control of
the ulema led by Hoca Muheddin, was in favor of the revolution because it would make it possible
to spread Islam and preach “the word of God”; this movement finally became part of the CUP’s
Egyptian branch on the condition that the CUP stop recruiting Christian members and defend a
political line based on unifying the Muslim elements of the Ottoman Empire.
33. Ibidem, p. 103.
34. Ibidem, p. 128. Rıza succeeded in persuading the ulema of al-Azhar to represent all the branches
of the CUP: had Rıza convinced the ulemas that he represented the whole movement, a move
that testified to his new approach. Dr. Nâzım, his confidant, notes that Rıza was suspicious of non-
Turks, whom he considered unreliable (ibidem., p. 136).
35. Diran Kelekian (1862, Kayseri–1915, near Sıvas), initially a Hnchak activist, joined the Young
Turk movement after 1896, during his stays in London and Paris; he was part of the group that
returned with Mizanci Murad; it was at this point that he drew closer to Ahmed Celâleddin, the
chief of the intelligence service (Droschak, supplement of 40 pp. of 15 April, 15 July, 15 November
to15 December 1899, p. 35; Droschak, no. 9/89, 30 September 1898, “Lettre de Constantinople,
1/13 octobre 1898”; editor-in-chief of the famous daily Sapah (1897–1899 and 1909–1915). During
his exile in Cairo, he headed the political section of Journal du Caire (1904–1909). Close to cer-
tain Ottoman court circles, he helped Bahaeddin Şakir organize the CUP in 1905–1906. He was
deported in April 1915 (A. Alboyadjian, Պատմութիւն Հայ Կեսարիոյ [History of Armenian
Caesaria], II, Cairo 1937, pp. 2071–4).
37. “Երիտասարդ Թուրքիա [Young Turkey],” in Droschak, Organe de la Fédération Révolutionnaire
Arménienne, no. 4/84, 30 April 1898, pp. 42–3.
38. “Առաջին քայլ [First Step],” in Droschak, no. 6/86, 30 June 1898, pp. 59–60, points out that
Mechveret, “which, only a few months ago, was quite unreservedly attacking the Armenians and
Bulgarians,” had itself called for solidarity among all those opposed to the Hamidian regime.
39. “Քաղաքական Դրամա թէ Ֆարս [Political Tragedy or Farce?],” in Droschak, no. 4/95, 30 April
1899, pp. 50–1. In the section containing general information, p. 56, the editors point out that
the local Armenian communities organized many meetings just before the conference, notably
in Bulgaria, in order to vote on a memorandum to be sent to the president of the conference;
they note that, at these meetings, Minas Tchéraz was chosen to represent them at the confer-
ence and charged with presenting their demands; “Declaration addressed by the ARF and the
Macedonian High Committee to the public opinion of the civilized world on the occasion of the
Peace Conference,” in Droschak, no. 5/96, May 1899, pp. 1–2, distributed to the delegations on 3/15
June 1899.
40. Ibidem, p. 59. Another emissary, Vaghinag Ajemian, renewed the sultan’s offer on 4 February 1897
(p. 60); a third emissary, Drtad Dadian, a cousin of the first, met with the Droschak leadership in
Geneva on 26 October 1897.
41. Ibidem, pp. 60–1.
42. Hamit Bozarslan, Les Courants de pensée dans l’Empire ottoman, 1908–1918, doctoral thesis, Ecole
des hautes études en sciences sociales, 1992, vol. II, p. 34, note 313, points out that Tunalı Hilmi
was then one of the rare Young Turk militants to advocate armed insurrection (Ş. Mardin, Jön
Türklerin Siyasi Fikirleri, 1895–1908, Ankara 1964, p. 96). Thus, it is quite possible that Tunalı
Hilmi was the anonymous author of the letter discussed below.
43. “Jeune Turquie,” in Droschak, no. 1/102, January 1900, p. 5, the letter of “a jeune Turk” also
indicates that the Young Turk Committee had, the year before, sent a delegation to meet with
Ottoman diplomats stationed abroad in order to suggest that they join the committee.
44. Droschak, no. 7/108, September 1900, pp. 101–2.
45. “Միութիւն Թիւրքերի հետ [Unity with the Turks],” in Droschak, no. 8/109, October 1900,
pp. 113–16.
46. S. Sapah-Giulian, “Երիտասարդ Թիւրքիա [Jeune Turquie],” Hnchak, no. 7, 15 December 1900,
pp. 71–5; the rest of the study was published in instalments in the issues of January (pp. 2–7),
February (10–13) and March (18–22) 1901.
47. S. Sapah-Giulian, “Երիտասարդ Թիւրքիա [Jeune Turquie],” Hnchak, no. 2, 10 February 1901,
p. 11.

Notes 817
Նիւթեր Հ. Յ. Դաշնակցութեան Պատմութեան համար [Documents concerning the

History of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation], II, Beirut 1985, pp. 379–80, a circular
distributed by the ARF’s Western Bureau, Geneva, 3/16 October 1900, announces the pub-
lication of Pro Armenia in French at the party’s expense, and asks the local committees to
send in information about the situation in the provinces.
49. Ibidem.
50. Ibidem, pp. 173–83.
Prince Sabaheddin explained, in the call convening this congress:
Given that it is all the Ottomans whose civil rights will continue to be denied if the current
situation persists, it is imperative that all the elements of the Ottoman world succeed, on
behalf of the communities they represent, in forging a general union of their forces.
The call is reprinted in Y. H. Bayur, Türk Ënkilabı Tarihi, IV, Ankara 1966, p. 294, cited in
Bozarslan, Les Courants de pensée, op. cit. I, note 871, p. 223.
51. Ibidem, p. 182.
52. Sapah-Giulian, The Responsibles, op. cit., p. 182. The SDHP kept its distance from the Young Turk
movement until 1906.
53. Report by the Armenian delegation: “Օսմանցի Ազատականների Համաժողովը [The
Congress of the Ottoman Liberals],” Droschak, no. 2/12, February 1902, pp. 23–6; Mikayel
Varantian, Հայ Յեղափոխական Դաշնակցութեան Պատմութիւն [History of the Armenian
Revolutionary Federation], II, Cairo 1950, p. 2.
54. Minas Tchéraz (1852, Constantinople-1929, Paris), member of the Armenian delegation that
sought to participate in the Congress of Berlin in 1878; exiled in London in 1889, he published
the newspaper Arménie in French; after settling in Paris in 1898, he published the same periodi-
cal there until 1906. He returned to Istanbul in 1908: Haykakan Hanragitaran, IX, Yerevan 1983,
p. 11.
55. Garabed Basmajian (1864, Constantinople–1942, Paris), physician, pharmacist and philologist
who published the newspaper Panaser in Paris from 1899 to 1907: Haykakan Hanragitaran, II,
Yerevan, 1976, pp. 304–5.
56. Arshag Chobanian (1872, Constantinople–1954, Paris), writer and publisher exiled to Paris in
1895 (Haykakan Hanragitaran, IX, Yerevan, 1983, pp. 59–60). Since he was close to Hnchaks who
left the party in September 1896 to found the Verakazmial Hnchak Party, it may be assumed that
he represented this party at the congress.
58. Parliamentary deputy from Erzerum, director of the Milli Agency in 1915.
59. İsmail Hakkı (1889–1948): E. Zürcher, The Unionist Factor, Leyde 1984, p. 78.
60. Editor of Muvazene (Geneva), Pan-Turk propagandist who was in Afghanistan in 1908: Zürcher,
op. cit., p. 74.
61. Hanioğlu, The Young Turks in Opposition, op. cit., pp. 189–92.
62. Ibidem, p. 193.
63. Ibidem, pp. 193–4, and the joint report of the ARF and Verakazmial Hnchak, “Օսմանցի
Ազատականների Համաժողովը [The Congress of Ottoman Liberals],” Droschak, no. 2/122,
February 1902, p. 25.
64. Ibidem, p. 155: at a meeting held in the wings of the Congress, Hüseyin Tosun, Ismaïl Hakkı, Hoca
Kadri, Şeyh Şevki Celâleddin, Çerkez Kemal, Dr Lütfi, Mustafa Hamdi, Dr Nâzım, Yusuf Akçura,
Ali Fehmi, Halil Ganim, Ahmed Rıza, Ali Fahri, Mahir Said, Babanzâde Hikmet, Celâleddin
Rıza, Zeki, Yaşar Sadık Erebera, Derviş Hima, decided, in Mechveret’s editorial offices, to publish a
four-point program reaffirming the legitimacy of the Imperial Ottoman family, to remain faithful
to it, and the need to exalt Islam, Muslim civilization and the Muslim tradition of protecting other
religions.
65. Ibidem, p. 195; Mikayel Varantian, Հայ Յեղափոխական Դաշնակցութեան Պատմութիւն
[History of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation], II, Le Caire 1950, p. 2, confirms that the agree-
ment did not come about, although the Armenian representatives accepted the principle of the
territorial integrity of the Ottoman Empire, noting that Rıza denied the existence of an Armenian
Question and would not even discuss foreign intervention.

66. Hanioğlu, The Young Turks in Opposition, op. cit., pp. 195–6: Sabaheddin, İsmail Kemal, Ali Haydar
Midhat, İsmail Hakkı, Hüseyin Siyret, Musurus Ghikis and Georges Fardis were elected. A com-
promise was worked out later, and an Armenian member was chosen to replace Siyret Bey.
67. Şükrü Hanioğlu, Preparation for a Revolution: The Young Turks, 1902–1908, Oxford University
Press, 2001, p. 13.
68. Ibidem, p. 14, 28. For example, Dr. Mehmed Nâzım, an eminent member of the minority, sharply
criticized the replacement, under pressure from the great powers, of the valis of Aleppo and, there-
after, of Dyarbekir, “for persecuting the Christians and committing atrocities against them.”
69. Ibidem, chap. 2, note 90; Droschak, no. 3/123, March 1902, pp. 37–8, announces, somewhat emo-
tionally, the death, in San Remo, of Dr. İshak Sükutî, a Kurd born in Dyarbekir who founded the
original nucleus of the CUP; Droschak, no. 5/136, May 1903, p. 75, comments with interest on
articles published in the newspaper Fédération Ottomane, which was published in Geneva under
the aegis of the majority.
70. Հ. Խ., “Երիտասարդ Թիւրքիա եւ Երիտասարդ Հայաստան Անտագօնիզմը [The Antago-
nism between Young Turkey and Young Armenia],” Hnchak, no. 2, 1 May 1902, pp. 11–14.
71. Ibidem, pp. 13–14.
72. Hnchak, no. 2, 1 May 1902, pp. 1–3, announces an accord that led to the reunification of the
Hnchak party and Verakazmial Hnchaks in May 1902, after a rupture lasting six years.
73. Hanioğlu, Preparation for a Revolution, op. cit., p. 33. Two non-Turks in the minority, Khalil
Ghanim and Albert Fuad, were excluded from it.
74. N° 1, April 1902, pp. 1–2, cited in Hanioğlu, Preparation for a Revolution, op. cit., p. 34.
75. Ibidem, p. 39. Şûra-yı Ümmet valorized nationalism and made increasingly frequent use of the term
“Turk,” which now came to replace “Ottoman” (p. 40).
76. Ibidem, p. 40.
77. Ibidem, p. 45.
78. The subject is vast. It has been discussed by, notaby, Akaby Nasibian, Britain and the Armenian
Question, 1915–1923, London 1984, and Edmond Khayadjian, Archag Tchobanian et le mouvement
arménophile en France, Marseille 1986.
79. Hanioğlu, Preparation for a Revolution, op. cit., p. 46; Նիւթեր Հ. Յ. Դաշնակցութեան
Պատմութեան համար [Documents concerning the History of the Armenian Revolutionary
Federation], IV, Beirut 1985, p. 95, Dr. Jean Loris-Melikov, elected a member of the ARF’s Western
Bureau at the party’s Third Congress, responsible for propaganda in Europe, ARF representative
at the London Conference, also reports this incident and notes that the French, Italian, and
British delegates were shocked by the tenor of the Young Turk leader’s remarks.
80. Ibidem, p. 47. The author points out, p. 48, that until 1906, the Young Turks in the coalition strug-
gled to enlist European public opinion in their cause; thereafter, they abandoned the effort.
81. Ali Kemal (1867–1922), a teacher and journalist, joined the opposition to the Unionist regime
after the 1908 revolution. Accused of collaborating with the enemy after the Mudros armistice,
he was lynched by the Kemalists: Bozarslan, Les Courants de pensée, op. cit. II, p. 133.
82. Ibidem, p. 65, according to the 5 November 1903 Türk.
83. Ibidem, p. 66.
84. Ibidem, p. 67. According to the author, the manifesto sought to propagate his nationalism among
Turks living outside the Ottoman Empire; he himself was descended of a Turkish family from
abroad. It is also noteworthy that he employs the term “ırk” in the in Türk to designate all ethnic
Turks as a whole, irrespective of their religion.
85. Y. Akçura, Üç Tarz-ı Siyaset, Ankara 1976, p. 19.
86. Notamment H. Bozarslan, Les Courants de pensée, op. cit.
87. Hanioğlu, Preparation for a Revolution, op. cit., pp. 67–8, notes that one of the editors of Türk,
Ahmed Ferid, confessed that “the term ‘Ottoman’ is an expression which has recently been given
a new connotation to camouflage Turkish domination,” and that Social Darwinism was quite
influential among the Tatarsde Russie.
88. Ibidem, p. 69.
89. H. Bozarslan, “Autour de la ‘thèse turque de l’Histoire’ ,” L’Intranquille, I (1992), pp. 121–50.
90. Cited in Hanioğlu, Preparation for a Revolution, op. cit., p. 71.
91. Ibidem, pp. 69–70, cited in Türk, 3 October 1905.

Notes 819
92. Bozarslan, Les Courants de pensée, op. cit., II, p. 24.

93. Hanioğlu, Preparation for a Revolution, op. cit., p. 82.
94. Ibidem.
95. Bozarslan, Les Courants de pensée, op. cit., II, pp. 60–1.
96. P. Fesch (Sabaheddin’s secretary), Constantinople aux derniers jours d’Abdulhamid, Paris 1907, p.
50; Bozarslan, Les Courants de pensée, op. cit., II, p. 61.
97. Ibidem, p. 62.
99. Ibidem, pp. 84–5.
100. Ibidem, pp. 87–8.
101. Ibidem, pp. 88–9 and n. 50: late in 1905, Bahaeddin Şakir approached Prince Sabaheddin, but
confessed that his only objective was to obtain financial support from the prince so that he could
carry out the reorganization of the CUP.
102. Bozarslan, Les Courants de pensée, op. cit., I, p. 219; cites the records of the Committee’s corre-
spondence, maintained, as a rule, by Şakir and Nâzım; lengthy extracts from them are reprinted
in Bayur, op. cit., p. 425; Ë. H. Danişmend, Izahlı Osmanlı Tarihi Kronolojisi, Istanbul, Türkiye
Yayınları, vol. 4, 1969, p. 358: Prince Sabaheddin’s mother was a Georgian (Nâzım and Şakir cites
by A. B. Kuran, Osmanlı İmperatorluğu’nda İnkilâp Hareketleri ve Millî Mücadele, Istanbul 1956,
p. 40.
103. Hanioğlu, Preparation for a Revolution, op. cit., pp. 90–91, article of Bahaeddin Şakir, in Şûra-yı
Ümmet, no. 114, 1 June 1907, pp. 4–6.
104. Ibidem, p. 91.
105. Ibidem, pp. 94–6. Despite their explicit criticisms of the Armenian Committees, the coalition
and Bahaeddin Şakir sought a tactical alliance with them, in part to drive a wedge between them
and Prince Sabaheddin.
106. Ibidem, p. 97; see also infra, p. 817, n. 58. A graduate of the Military Academy of Istanbul, Tosun
would later become an important leader of the CUP’s Turkist faction.
107. Ibidem, p. 97, 115–17; Hüseyin Tosun traveled to the Caucasus under the pseudonym Şeikh
Ali. The ARF provided him with a Russian passport, and he entered Turkey thanks to the
fedayis. Abdullah Cevdet has left an account of Tosun’s role in the Erzerum revolt. He notes
that Sabaheddin’s emissary initially posed as a grocer; with the help of Armenian friends, he
then found employment as a deliveryman for the Russian consulate in Erzerum, a post that
made it easier to distribute illegal literature. According to official sources, those responsible for
the revolt came from Alevi circles; this, however, is anything but certain (see p. 115); Vahan
Papazian, Իմ Յուշերը [Memoirs], I, Boston 1950, pp. 280–1, confirms both that he was present
in Erzerum and that the local ARF played an important role, helping him to escape, among
other things.
108. Hanioğlu, Preparation for a Revolution, op. cit., pp. 104–6. The movement brought together 2,000
“Muslim and non-Muslim” demonstrators from the city and surrounding villages; taking up a posi-
tion in front of the subprefect’s house, they exclaimed that his corrupt practices were responsible
for their plight. The following day, the members of local guilds occupied the post office while wait-
ing for a positive response to the telegram that they had sent the vali of Kastamonu. The leaders
of the movement – notably, the head of the butchers’ guild – were exiled to various provinces.
109. Ibidem, pp. 106–7. In November 1907, new complaints at last convinced the Cabinet to banish
İbrahim Pasha to Aleppo. It should be noted that Ziya Gökalp and Pirinçizâde Ârif Bey, future
leaders of the CUP, took an active part in this last demonstration.
110. Papazian, Memoirs, op. cit., I, pp. 512–35.
111. Ibidem, pp. 282–5; Hanioğlu, Preparation for a Revolution, op. cit., pp. 97–9.
112. Papazian, Memoirs, op. cit., I, p. 285; containing mostly articles translated from the Armenian by
David Papazian.
113. Hanioğlu, Preparation for a Revolution, op. cit., pp. 99–100. Joint actions of the same sort took
place in Pasinler, Khnus/Hınıs (April 1906) and Çemişgezek/Tchmechgadzak or Seghert/Siirt
(see ibidem, pp. 120–1).
114. Ibidem, pp. 97–9.
115. Ibidem, p. 128.

116. Hanioğlu, Preparation for a Revolution, op. cit., especially pp. 130–2. The author has the personal
archives of Bahaeddin Şakir and Ahmed Rıza at his disposal.
117. Born in Istanbul in 1879, executed in Berlin in 1922. A member of the CUP’s Central Committee
practically without interruption from 1907 to 1918, he led the Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa during the First
World War. His decisive role in the eradication of the Ottoman Armenians is discussed at length
below.
118. Hanioğlu, Preparation for a Revolution, op. cit., pp. 131–2.
119. Ibidem, p. 131, note 13: Albert Fuad and the general Şerif Pasha.
120. See infra, p. 816 n. 35. Even as he collaborated with the Young Turks, Kelekian maintained ties
with his Hnchak friends. When, in the fall of 1904, he set out to publish an oppositional news-
paper in Cairo, where he spent his second period in exile, he appealed to Yervant Odian for help
(Նամակներ [Correspondence]), ed. Ofelia Karapetian, Yerevan 1999, letter from Bombay, 29
October 1904, to Mikayel Giurjian, p. 196.
122. Ibidem, pp. 132–3.
123. Ibidem, p. 133. Ahmed Saib was to found the Ottoman Constitutional League a few months
later.
124. Ibidem, Private Papers of B. Şakir, letter from Bedri [D. Kelekian] to B. Şakir, Cairo, 9, 16, 17, 19
December 1905.
125. Ibidem, p. 135.
126. Ibidem, Private Papers of B. Şakir, letter from Bedri [D. Kelekian] to B. Şakir, Cairo, 9 April
1906.
127. Ibidem, p. 136, Private Papers of B. Şakir, undated memorandum, April 1906.
128. Ibidem, p. 136, n. 46. In a 12 September letter to Kelekian, Bahaeddin mentions discussions with
a committee, without naming the party in question.
129. Cf. Sapah-Giulian, The Responsibles, op. cit., pp. 182–95. It should be recalled that the SDHP
moved its headquarters and official organ, Hnchak, from London to Paris in June 1904 and that
Sapah-Giulian took over the task of editing the newspaper: cf. Hnchak, nos 9–10–11, September–
October–November 1904, p. 1.
130. Murad (pseudonym of Hampartsum Boyajian), 1867, Hajın–1915; one of the founders of the
Hnchak party; the leader of the 1894 Sasun rebellion; condemned to life in prison; Hnchak,
5, May 1906, announced that he had been set free after twelve years in prison and had settled
in Paris, where he was put in charge of revolutionary operations; from 1908 to 1915, deputy in
the Ottoman parliament; hanged in Kayseri in June 1915: Raymond Kévorkian, IBN, Index bio-
bibliographicus notorum hominum, Sectio Armeniaca, III, Osnabrück 1986, p. 135.
131. Hanioğlu, Preparation for a Revolution, op. cit., p. 40: during the fall 1905 events in the Caucasus,
Şûra-yı Ümmet and Mechveret supplement français took a pro-Tatar, anti-Armenian position.
133. Ibidem, p. 187; from this point on, the meetings took place in a room in a café in the Paris suburb
Les Lilas.
134. Ibidem, p. 190.
135. Ibidem, p. 191.
136. A renowned German geographer, author of many detailed maps of the Middle East.
137. Ibidem, p. 192.
138. Ibidem, p. 193.
139. Ibidem, pp. 194–5.
140. S. Sapah-Giulian, “Մենք եւ ﬔր Քննադատները [We and our critics],” Hnchak, no. 9–10,
September-October 1906, pp. 91–5.
141. Ibidem, pp. 92–3.
142. Ibidem, p. 94.
143. Ibidem, p. 95.
144. Ibidem, pp. 197–8. Murad’s proposal was not officially transmitted to the ARF until 16 March
1907. The ARF waited until 15 June 1907 to respond to it; it considered the proposal “pre-
mature.” It was also on Murad’s initiative that the SDHP signed, on 27 November 1907, a
reunification agreement with its dissidents, who had founded the Verakazmial Hnchak party;

Notes 821
S. Sapah-Giulian, “Հրատապ Խնդիրը [The urgent problem],” Hnchak, no. 11, novembre 1906,
pp. 104–8.
145. S. Sapah-Giulian, “Հին Ցաւը [The old grievance],” Hnchak, no. 12, December 1906, pp. 114–18.
146. S. Sapah-Giulian, “Միտհատեան Սահմանադրութեան Առթիւ [On the Midhat
Constitution],” Hnchak, nos 3–4, March–April 1907, pp. 26–36.
147. Նիւթեր Հ. Յ. Դաշնակցութեան Պատմութեան համար [Documents concerning the History of
the Armenian Revolutionary Federation], III, Beirut 1985, p. 198. This volume of archival docu-
ments is wholly devoted to the Fourth Congress of the ARF, held from 22 February to 4 May
1907 in Vienna, in a building belonging to the Austrian socialist party. The volume includes
detailed reports delivered to congress by the leaders of the attempt to assassinate the sultan (see
pp. 194–223).
148. Ibidem, pp. 194–5. The commando comprised Ellen (Kristapor Mikayelian), Safo (Martiros
Margarian), Torkom, Hovnan Tavtian, Ashod Bagratuni (Ashot Yeghikian): see p. 220, n. 1.
149. A total of 18 to 20 people, counting those who provided only occasional help.
150. Ibidem, pp. 196–7. Their materiel was twice confiscated; those who carried out the trials in
Bulgaria were arrested and the addresses of the members who had been slipped into Istanbul
were found in their possession. During the dry runs, one of the three founders of the ARF, the
head of the commando, Kristapor Mikayelian, was killed as the result of an error in the handling
of the explosives.
151. Ibidem, p. 198.
152. Bozarslan, Les Courants de pensée, op. cit. II, p. 31.
153. K. Karabekir, İttihat ve Terakki Cemiyeti, 1896–1909, Neden Kuruldu? Nasıl Kuruldu? Nasıl İdare
Olundu? (ed. F. and E. Özerergin), Istanbul 1982, pp. 73–4.
154. See the letter of Dr. B. Server (=Bahaeddin Şakir), 25 March 1906, in A. B. Kuran, İnkilâp
Tarihimiz ve İttihat ve Terakki, Istanbul 1946, p. 197.
155. Hanioğlu, Preparation for a Revolution, op. cit., p. 137–8.
156. Ibidem, pp. 138–139. The grandson of the founder of modern Egypt, Mehmed Said Halim Pasha,
who had also been exiled by Abdülhamid in 1905, accepted a position as inspector of the Central
Committee, joining his brother Mehmed Ali Halim. The prestige of the two princes living in
Cairo rapidly restored the CUP’s credibility, without disturbing the physicians settled in Paris.
The creation of a real office also allowed Şakir to take control of the CUP’s correspondence,
which had until then passed through the hands of Ahmed Rıza. Certain well-informed (mainly
German) sources even present Mehmed Said Halim as the leader of the CUP during the First
World War (ibidem., p. 140, n. 73).
157. Ibidem, p. 146. Although the CUP was not implanted in the east, Şakir tried to make potential
members of the committee believe that it had powerful branches in Anatolia, “especially in
Erzerum, Bitlis, Van and Trebizond” (letter from B. Şakir to Mesud Remzi, Paris, 27 November
1907 (ibidem., p. 115, n. 365). It was not until June 1907 that the official organ Şûra-yı Ümmet was
brought back to Paris (ibidem., p. 183).
158. Erik J. Zürcher, The Unionist Factor: the Role of the Committee of Union and Progress in the Turkish
National Movement, 1905–1926, Leiden 1984, p. 22.
159. Mehmed Talât (1874–1921), member of the first CUP in Edirne around 1895, founding member,
founder of the SOL in Salonika in 1906, parliamentary deputy from Edirne, minister of the inte-
rior, grand vizier, one of the main organizers of the Armenian genocide (ibidem., p. 37 and infra,
p. 815, n. 29).
160. Midhat Şukrü [Bleda] (1874–1956): then director of Salonika’s municipal hospital, thereafter par-
liamentary deputy from Serez (1908), Drama (1912) and Burdur (1916), member of the CUP’s
Central Committee, close associate of Talât, secretary general of the CUP. After the armi-
stice, Şukrü was given the task of destroying the CUP’s archives (Zürcher, The Unionist, op. cit.,
p. 38).
161. Mustafa Rahmi [Evranos], parliamentary deputy from Salonika (1908 and 1912), governor of
Smyrna from 1915 to 1918 (ibidem., p. 38).
162. İsmail Canbolat (1880–1926), parliamentary deputy from Smyrna (1912), chief of police (1914),
governor of Istanbul (1915) and then vali (1916), minister of the interior (1918), deported to
Malta in 1919, hanged in 1926 (ibidem, p. 38).

163. Bursalı Mehmed Tahir (1861–1926), appointed director of the Military Academy of Salonika in
May 1906 (ibidem, p. 38).
164. Ömer Naci (1880–1916), officer educated in Harbiye, CUP propagandist, twice elected a member
of parliament, member of the Central Committee from 1910 to 1912, one of the leaders of the
Special Organization in 1915–16 (ibidem, p. 35).
165. İsmail Hakkı (1889-–948), member of the CUP, undersecretary of state in the War Ministry, one
of the leaders of the Special Organization (ibidem, p. 78).
167. Hüsrev Sâmi [Kızıldoğan] (1884–1942), artillery office, friend of Ömer Naci’s, renowned CUP
fedayi (Zürcher, The Unionist, op. cit., p. 35).
168. Ibidem, p. 41; Hanioğlu, Preparation for a Revolution, op. cit., p. 214. Nâzım first arrived in Greece
in mid-June 1907 disguised as a dervish, then went on to Macedonia disguised as a sailor.
169. Ibidem, pp. 214–15.
170. Ibidem, pp. 216–17. In 1906, Talât defended the necessity of organizing the committee in the form
of a Masonic lodge; “otherwise, Europe will crush the Ottomans” (cited in Karabekir, İttihat ve
Terakki Cemiyeti, op. cit., p. 175.
171. Ibidem, p. 218. The main CUP fedayis were Abdülkadır († 1926), Ali [Çetinkaya], Atif [Kamçıl],
Sarı Efe Edip, Kuşçubaşızâde Eşref [Sencer], Sapanclı Hakkı, Halil [Kut], Filibeli Hilmi, Ismitli
Mümtaz, Hüsrev Sâmi [Kızıldoğan], Nuri [Conker], Kâzım [Özalp], Süleyman Askeri, Yenibahçeli
Sükrü and Nail, Yakup Cemil († 1916), one of the best-known fedayis of the party (Zürcher, The
Unionist, op. cit., p. 50).
173. The Potorig (“storm”) commando created in 1903 by the ARF’s Third Congress was given the
mission of collecting the revolutionary tax, by threat if necessary. A few Armenians who refused
to contribute were executed.
174. Hanioğlu, Preparation for a Revolution, op. cit., p. 226. Eyüb Sabri [Akgöl] (1876–-1950), one of the
officers who rebelled in summer 1908, member of the CUP’s Central Committee without inter-
ruption down to 1918 (Zürcher, The Unionist, op. cit., p. 43).
175. In 1906, Mustafa Kemal founded, together with three other officers who had graduated from
Harbiye, a Young Turk branch of the Vatan ve Hürriyet in Salonika: Hakkı Baha [Pars], Hüsrev
Sâmi [Kızıldoğan] and İsmail Mahir (1869–1916), who joined the SOL soon after. Kemal nev-
ertheless remained on the periphery of the party to the end of the First World War (ibidem,
p. 35).
176. Ahmed Cemal (1872–1922), member of the CUP’s Central Committee, vali of Uskudar (1909),
Adana (1909) and Baghdad (1911), prefect of Istanbul (1913), minister of the navy, commander
of the Fourth Army (Syria-Palestine). Cemal is said to have engineered the famine that carried
off thirty percent of the Lebanese population in the courses of the First World War (ibidem,
p. 43).
177. Halil [Kut] (1881–1957), Enver’s uncle, organizer of the squadrons of çetes of the Special
Organization, responsible for massacres in the regions of Van and Bitlis in 1915 (ibidem, p. 43).
178. Ibidem.
180. Ibidem, pp. 150, 167.
181. Ibidem, p. 168.
182. Ibidem, p. 169. Kâzım Karabekir (1882–1946), Turkish army general who played an important part
in the activities of the Young Turk officers in the Balkans, architect of the Turkish victory in the
War of Independence, pushed to the sidelines by Mustafa Kemal after the proclamation of the
Republic (Bozarslan, Les Courants de pensée, op. cit. II, p. 130).
184. Ibidem, p. 161.
185. Նիւթեր Հ. Յ. Դաշնակցութեան Պատմութեան համար [Documents concerning the History of
the Armenian Revolutionary Federation], III, Beirut 1985.
186. Ibidem, III, pp. 4–5. Aknuni was the representative of the Western Bureau, based in Geneva;
Rostom that of the Eastern Bureau, based in Tiflis; Hovhannes/Ivan Zavriev represented the
Committee of Yerevan, Arshag Vramian, the Committee of the United States. The Committee

Notes 823
of the Lernabar (= Rshtunik-Moks) was represented by Ishkhan, Sham (= Van) by Aram

Manukian, Mush-Sasun by Antranig (Ozanian) and Murad (Sepastatsi).
187. Ibidem, IV, p. 90. In his report on the work accomplished by the party since the previous con-
gress, Dr. Jean Loris-Melikov (physician and scientist at the Institut Pasteur in Paris, nephew
of the prince and general Loris-Melikov), who had been a member of the Western Bureau
responsible for “managing” the newspaper Pro Armenia, criticized this “oligarchy” quite
sharply.
Loris-Melikov also gave an account of his activities as a member of the delegation, created on
the initiative of the catholicos, sent to petition the powers after the Sasun affair. He reviewed
his discussions with the president of the Council of Ministers in Paris, facilitated by V. Berard,
E. Lavisse and Destournel; with the archbishop of Canterbury and the British prime minister,
facilitated by Lord Bryce; and with Roosevelt, facilitated by James Reynolds. He then turned
to his participation, on the advice of Clemenceau, Jaurès and Pressense, in the Boston Peace
Conference as “the elected representative of Armenia.” (ibidem, IV, pp. 96, 125).
188. Droschak, no. 5, mai 1907, Report on the decisions of the ARF’s Fourth General Congress,
Geneva, 4 May, pp. 66–8, cited on p. 72.
189. Documents concerning the History of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation, op. cit., III, pp. 17–20,
proceedings of the eighth session, held on 26 February 1907. Ishkhan, whose real name was Nigol
Mikayelian (1883–1915), born in Shushi, head of the ARF in the Lernabar district (Rshtounik/
Moks) south of Lake Van from 1902 to 1908, and in the city of Van from 1908 to 1915. Murdered
in April 1915.
190. Ibidem, III, pp. 21–2.
191. Ibidem, III, pp. 30–1, Antranig spoke at the thirteenth session of the Congress, held on 1 March
1907.
192. Aknuni (1863–1915), member of the Western Bureau from 1901 to 1915.
193. Ibidem, III, pp. 33–6. Described at the fifteenth session, held on 2 March 1907. The incumbent
Western Bureau comprised Avetis Aharonian, Rostom (Zorian), Aknuni, Mikayel Varantian
(Hovhannesian), and Jean Loris-Melikov.
194. Sarkis Minasian († 1915), born in Constantinople, journalist and teacher.
195. Ibidem, III, pp. 234–6.
196. Ibidem, III, p. 239. Aram Manukian (1879–1919), born near Ghapan, in the Zangezur district,
officer in Iran and Van, where he led the self-defense effort in April 1915, interior minister of the
Republic of Armenia in 1918.
197. Ibidem, III, p. 240.
198. Aharonian was of course alluding to the First Congress of the Ottoman Opposition, in which he
took part as a representative of the ARF (see supra, p. 19).
199. Documents concerning the History of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation, op. cit., III, pp. 245–6.
200. Rostom (1867–1919), born in Tseghna, agronomist, founded the ARF in 1890.
203. Murad (1874–1918), born in Godvun (Sıvas), officer in the Lernabar district (1904), one of the
defenders of Baku in 1918.
204. Ibidem.
205. Ibidem.
206. Ibidem.
207. Arshag Vramian (1871–1915), born in Constantinople, member of the Western Bureau in 1899,
representative of the ARF in the United States until 1907, thereafter official of the party in Van
(1909), executive director of the Western Bureau in Istanbul, parliamentary deputy from Van
(1913), murdered in April 1915 of the orders of the vali of Van, Cevdet Bey.
208. Documents concerning the History of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation, op. cit., III, pp.
247–8.
209. Ibidem, III, p. 248. The congress elected the following people to the Eastern Bureau: Hamo
Ohanjanian, Simon Zavarian, Garo (Karekin Pastermajian), Yeghishe Topchian and Arshag
Vramian; to the Western Bureau: Mikayel Varantian (Hovhannisian), Aknuni (Khachadur
Malumian), Hovnan Tavtian and Aram-Ashod (Sarkis Minasian) (ibidem., III, pp. 286–7).

At the Fourth Congress, the ARF decided, in view of the way the situation had evolved in
the empire and of the evolution of the Young Turks, to take the initiative of convoking a
General Congress of the Ottoman Opposition (Mikayel Varantian, Հայ Յեղափոխական
Դաշնակցութեան Պատմութիւն [History of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation], II,
Cairo 1950, p. 43).
210. Droschak, no. 6–7, June-July 1907, pp. 82–3.
2 The December 1907 Second Congress of the Anti-Hamidian

Opposition: Final “Preparations for a Revolution”
2. Ibidem.
4. Ibidem, p. 208.
6. Ibidem, p. 181.
7. Documents concerning the History of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation, op. cit., III, pp. 94–5:
about the Armenian-Turkish clashes in the Caucasus and the provocations organized by the
Russian government.
9. Ibidem, p. 160, letter of 23 November 1906, sent from Paris to the Turkish-speaking correspond-
ents of the Caucasus.
10. Ibidem, pp. 191–2.
11. Ibidem, p. 194.
12. Ibidem, pp. 194–5.
13. Ibidem, pp. 195–6.
14. Ibidem, p. 196.
15. Sapah-Giulian referred to this formula during his exchange with his former classmate Aknuni,
cites above. M. Varantian, History of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation, op. cit., p. 9, confirms
that the ARF had ceased to advocate the reform and agreed to suspend the publication of Pro
Armenia.
16. Hanioğlu, Preparation for a Revolution, op. cit., p. 197. Hanioğlu insists above all here on the
CUP’s fears of the ARF; he deals more cursorily with the Dashnaks’ approach.
17. Ibidem, pp. 198–203.
18. Ibidem, p. 203, notes that the sessions of the Congress were chaired by Prince Sabaheddin,
Aknuni and Ahmed Rıza by turns and that Pierre Anmeghian served as the secretary of the
Congress; Varantian, History of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation, op. cit., II, p. 5, confirms
this. The ARF delegation also included Hrach (Haïg Tiriakian [1871–1915], an agronomist born
in Trebizond), Vahram (Harutiun Kalfayan), Aram-Ashod (Sarkis Minasian [c. 1875–1915], a
member of the ARF’s Western Bureau in 1907), H. Sarafian and Rupen Zartarian (known as
Aslan [1874–1915], a journalist born in Severek, the founder of Azadamard [1909], a member of
the Western Bureau in 1911).
S. Sapah-Giulian, “Թուրք Բռնապետութիւնը եւ Երիտասարդ Թուրքերը [The
Turkish tyranny and the Young Turks],” Hnchak, no. 1, January 1908, pp. 2–10, affirms, on
the basis of the invitation recieved by his party, that Droschak, the CUP and the League
for Private Initiative and Decentralization convened the Congress.
20. Ibidem, p. 205; Droschak, no. 1, January 1908, “The Congress of the parties [of opposition], 27–29
December 1907,” pp. 1–5, published the texts of the decisions of the Congress.
22. Bozarslan, Les Courants de pensée, op. cit. I, p. 197, of a total of 56,000 Ottoman officers.
23. Hanioğlu, Preparation for a Revolution, op. cit., p. 229. This branch, founded by Major Enver and
Captain Kâzım [Karabekir], had more members and was more active than the Central Committee
of Salonika.

Notes 825
24. Ibidem.
25. M. Talât, Talât Paşa’nın Anıları, (ed.) par M. Kasım, Istanbul 1986, p. 58, cited in Bozarslan, Les
Courants de pensée, op. cit. II, p. 32.
27. Ibidem.
28. Aram Andonian, Պատմութիւն Պալքանեան Պատերազﬕն [History of the Balkan War], I,
Istanbul 1912, p. 315.
29. Ibidem, pp. 315–16.
31. Ibidem, pp. 254–8.
32. Ibidem, pp. 259–60.
33. Ibidem, pp. 269–78.
35. Ibidem, pp. 220–4. The prince concluded his remarks with the words: “The country is on the road
to its destruction, its dismemberment.” The same day, the Hnchak leaders sent their Kurdish col-
league Bedr Bey Bedrkhan to Salonika to gather information on the Ittihad’s congress bring it
back to them in Constantinople.
36. Ibidem, pp. 230–1.
Part II Young Turks and Armenians Facing

1 Istanbul in the First Days of the Revolution:

“Our Common Religion is Freedom”
1. “Սահմանադրական Թիւրքիա եւ Հայկական Խնդիր [Constitutional Turkey and the
Armenian Question],” Hnchak, no. 6–7, June–July 1908, éditorial, pp. 49–50.
2. Ibidem, p. 51.
4. Ibidem, p. 233.
5. Ibidem, p. 234.
6. Ibidem, p. 235.
7. Droschak, no. 7/195, July 1908, pp. 97–106: note p. 100.
8. Ibidem, p. 101.
9. Droschak, no. 8/196, August 1908, p. 121; Mikayel Varandian, Վերածնւող Հայրենիքը եւ ﬔր
Դերը [The Renascent Fatherland and Our Role], Geneva, 1910, p. 69, writes, the “victory of July
1908 is that of the Young Turks and also of the Dashnaktsakans, who together showed the Muslim
world for the first time, in 1907, that solidarity is something real.”
10. Ibidem, p. 101; Gaïdz F. Minassian, “Les relations entre le Comité Union et Progrès et la Fédération
révolutionnaire arménienne à la veille de la Première Guerre mondiale d’après les sources arméni-
ennes,” Revue d’histoire arménienne contemporaine I (1995), pp. 45–99.
11. Roupèn Ter Minassian, Mémoires d’un partisan arménien, trad. W. Ter-Minassian, Marseille 1990,
p. 26; Roupèn Ter Minassian, Mémoires d’un cadre révolutionnaire arménien, trad. Souren L.
Chanth, Athènes 1994, p. 607.
12. Hratch Dasnabédian, évolution de la structure de la FRA, Beyrouth 1985, p. 59.
13. Varandian, History of the ARF, op. cit., I, p. 427.
14. Sapah-Giulian, The Responsibles, op. cit., p. 238. This exchange took place in French.
15. A. S. Sharurian, Գրիգոր Զոհրապի Կյանքի եվ Գործունեության Տարեգրություն [Chronology
of The life and work of Krikor Zohrab], Echmiadzin 1996, pp. 160–1. Krikor Zohrab (1861–1915),
lawyer, writer, deputy in both the Ottoman parliament and the Armenian Chamber who, as we
shall soon see, played an important role in Ottoman public life, defended Armenian, Young Turk,
Bulgarian, and Macedonian political prisoners, notably Apig Unjian, accused of “aiding and abet-
ting a Revolutionary committee” in September–October 1896, as well as Garabed Basmajian,

charged with the same crimes in October (p. 80). In 1902, the Sublime Porte initiated a procedure
to exclude him from the Constantinople bar (p. 117).
16. Sapah-Giulian, The Responsibles, op. cit., pp. 263, 279.
17. Hanioğlu, Preparation for a Revolution, op. cit., p. 279. According to the CUP statutes, the precise
functions of each party official were to remain a secret.
18. Descended of the Kurdish Bedırhan family from Bohtan, a former principality governed by the
Bedırhan dynasty.
20. Hanioğlu, Preparation for a Revolution, op. cit.
21. Ibidem, p. 286.
22. Bozarslan, Les Courants de pensée, op. cit. I, p. 151, cites A. B. Kuran, Osmanlı İmparatorluğu’nda
İnkilâp Hareketleri ve Milli Mücadele, Istanbul 1956, p. 411. “The Sultan’s rights constituted one of
the thorny issues confronting the Young Turk Congress of 1907. The Armenians replied to the
Turkish delegates at the time that ‘a revolution that wishes to protect the Padişa’s rights is not a
revolution.’ ”
23. Erik J. Zürcher, Turkey: A Modern History, London and New York 1998, p. 99.
24. Said pasha (from 22 July to 5 August 1908), Kâmil pasha (from 5 August 1908 to 13 February
1909), Hilmi pasha (from 14 February to 13 April 1909), Tevfik pasha (from 14 April to 5 May
1909), Hilmi pasha (from 5 May to 28 December 1909), Hakkı pasha (from 12 January 1910 to
30 September 1911), Said pasha (from 30 September 1911 to 17 July 1912), Ğazi Ahmed Muhtar
Pasha (from 21 July to 29 October 1912), Kâmil pasha (from 29 October 1912 to 23 January 1913),
Mahmud Şevket pasha (from 23 January to 11 June 1913), and after the imposition of the dictator-
ship of CUP, Said Halim pasha (from 11 June 1913 to 4 February 1917) and Mehmed Talât pasha
(from 4 February 1917 to October 1918): Feroz Ahmad, The Young Turks, Oxford 1969.
25. Vahan Papazian, Յուշեր [Memoirs], I, Boston 1950, pp. 591–8, II, Beirut 1952, pp. 32–3; Ter
Minassian, Mémoires, op. cit., trad. W. Ter-Minassian, p. 255; Ter-Minassian, Mémoires, op. cit.,
trad. S. L. Chanth, p. 590.
26. Centre des Archives diplomatiques de Nantes (CADN), Ambassade de Constantinople, E 130,
report from the French vice-consul in Uskub, G. Rajevof, to M. Boppe, chargé d’affaire in
Constantinople, 28 June 1909, no. 65, Histoire du mouvement révolutionnaire du mois de juillet 1908,
p. 15.
27. Ibidem, pp. 16–17.
28. Sharurian, Chronology of the Life and Work of Krikor Zohrab, op. cit., pp. 155–6, according to both
Zohrab’s correspondence and the Istanbul press of 14 August.
29. Ibidem, pp. 159–60.
30. A. Asdvadzadurian, “Հ. Յ. Դաշնակցութեան եւ Իթթիհատի Հարաբերութիւնները [The
Relations between the ARF and the CUP],” Hairenik December 1964, p. 176. The ARF’s main offices
in Istanbul were located at 51 Sakız Ağac Street in Pera (Papazian, Memoirs, op. cit., II, p. 48).
Simon Zavarian (1866–1913), a native of Lori, one of the founders of the party, studied
agronomy in Moscow and served as a member of, first, the Eastern Bureau (1892–1902), and
then the Western Bureau (Geneva, 1902–08). From November 1909 to July 1911, he was
the inspector of the Armenian schools in the Daron district and, thereafter, an editor of
Azadamard in Istanbul, a post he held until his death.
31. Papazian, Memoirs, op. cit., II, p. 36.
32. Ter Minassian, Mémoires, op. cit., trad. S. L. Chanth, p. 606.
33. Papazian, Memoirs, op. cit., II, pp. 46–54.
34. Varandian, Histoire de la Fédération, op. cit., I, p. 429.
35. Ibidem, I, p. 448.
36. Sharurian, Chronology of the Life and Work of Krikor Zohrab, op. cit., p. 162.
38. Ibidem, II, p. 82.
41. Sapah-Giulian, The Responsibles, op. cit., pp. 246–7. According to Sapah-Giulian, their main
offices and all the meetings they organized were closely watched, probably on CUP orders.

Notes 827
42. Ibidem, pp. 249–50.

43. Ibidem, p. 253.
44. Ibidem, pp. 254–5.
45. Ibidem, pp. 254–5. He even became justice minister, but held the post only briefly since he died
suddenly two months later under circumstances that some consider suspect.
46. Ibidem, p. 261. These developments led to the creation of the Ottoman Democratic Party on
6 February 1909. Among its leaders were two of the founders of the CUP, İbrahim Temo and
Abdullah Cevdet.
47. Ibidem, p. 263. We mention the smear campaign supra, p. 57. He refused the presidency of the only
oppositional party of the day, the Osmanlı Ahrar Fırkası (Ottoman Freedom Party).
48. A. B. Kuran, İnkilâp Hareketleri ve Millî Mücadele, Istanbul 1956, p. 483, in Bozarslan, Les Courants
de pensée, op. cit. I, p. 207.
50. Ibidem, pp. 280–2. The Post and Telegraph Ministry even received an order to give priority to
exchanges between party branches, as it already did to intragovernmental exchanges.
51. Ibidem, pp. 282–3.
52. Ibidem, pp. 284–5. The same leading officers took it upon themselves to execute members of the
opposition, especially the journalists who criticized the “Holy Committee.” For Enver, the depu-
ties were “people of average intellectual abilities” (p. 311).
53. Ibidem, p. 311.
54. Ibidem, p. 286.
55. H. A. Yücel, Geçtiğim Günlerden, Istanbul 1990, p. 149, in Bozarslan, Les Courants de pensée, op.
cit. I, p. 208.
56. Ibidem, I, p. 210.
58. Ibidem, p. 288.
60. Papazian, Memoirs, op. cit., II, p. 27. Vahan Papazian (1876–1973), better known by his pseudonym,
Goms, born in Tabriz to a family from Van, physician, party cadre in Van (1903–1905), deputy
from Van in the Ottoman parliament from 1908 on, he managed to cross the Turkish lines and
regain the Caucasus in summer 1915. He died in Beirut.
61. Papazian, Memoirs, op. cit., I, p. 480.
62. Ter Minassian, Mémoires, op. cit., trad. S. L. Chanth, p. 590.
63. Ibidem, p. 597. Among the notables of Mush, Hoca Iliaz, a Kurdish tribal chief, seemed the most
hostile to the Armenians and only reluctantly took part in staging an enthusiastic welcome for
the fedayis. According to Ruben, Iliaz’s mother was Armenian and he spoke the Armenian dialect
of Mush, but he was a “fanatic.” In 1915, this parliamentary deputy was to be the main organizer
of the extirpation of the Armenian population from the plain of Mush; he killed his half-brother
Sulukhi Stepan with his own hands (p. 604).
64. Supra, pp. 38, 52, on Dr. Nâzım’s activities in Smyrna in this period.
65. For further details on the local ARF, see Hovhannes Boyajian, “Հ. Յ. Դաշնակցութիւնը
Զﬕւռնիային մէջ [The ARF in Smyrna],” Hairenik October 1958, pp. 88–9.
66. Minassian, “Les relations entre le CUP,” art. cit., p. 53.
67. Hovhannes Yeretsian, “Հ. Յ. Դաշնակցութիւնը Տիգրանակերտին մէջ [The ARF in
Dikranagerd],” Hairenik, April 1956, p. 49.
68. Marzbed, the pseudonym of Ghazaros Ghazarosian (1878–1918), born in Tomarza (sancak of
Kaiseri), a teacher trained at the University of Leipzig; ARF cadre in Persia, Van and Bitlis;
deported in 1915, he managed to escape and work under an assumed name on construction of the
Baghdad Railway in Cilicia.
69. Infra, p. 915, n. 33, for a brief biography.
71. Ibidem, p. 34.
72. Infra, p. 816, n. 35.
73. Pseudonym of Dajad Melkonian (c. 1870–1916), doctor of theology, defrocked in 1906, ARF del-
egate first in Iranian Azerbaijan and then in the Mush-Sasun area (1908–1911); executed in Urfa.

74. Minassian, “Les relations entre le CUP,” art. cit., p. 58.

75. Simon Zavarian, Միմոն Զաւարեան. Մահուան Եօթանասունաﬔակին Առթիւ [Simon
Zavarian: On the Occasion of the Seventieth Anniversary of His Death], edited by Hrach Dasnabedian,
III, Beirut 1997, pp. 31–3, letter from Constantinople, 6 January 1909
76. Mahmud Kâmil, a classmate of Enver’s at the Military Academy of Istanbul became, in 1915,
commander-in-chief of the Third Army, based north of Erzerum, in Tortum, after the failure of
the offensive on the Caucasus launched in December 1914.
77. Ruben Ter Minassian, Հայ Յեղափոխականի մը Յիշատակները [Memoirs of an Armenian
Revolutionary], vol. V, Los Angeles 1951, p. 184–96.
78. Ibidem, V, p. 198.
79. Ibidem, V, pp. 199–200.
80. Ibidem, V, pp. 226–7. Rupen ignored the official ceremonies, preferring to visit Van’s police chief,
Mehmed Effendi, an old acquaintance. Mehmed Effendi reminded him that Turkish officials gov-
erned the region and were perfectly familiar with the mentality of the local populations, as well as
the fact that people from Van were interested only in their own region. He confirmed that police
officials had produced all the propaganda aimed at glorifying Aram and Ishkhan and that its sole
purpose was to allay the Armenians’ suspicions. Ruben concludes his account of this conversation
by revealing that the police chief in question was an Armenian who had converted to Islam after
the 1895 massacres and regularly informed the fedayi leaders of the government’s plans (ibidem,
pp. 250–9).
81. Ibidem, pp. 244–5. Present were, notably, Dr. Hovsep Ter Davtian, Arshag Vramian, Vahan
Papazian, and Vartan Shahbaz.
82. Ibidem, pp. 118–19, letter from S. Zavarian to the Balkans Central Committee, Constantinople,
10 October 1912.
83. Infra, p. 826, n. 30.
84. Simon Zavarian: on the occasion of the seventieth anniversary of his death, op. cit., pp. 315–429, see
the series of letters that Simon Zavarian wrote from Mush between 25 November 1909 and 6 July
1911.
85. Infra, p. 817 n. 53; Papazian, Memoirs, op. cit., II, p. 37, for his action in Van.
86. Ibidem, pp. 38–9.
87. Ibidem, pp. 42–3.
88. Ibidem, p. 40.
89. CADN, Ambassade de Constantinople, E 130, report from the French vice-consul in Uskub,
G. Rajevof, to M. Boppe, chargé d’affaires in Constantinople, 28 June 1909, no. 65, “Histoire du
mouvement révolutionnaire du mois de juillet 1908,” pp. 70–2.
90. Ibidem, p. 72.
91. Bedros Halajian (1852–1920), deputy in the Ottoman parliament, minister of public works, mem-
ber of the Young Turk party.
92. Sharurian, Chronology of the life and work of Krikor Zohrab, op. cit., p. 163. It should be added that
initially, the patriarch interfered in the political process by taking a hand in creating the rules
for choosing the Armenian candidates (at an informal meeting to which, notably, Zohrab, Rupen
Zartarian, and Murad [Hampartsum Boyajian] had been invited) (ibidem).
93. Vartkes (1871–1915), born in Erzerum, head of the party in Van (1901–1903), arrested and con-
demned to death (a sentence commuted to life in prison), deputy in the Ottoman parliament from
1908 to 1915, deported toward Urfa and then murdered.
94. Armen Garo (1872–1923), born in Erzerum, doctor in chemistry (educated in Geneva), responsible for
the occupation of the Banque Ottomane (1896), member of the Western and Eastern bureaus (1898–
1901 and 1907, respectively) and deputy in the Ottoman parliament from 1908 to February 1914.
95. Kegham (1865–1918), born in Khebian (Mush), leader of the ARF in his native region, deputy in
the Ottoman parliament from 1908 to 1918 (ill with tuberculosis, he was not deported).
96. Descended of a family of rich merchants from Smyrna.
97. Hagop Babikian (1856–1909), born in Edirne, lawyer in Constantinople, member of the CUP,
deputy in the Ottoman parliament (1908), a leader, together with Yusuf Kemal, of the parliamen-
tary commission of inquiry into the massacres of Cilicia.
98. Supra, I, n. 130.

Notes 829
99. Nazareth Daghavarian († 1915), born in Sıvas, writer, agronomical engineer, and Paris-trained
physician, founder and secretary general of the A.G.B.U. (1906), deputy from Sıvas in the
Ottoman parliament (1908–1915), deported on 24 April 1915 and murdered.
100. Ahmad, The Young Turks, op. cit.
101. Minassian, “Les relations entre le CUP,” art. cit., p. 60. The Armenian deputies of course refused
the invitation.
102. CADN, Ambassade de Constantinople, série E/126, letter from the French vice-consul in
Erzerum to Constans, French ambassador in Constantinople, 21 November 1908. The mufti
elected in Erzincan was described as “very fanatical.”
Erzerum to Constans, French ambassador in Constantinople, 20 November 1908.
104. CADN, Ambassade de Constantinople, série E/126, letter from the French consul in Salonika to
Constans, French ambassador in Constantinople, 23 September 1908.
Mehmed Cavid (1875–1926), graduated from Mülkiye at the same time as Hüseyin Cahid,
member of the OOL in 1906, deputy first from Salonika (1908 and 1912) and then from
Çanakkale (1914), minister of finance in June 1909 and again in 1913–1915 and 1917–
1918; took part in the plot against Kemal and was executed in 1926 (Zürcher, The Unionist,
op. cit., p. 49).
105. The consul describes Harutiun/Artin Boshghazarian as an “intelligent man, a good speaker
and a patriot. It is said that he owes his success to the vali’s support.”: CADN, Ambassade de
Constantinople, série E/126, letter from the French consul in Aleppo to Bompard, ambassador
in Constantinople, 25 November 1909.
106. Ibidem.
107. The Armenian Chamber had 140 members: the parish councils of Constantinople designated 80
deputies, the clergymen of the capital designated 20 more and the provincial dioceses designated
another forty. The chamber elected the Political Council, a kind of national government with
executive powers. The 20 people on the Political Council oversaw the naming and the work of
four committees while also maintaining regular relations with the Ottoman government. The
Political Council was sometimes combined with the Religious Council, made up of 14 clergymen,
to form a Mixed Council.
The four committees were the School Committee, which administered 2,000 schools; the
Administrative Committee, charged with managing and maintaining national property
and revenue (collecting rents and taxes), buying and selling real estate, keeping a strict
watch over the national legacy, monitoring receipts and expenditures, and administering
the hospitals; the Judiciary Committee, comprising eight members – four clergymen and
four lay jurists required to have a doctorate in law – was charged with settling family dis-
putes and dealing with the litigation involving Armenians that the Sublime Porte referred
to it; and the Committee on Monasteries, charged with supervising the management of
the hundreds of Armenian monasteries in the empire.
The internal organization of the Armenian community in the provinces – the 45 dio-
ceses – was modeled after the organization in the capital. The metropolitan of each dio-
cese presided over the diocesan council, a majority of whose members were lay dignitaries,
and had executive power: Raymond Kévorkian and P. B. Paboudjian, Les Arméniens dans
l’Empire ottoman à la veille du génocide, Paris 1992, pp. 7–9.
108. Adenakrutiun Azkayin Zhoghovo [Minutes of the National Chamber], 1887–1896, Constantinople
1896.
109. M. Ormanian, Azkabadum, III, Jérusalem 1927, coll. 5066–506.
110. Kévorkian-Paboudjian, Les Arméniens dans l’Empire ottoman, op. cit., pp. 15–19.
111. Ormanian, Azkabadum, op. cit., col. 5153.
112. Adenakrutiun Azkayin Zhoghovo [Minutes of the National Chamber], Constantinople, July 1906,
pp. 1–4.
113. Ormanian, Azkabadoum, op. cit., coll. 5380–5388. This prelate (1841–1918), a convert from the
Catholic Church educated in Rome, reformed the seminary in Armash where he trained the future
leaders of the Armenian Church along modernized lines; he served as Archbishop of Erzerum,
founding Erzerum’s Sanasarian School, an elite establishment with a curriculum based on German

models. Ormanian is the author of standard works on the history of the Armenian Church. After
being forced to resign, he spent several years in exile at the Patriarchate of Jerusalem, then returned
and settled in the capital, where he lived modestly in a one-room apartment in Pera.
114. Stepan Karayan (1855–1933), jurist, law professor, judge on the court of appeals, president of the
Political Council almost without interruption from 1908 to 1914.
115. H. Shahrikian, known as Nitra (1860–1915), born in Şabin-Karahisar, Istanbul-educated jurist,
member of the Eastern Bureau (1898–1905), murdered in 1915.
116. Adenakrutiun Azkayin Zhoghovo, Verapatsoum 1908–1909 Nstachrtchani [Minutes of the inaugural
session of the National Chamber 1908–1909], Constantinople 1909, pp. 39, 49–54.
117. Hrant Asadur (1862–1928), born in Constantinople, Paris-educated jurist, member of the
Ottoman Constitutional Council, editor of the newspaper Masis, literary critic.
118. V. Torkomian (1858–1942), born in Constantinople, Paris-trained physician, Prince Abdül
Mecid’s private physician, president of the Imperial Medical Academy founder of the Armenian
Red Cross, deported in 1915, exiled to France (1923), author of many scholarly works.
119. Ibidem, p. 57.
120. Report, 20 November 1908: Bibliothèque Nubar, CCG 5/4, file 1, 16 pp., in Kévorkian-Paboudjian,
Les Arméniens dans l’Empire ottoman, op. cit., pp. 26–7.
121. The first veritable crisis facing the CUP broke out in early October 1908, when, in short order,
Bulgaria declared its independence (5 October), the Austro-Hungarian Empire proclaimed that
it had annexed Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Crete proclaimed itself a part of Greece (6 October).
122. Founded on 14 September 1908 by Nureddin Ferruh, Ahmed Fazıl, Celâleddin Arif: Bozarslan,
Les Courants de pensée, op. cit. II, p. 123; Erik J. Zürcher, Turkey, a Modern History, London and
New York, ed. 1998, p. 100.
123. Papazian, Memoirs, op. cit., II, p. 101. We have observed that the Armenian delegation had opted
for direct negotiations with the government or even the Young Turk Central Committee in
order to circumvent the tensions that reigned in the parliament to which many conservatives,
especially from the provinces, had been elected on the CUP’s lists.
124. Ibidem, pp. 99–100.
125. His candidacy was initally blocked by the CUP (Piuzantion, no. 3700, 8 December 1908, p. 1).
However, in the face of the Patriarchal Political Council’s insistence, and after a 6 December meet-
ing that the Council’s president, Stepan Karayan, held with “an important figure” at the CUP’s
Istanbul headquarters, the Young Turks agreed not to veto his election (Piuzantion, no. 3701, 9
December 1908, p. 1). In its 9 December issue, the CUP’s organ, Şûra-yı Ümmet, announced that
there were two Armenian candidates on the committee’s list of candidates for the capital.
126. Under the feather of the editor-in-chief, Puzant Kechian, de Piuzantion, no. 3706, 15 December
1908, p. 1.
127. A Laz born in Şoppa, a judge who served in Damascus, Salonika, and Skopie (Uskub) as president
of the penal court; after 1908, member of the CUP, court inspector in Salonika and interim vali
of Kosovo; traveled frequently to Lazistan as a CUP propagandist; director of the Department
of Criminal Affairs in the Ministry of Justice; member of the commission for the nomination of
magistrates; charged with investigating the “abuses” committed during the First World War at
the expense of the Armenians; presiding judge of the criminal and the appeals court: APC/PAJ,
PCI Bureau, Յ 25–26–27–28–29–30–31–32–33–34, Second Report on Turks Responsible for the
Armenian Atrocities.
128. Hüseyin Cahit bey [Yalçın] (1874–1957), parliamentary deputy from the capital, vice-president
(1914–1916), and, later, president of parliament, member of the Young Turk Central Committee,
one of the main CUP propagandists, editor of Tanin. Interned in Malta in 1919.
129. Piuzantion, no. 3714, 24 December 1908.
130. Zhamanag, no. 54, 29 December 1908.
131. Piuzantion, no. 3721, 4 January 1909.
132. Piuzantion, no. 3686, 21 November 1908.
133. Zhamanag, no. 61, 6 January 1909.
134. Piuzantion, no. 3736, 22 January 1909.
135. Bozarslan, Les Courants de pensée, op. cit. II, p. 123; Hanioğlu, Preparation for a Revolution, op. cit.,
p. 292.

Notes 831
136. Naim Turfan, Rise of the Young Turks: Politics, the Military and Ottoman Collapse, London and
New York 2000, p. 232, n. 63.
137. Hüseyin Rauf (1881–1964), agent in Persia during the First World War, signatary of the 31 October
1918 Mudros Armistice, one of the founders of the Karakol and the resistance in Anatolia (1919):
Zürcher, The Unionist, op. cit., p. 45.
138. Monastırlı Nuri (1882–1937), born in Salonika, Unionist fedayi, parliamentary deputy, first direc-
tor of the Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa, Enver’s secret service secret after 1914: ibidem.
139. Kuşçubaşızade Eşref [Sencer] (1873–after 1963), important director of a section of the Teşkilât-ı
Mahsusa: ibidem.
140. Yenibahçeli Şükrü [Oğuz], Unionist fedayi and CUP inspector, member of the Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa,
and, later, of Karakol: ibidem.
141. Kara Vasıf (1872–1931), colonel, member of the CUP prior to 1908, member of the court-martial
that judged the fiasco of the Balkan War, founder of Karakol in 1919: ibidem.
142. Kâzım [Özalp] (1880–1968), member of the CUP, officer, member of the Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa, presi-
dent of the National Assembly (1924–1935), minister of war (1922–1924, 1935–1943): ibidem.
143. Ibidem, p. 50.
144. Published by Ali Birinci, in Tarih ve Toplum, no. 70, 1989, p. 60, cited in Bozarslan, Les Courants
de pensée, op. cit., I, p. 210, n. 818.
145. “Enver Paşa’nın Gizli Mektupları,” (ed. by Ş. Hanioğlu), Cumhuriyet, 9 October 1989, in Bozarslan,
Les Courants de pensée, op. cit., I, p. 210, n. 815.
146. Midhat Şükrü Bleda, İmparatorluğun Çöküşü, Istanbul 1979, p. 26. This group, founded early
in 1909, had the support of Hasan Fehmi and was dissolved after the events of “31 March” on
charges of plotting, not against the government, but against the CUP: Bozarslan, Les Courants
de pensée, op. cit., II, p. 138.
147. T. Z. Tunaya, Hürriyetin Ilânı, Istanbul 1959, p. 41, in Bozarslan, Les Courants de pensée, op. cit., I,
p. 233.
148. Founded in November 1909, the moving spirits behind this party were Lütfi Fikri, Şükrî Al-Aseki:
ibidem, II, p. 123.
149. This party was led by Ferit pasha Sadık bey, Şükrü al-Aseki, Rıza Nur, Lütfi Fikri and Gümülcineli
İsmail: ibidem, II, p. 123.
150. Ibidem, I, p. 234.
151. Ibidem, II, p. 123.
152. Sabah-Gulian, The Responsibles, op. cit., p. 284.
153. Ibidem, pp. 285–6.
154. Ibidem, p. 287.
2 Young Turks and Armenians Facing the Test of

“The 31 March Incident” and the Massacres in Cilicia
1. Turfan, Rise of the Young Turks, op. cit., p. 238, n. 89.
2. M. Sabri Efendi, “Menkibelerimiz ve Ayıblarımız,” in S. Albayrak, 31 Mart Vak’ası Gerici Bir
Hareket mi?, Istanbul 1989, p. 33, discourse of Rasim Efendi in Ottoman parliament, in Bozarslan,
Les Courants de pensée, op. cit., II, pp. 69–70.
3. François Georgeon, “Le dernier sursaut (1878–1908),” in Robert Mantran (dir.), Histoire de
l’Empire ottoman, Paris 1989, p. 582.
4. Ahmad, The Young Turks, op. cit, pp. 43–4. The grand vizier, Kâmil Pasha, expelled him again,
perhaps under pressure from the CUP.
5. See the Istanbul press of 19 April 1909, in particular Piuzantion, no. 3806, p. 3; Zürcher, Turkey:
A Modern History, op. cit., p. 102.
6. Piuzantion, no. 3805, 17 April 1909, p. 2.
7. Piuzantion, no. 3812, 27 April 1909, p. 3.
8. Papazian, Memoirs, II, op. cit., p. 109.
9. Simon Zavarian: On the Occasion of the Seventieth Anniversary of His Death, op. cit., III, pp. 60–1,
letter of S. Zavarian, Constantinople, 14/27 April 1909.

10. Ibidem, p. 61.

11. Papazian, Memoirs, II, op. cit., p. 105, notes that Ahmed Rıza in particular was targeted by the
insurgents, who were led by the grand mufti of Istanbul. No more than 50 or 60 deputies were
present when the parliament building was occupied, including Halajian, Armen Garo, and
Papazian himself.
12. Azadamard, no. 66, 9 September 1909, p. 1, published Papazian’s eyewitness account; Papazian
repeats what he wrote here in his Memoirs, II, Cairo 1957, pp. 103–8; a vote in favor of the reintro-
duction of the şaria as the basic law of the land took place nevertheless.
13. Minassian, “Les relations entre le Comité Union et Progrès et la Fédération,” art. cit., pp. 62–3.
14. Diary of K. Zohrab, in Garun 5/1991, p. 67.
15. Minassian, “Les relations entre le Comité Union et Progrès et la Fédération,” art. cit., p. 62.
16. Reprinted in Mshag, no. 67, 15 April 1909.
17. CADN, Ambassade de Constantinople, série E/131, letter from the French vice-consul in Marash,
Marcial Grapin, to Constans, French ambassador in Constantinople, 4 January 1909.
Dyarbekir to Bompard, French ambassador in Constantinople, 20 April 1909.
19. Archives du ministère des Affaires étrangères (AMAE), Correspondance politique, Turquie, n. s.,
vol. 83, politique intérieure, Arménie, Anatolie, Cilicie, f° 69 r°, letter from the French vice-
consul in Van, captain B. Dickson, to the minister of foreign affairs, Pichon.
20. Ten months later, Bağdâdizâde, too, would be among the organizers of the massacres.
21. AMAE, Correspondance politique, Turquie, n. s., vol. 83, f° 64 r°-v°, letter from the French vice-
consul in Mersina and Adana to French ambassador in Constantinople and to the minister of
foreign affairs, Pichon, 18 August 1908.
22. Ibidem, ff. 84–85, letter from the French vice-consul in Mersina and Adana to French ambassador
in Constantinople and to the minister of Foreign affairs, 23 October 1908.
23. Duckett Z. Ferriman, The Young Turks and the Truth about the Holocaust at Adana, in Asia Minor,
During April, 1909, London 1913, p. 14; Hagop Terzian, Կիլիկիոյ Աղէտը [The Catastrophe of
Cilicia], Constantinople 1912, p. 12.
24. AMAE, Correspondance politique, Turquie, n. s., vol. 83, f° 86, dispatch of 3 November 1908.
25. AMAE, Correspondance politique, Turquie, n. s., vol. 83, f° 159, letter from French embassy,
Therabia, 31 July 1910.
26. AMAE, Correspondance politique, Turquie, n. s., vol. 83, f° 84, letter to minister Pichon, 23
October 1908. Despite the witch hunt and the corresponding climate that prevailed in Cilicia
after the massacres, and despite the political condemnations pronounced by the court-martial, G.
Guvderelian, who was held in prison for approximately one year before being cleared and released,
was described by the members of the commission of inquiry come from Constantinople as a man
who enjoyed great prestige.
27. Duckett Z. Ferriman, The Young Turks and the Truth about the Holocaust at Adana, op. cit.,
pp. 13–14.
28. Azadamard, no. 9, 2 July 1909, p. 3, published an interview of the editorial board with Grand
Vizier Hilmi Pasha and General Mahmud Şevket about the condemnation of Bishop Mushegh,
“considered to be responsible for the massacres” to “101 years in prison.”
29. Service historique de la Marine (Vincennes), SS ED 100, 13 pp., Escadre de la Méditerranée
occidentale et du Levant, dispatch no. 716, Alexandretta, 8 May 1909, Contre-Amiral Pivet, com-
mander of the Escadre légère de la Méditerranée, to the minister of Navy.
30. Piuzantion, no. 3764, 27 February 1909, p. 1.
31. Report from the vali Cevad bey to minister of the Interior, end of April 1909, in H. Terzian, La
catastrophe de Cilicie, op. cit., p. 752.
32. Service historique de la Marine (Vincennes), SS ED 100, 13 pp., Escadre de la Méditerranée
occidentale et du Levant, dispatch no. 716, Alexandretta, 8 May 1909, Contre-Amiral Pivet, com-
mander of the Escadre légère de la Méditerranée, to the minister of Navy.
33. A. Adossidès, Arméniens et Jeunes-Turcs, les massacres de Cilicie, Paris 1910, pp. 117–18.
34. AMAE, Correspondance politique, Turquie, n. s., vol 283, ff. 164/22–23v°, reprinted in Azadamard,
no. 42, 12 August 1909, p. 1.
35. AMAE, Corr. pol., Turquie, n. s., vol 283, f° 94.

Notes 833
36. Azadamard, no. 39, 8 August 1909, p. 1.

37. Terzian, The Catastrophe of Cilicia, op. cit., pp. 717–24, published the entire proceedings of the
court-martial, dated 7 July 1909; the proceedings were also published by the Istanbul press begin-
ning in mid-July (see Azadamard, no. 22, 17 July 1909, p. 3).
38. FO 195/2280, letter from British consul in Mersina and Adana, Doughty-Wylie, Konya, 15 June
1908.
39. Terzian, The Catastrophe of Cilicia, op. cit., pp. 689–99, published the entire proceedings of the
court-martial, dated 10 July 1909; the proceedings were also published by the Istanbul press begin-
ning in mid-July (see Azadamard, nos 33 et 34, 31 July and 2 August 1909).
40. As early as 1906, Bağdâdizâde was sending reports to Sultan Abdülhamid accusing the Armenians
of Cilicia of harboring separatist intentions : Ferriman, The Young Turks, op. cit., p. 12.
41. Ibidem, p. 19.
42. Terzian, The Catastrophe of Cilicia, op. cit., pp. 10–19.
43. Ibidem, pp. 19–20.
44. This information is provided both by Ferriman, The Young Turks, op. cit., pp. 22–3 and by the parlia-
mentary commission in its report, written by the judges Fayk Bey and H. Mosdichian (see n. 37).
45. Haci Adıl (1869–1935), former vali of Edirne, participed in the Union and Progress congress in
Salonika in November 1910, becoming, at that time, both a member of the Central Committee
and Dr. Nâzım’s successor as the CUP’s secretary general (AMAE, Turquie, n. s., vol. 7, ff. 154–8,
report from the French consul in Salonika, Max Soublier, to Pichon and to the French ambas-
sador in Constantinople, Bompard, Salonika, 17 November 1910). Adıl served as president of the
reform commission in Albania and briefly, in January 1913, as interior minister (Gohag, 30 January
1913, no. 3 [128], pp. 25–6), and president of parliament in fall 1915. Under Mustafa Kemal, he
became Director-General of the State Monopolies. He was one of the defendants in the “Smyrna
plot” trial of 1926: Zürcher, The Unionist, op. cit., p. 160.
46. This famous telegram was cited by virtually the entire Istanbul press and in the report of the
parliamentary commission; it was also at the heart of the debates in the Ottoman parliament at
the session of 19 April 1909, during which Adıl Bey was asked to provide an explanation in place
of his newly named minister of the interior, who was not familiar with the details of the affair
(see the precise account Piuzantion, no. 3806, 19 April, p. 2 and the publication in extenso of the
parliamentary debates in Terzian, The Catastrophe of Cilicia, op. cit., pp. 592–607).
47. Rigal (P.), “Adana. Les Massacres d’Adana,” Lettres d’Ore, relations d’Orient [Confidential Review
of the Jesuit Missions Edited in the Order in Lyons and Published in Brusells], November 1909, pp.
359–91. Another series of reports was published in the July 1909 issue, pp. 199–223.
48. This summary of events is based on many different sources: the reports of the parliamentary com-
mission, the Armenian Council, the missionaries and consuls, and, of course, on the articles and
reports published in the Istanbul press, as well as the crucially important eyewitness accounts
reproduced in Terzian, The Catastrophe of Cilicia, op. cit., pp. 26–36, Ferriman, op. cit., pp. 23–5.
49. According to the pharmacist Hagop Terzian, it was the 300 Armenians living in the quarter near
the Sultane Valide mosque in Hazır Bazar, almost all of them natives of Hacın, who witnessed
these events (cf. Terzian, The Catastrophe of Cilicia, op. cit., p. 37). After resisting for two hours,
they succeeded in the course of the night in making their way into the house of the dragoman
of the Russian consulate, Yanko Artemi, after making an opening in a side wall. They remained
there for three days, until the massacres were over.
50. Terzian, who was in the Armenian quarter at the time, gives a very precise description of the posi-
tions, street by street, of the defenders (pp. 38–9). The English consul, for his part, confirms that
the Muslims launched an assault on the Armenian quarter: FO 195/2306, letter from Doughty-
Wylie to the ambassador Lowther, 21 April 1909.
51. See the French missionaries’ narratives published in Raymond Kévorkian, Les Massacres de Cilicie
d’avril 1909, Revue d’Histoire Arménienne Contemporaine, III (1999), pp. 144–7.
52. To present a full account of the Cilician events, we would also have to discuss the events that
occurred simultaneously in the other towns and villages of the region; that would, however, take
us too far afield. We therefore refer interested readers to our study: Kévorkian, Les Massacres
de Cilicie d’April 1909, op. cit., pp. 5–141, and especially pp. 65–82, for the other towns and
villages.

53. A facsimile reproduction, with a translation of the incriminating articles, is included in Terzian,
The Catastrophe of Cilicia, op. cit., pp. 64–92.
54. Ibidem, pp. 64–8.
55. Reprinted in Azadamard, no. 4, 26 June 1909, p. 2.
57. Ibidem, p. 69.
58. Infra, p. 833, n. 47, relation of Father Rigal.
59. Published especially in Piuzantion, no. 3806, 19 April 1909, p. 2.
60. Report on the Session in Piuzantion, no. 3807, 20 April 1909, p. 1.
61. Supra, p. 72.
62. Piuzantion, no. 3816, 1 May 1909, p. 1.
63. AMAE, Correspondance politique, Turquie, n. s., vol. 83, ff. 121–122, Paris, 16 June 1909.
64. Kévorkian, Les Massacres de Cilicie d’avril 1909, op. cit., p. 149, Some of the following passages are
also taken from Rigal’s Mémoire.
65. Ibidem, p. 173, complete report by Hagop Babikian. This information is confirmed in the “Report
on the Massacres in Adana” by major Doughty-Wylie: FO 424/220.
66. These figures are given in Interior Minister Ferid Pasha’s report, read during the 11 May 1909
session of the Ottoman parliament. The full record of this session may be found in Terzian, The
Catastrophe of Cilicia, op. cit., p. 607; see also ibidem, 300; Ferriman, op. cit., p. 80.
67. Figures cited by Zohrab in his contribution to the parliamentary debate; he identified his source as
a letter, received in Constantinople, from the dragoman of the French vice-consulate in Mersin
and Adana: Terzian, The Catastrophe of Cilicia, op. cit., pp. 604–5
68. Reprinted in Piuzantion, no. 3827, 14 May 1909, p. 2.
69. Kévorkian, Les Massacres de Cilicie d’April 1909, op. cit., p. 167, text of the report.
70. Ibidem.
71. Tasviri Efkiar, 12 August 1909.
72. Figures given by the charge d’affaire Boppe, in a letter to the minister Pichon: AMAE,
Correspondance politique, Turquie, n. s., vol. 83, f° 147.
73. For the complete compilation, see ibidem, p. 83.
74. Ibidem.
75. See n. 30; Ferriman, op. cit., pp. 85–7.
76. Figures given by the governmental commission of inquiry (see note 173). Ferriman, pp. 91–3, 97,
furnishes the details region by region.
77. On the question of the orphans, see Zabel Essayan (administrator of the Armenian Red Cross in
Cilicia in this period), correspondence and notes, Levon Kecheyan (ed.), in Kévorkian, Les mas-
sacres de Cilicie d’avril 1909, op. cit., pp. 217, Suiv.
79. Ibidem, pp. 819–24.
3 The Ottoman Government’s and the Armenian Authorities’

Political Responses to the Massacres in Cilicia
1. Kévorkian, Les massacres de Cilicie d’avril 1909, op. cit., p. 152.
2. The allusion is to the second massacres of Adana, underway as Cevad wrote.
3. Kévorkian, Les massacres de Cilicie d’avril 1909, op. cit., p. 57, n. 59, p. 152.
4. Zohrab is alluding to the fact that Adıl was then de facto in charge of the Interior Ministry.
5. 3 May 1909, p. 1, “The Turkish Crisis: The Armenians Protest in the Chamber.”
6. A complete translation of the records of the debates of the Ottoman parliament was published by
the Istanbul press the next day, notably in Piuzantion, nos 3836, 3837, 24 and 25 May, pp. 2–3; see
also Terzian, The Catastrophe of Cilicia, op. cit., pp. 611–15.
7. Ibidem.
8. AMAE, Correspondance politique, Turquie, n. s., vol. 83, f° 159/2, from Barré de Lancy to Boppe,
3 July 1909.
9. Ibidem.

Notes 835
10. Azadamard, no. 13, 7 July 1909, p. 3.

12. Ibidem.
14. Records of the debates of the Ottoman parliament, 105 session, in Azadamard, no. 11, 5 July 1909,
p. 2.
15. AMAE, Correspondance politique, Turquie, n. s., vol. 83, f° 159/3. Gabriel-Georges Barré de
Lancy (born 8 Sept. 1865), vice-consul in Mersin and Tarse.
16. FO 195/2306, letter from Doughty-Wylie to the British ambassador in Constantinople, 30 June 1909.
18. Reprinted in Azadamard, no. 12, 6 July 1909, p. 1. According to the editorialist of this daily, the
members of the government admitted in private that all these accusations were false, but refused
to say so publicly.
19. AMAE, Correspondance politique, Turquie, n. s., vol. 83, f° 159/7, report from Barré de Lancy to
Boppe, Mersin, 16 July 1909.
21. Three of these individuals and many others murderers were, oddly, appointed to the local
commissions of inquiry charged with investigating crimes for which they too were under
suspicion.
22. Reports in the Istanbul press of 27 July, especially in Azadamard, no. 29, 27 July 1909, p. 2. According
to Şerif pasha, İsmail Hakkı is a member of Young Turk Central Committee: Mécheroutiette,
no. 38, January 1913, p. 16.
24. AMAE, Correspondance politique, Turquie, vol. 83, f° 162, Thérapia, 11 August 1909.
26. Azadamard, no. 34 and 36, 2 and 4 August 1909, p. 3. Babikian’s 4 August funeral was the occa-
sion for a grand ecumenical ceremony at which members of parliament, senators, members of the
government, and the diplomatic corps were all present. During the ceremony, Yusuf Kemal and
Krikor Zohrab delivered eulogies in which they paid tribute to Babikian’s selflessness and political
courage.
27. Records of the debates of the Ottoman parliament were published by Istanbul press and by Terzian,
The Catastrophe of Cilicia, op. cit., pp. 621–3.
28. A complete translation was published in Azadamard, no. 63, 5 September 1909, p. 1.
29. Azadamard, no. 38, 6 August 1909, pp. 1–2, announced Cemal appointment and published an
interview with him; ambassador Bompard also announced this appointment in a letter to minister
Pichon, 11 August 1909: AMAE, Correspondance politique, Turquie, n. s., vol. 283, f° 162.
30. The funds were put in the hands of commissions made up of local notables more or less deeply
implied in the massacres; most of the money was embezzled. Let us also point out that there
occurred only symbolic restitution of the booty seized during the massacres: FO 195/2306, letter
from Doughty-Wylie to Lowther, Adana, 9 May 1909.
31. French version in AMAE, Correspondance politique, Turquie, n. s., vol. 283, ff. 164/22–23v°;
Armenian version in Azadamard, no. 42, 12 August 1909, p. 1.
33. FO 195/2306, letters from Doughty-Wylie to Lowther, 4 and 21 May 1909.
34. Adossidès, op. cit., p. 106, cites the report of the American mission.
35. Terzian, The Catastrophe of Cilicia, op. cit., pp. 689–99, for the full report, 10 July 1909, and in the
Istanbul press in the end of July (see Azadamard, no. 33, 34, 31 July and 2 August 1909).
36. AMAE, Correspondance politique, Turquie, n. s., vol 283, ff. 121–3, 16 June 1909.
37. A big Kurdish landowner said to be particularly corrupt.
38. AMAE, Correspondance politique, Turquie, n. s., vol. 283, f° 16421, 24, 33, Mersine, 11 and 21
September 1909.
39. Azadamard, no. 63, 6 September 1909, p. 3.
40. Adossidès, op. cit., pp. 119–20.
41. Adenakrutiun, op. cit., records of the 8 May 1909 Session, pp. 322–7.
42. Ibidem, pp. 328–35.

43. M. Ormanian, Azkabadum, III, Jérusalem 1927, col. 5432; diplomatic sources indicate that some of
the victims from others regions were repatriated. “Some sixty people, widows as well as girls and
boys whose parents had been massacred during the events in Adana and the surrounding area
were taken to Sıvas by the local authorities in a terrible state” and then conducted “as far as their
native district of Terjan, in the vilayet of Erzerum. Fleeing the poverty and famine prevailing in
region from which they came, these families had gone to the vilayet of Adana the previous fall to
work during the harvest.”
44. Adenakrutiun, op. cit., records of the 12 June 1909 Session, pp. 404, 409.
45. Sarkis Svin, a delegate traveling with a prelate, was put under “military surveillance” as soon as he
arrived in Cilicia, and prevented from traveling freely (ibidem, p. 407).
46. Ibidem, records of the 24 April 1909 Session, pp. 305–6.
47. Ibidem, records of the 12 June 1909 Session, pp. 389–409.
48. Ibidem, records of the 21 August 1909 Session, pp. 484, suiv.
49. Piuzantion, no. 3823, 10 May 1909, p. 1.
50. Azadamard, no. 2, 24 June 1909, p. 1.
51. Azadamard, no. 9, 2 July 1909, p. 2, records of the 104 Session.
52. Azadamard, no. 10, 3 July 1909, p. 2, records of the Session.
53. Ibidem, records of the 25 September 1909 Session, pp. 517–18, 522–4.
54. Ibidem, records of the 4 September 1909 Session, pp. 493–4.
55. Ibidem, records of the 30 October 1909 Session, pp. 46–7.
56. Ibidem, pp. 49–50.
57. N° 3924, 20 September, p. 1, editorial.
58. Ibidem, p. 1.
59. Ibidem, records of the 18 December 1909 Session, pp. 127–9.
60. Ibidem, p. 130.
61. Declaration published in the Temps and reprinted in Azadamard, no. 12, 6 July 1909, p. 1, see
supra, p. 103.
62. Ibidem, pp. 143–53, 161.
63. Zeki Bey was preparing to publish “important revelations concerning the Committee’s intrigues,
the revolutionary movement of 31 March and the Adana incidents.” As a result, “he would be, in
his own words, condemned to death by the Committee”: Mécheroutiette, Constitutionnel ottoman,
no. 51, February 1914, p. 34.
64. Kévorkian, Les Massacres de Cilicie d’avril 1909, op. cit., p. 152.
65. Piuzantion, no. 3946, 16 October 1909, p. 3, published the declaration of the Central Committee
in Salonika.
66. Azadamard, no. 3, 25 June 1909, p. 3, article of Rinat de Vall, correspondant of the Giornale
d’Italia.
67. Azadamard, no. 125, 18 November 1909, p. 1.
68. Hanioğlu, Preparation for a Revolution, op. cit., p. 285; Papazian, Memoirs, op. cit.., II, p. 114, points
out that Zohrab was one of the main authors of the act destituting the Sultan.
69. “Երկրորդ Յեղափոխութիւն [Second Revolution],” Droschak, no. 4/201, April 1909, pp. 41–45.
70. Ibidem, p. 43.
71. Adenakrutiun, op. cit., p. 43. the allusion is probably to the tribal leaders and notables in the prov-
inces who had been closely associated with the old regime. “The traitors tothe fatherland” in favor
of decentralization are probably the liberal circles that the CUP liquidated after the “reaction” of
31 March.
72. Ibidem, records of the 21 August 1909 Session and records of the 12 February 1910 Session,
pp. 190–5. The correspondence of the French consuls sheds light on the first experiments in
this domain. It also indicates that “the Christians also find the abnormal moeurs of the Muslim
soldiers repulsive.” These and similar remarks about the Turkish soldiers are confirmed by the
frequent references to cases of rape or attempted rape of the Armenian conscripts. The authori-
ties avoided airing them in public. They also maintained silence about the conditions imposed on
Christian soldiers, illustrated by “the example of the seventeen recruits from Diarbekir who were
sent to Musch [sic] last year; fourteen of them succumbed to fatigue and privation, [a circumstance
that is] hardly likely to reassure the others”: cf. AMAE, Correspondance politique, Turquie, n. s.,

Notes 837
vol. 85, pp. 37, 52, 105, letter from the French vice-consuls in Erzerum and Dyarbekir, 10 March,
6 April and 7 August 1911.
73. Simon Zavarian: On the Occasion of the Seventieth Anniversary of His Death, III, op. cit., pp. 385–6:
Letter to the Western bureau, section of Constantinople, 25 October 1910.
74. Stepanos Sapah-Giulian, Փոքր Հայքի Յիշատակներ. Մաս Ա. 10-Մայիս-1 Օգոստոս
[Memories of Armenia Minor, Part 1, 10 May–1 August 1911], Chicago 1917, p. 323.
75. Adenakrutiun, op. cit., records of the 25 November 1911 Session, pp. 430–44.
76. Papazian, Memoirs, op. cit.., II, p. 126.
4 The CUP’s First Deviations: The 1909, 1910,

and 1911 Congresses
1. Mehmed Ziya [Gökalp] (1876–1924), sociologist, main CUP ideologue, member of the Central
Committee from 1910: Zürcher, The Unionist, op. cit., p. 77.
2. Bozarslan, Les Courants de pensée, op. cit. II, p. 124.
3. Turfan, Rise of the Young Turks, op. cit., pp. XV–XVI. The author points out that Kemal’s position
is contradictory, since he himself was an officer and a delegate from Tripolitania. More prosaically,
we might ask if his reaction is not due, above all, to his long-standing conflict with Enver, who
shut him out of the committee’s supreme body. An imperial decree of 29 May 1909 called on the
officers to stop meddling in politics; Mahmud Şevket seemed to be one of the most determined
high-ranking officers in this regard: Ahmad, The Young Turks, op. cit., p. 55.
4. Supra, p. 105.
5. ADN, Ambassade de Constantinople, série E/126, letter from the French ambassador in
Constantinople, Bompard, to the minister of Foreign affairs, 5 January 1910.
6. Mécheroutiette, Constitutionnel ottoman, no. 38, January 1913, p. 16.
7. Ibidem, no. 39, February 1913, p. 21, article of Sam Lévy, in Journal de Salonique.
8. Ibidem, p. 27, collected by Sam Lévy.
9. Records of the trial, 27 June 1911, in Mécheroutiette, Constitutionnel ottoman, no. 25–32,
November 1911 to July 1912. Zeki had also collaborated for quite some time on Murad Bey’s
Mizanci. It was for this reason that he was arrested, like many other members of the opposition,
after the events of 13 April 1909, and accused of being a “reactionary.” He was not, however,
found guilty, thanks to his reputation for integrity and his past as an opponent to the Hamidian
regime.
10. Mécheroutiette, Constitutionnel ottoman, no. 51, February 1914, p. 34. The day after Zeki Bey was
murdered, “police searches” were carried out in the victim’s bureau and home, and all his files
were confiscated; the court, however, did not make use of them at his trial. Ahmad, The Young
Turks, op. cit., p. 74, explains Cavid’s resignation as the result of disagreement between him and
the minister of war, M. Şevket, over the military budget.
11. His murder gave rise to a chorus of protests and a stormy debate in parliament, during which the
CUP was openly accused of ordering the murder. To disparage Hasan, the Young Turk press fell
back on its old propaganda arsenal, describing him, like many others, as a Hamidian reactionary
opposed to the Constitution.
12. Dr. Tevfik Rüstü [Aras] (1883–1972), Dr. Nâzım’s brother-in-law and a comrade of Mustafa Kemal’s;
an important member of the committee’s inner circle, a leader of the war of liberation in Anatolia,
foreign minister under Mustafa Kemal.
13. Mécheroutiette, Constitutionnel ottoman, no. 51, February 1914, pp. 15–53.
14. Ibidem, p. 34.
15. CADN, Ambassade de Constantinople, série E/126, letter from the French ambassador in
Constantinople, Bompard, to the minister of Foreign affairs, 10 May 1911.
16. Ibidem.
17. Mehmed Sadık (1860–1940), born in Istanbul, Harbiye graduate, leader of the CUP in Manastır,
member of the Central Committee in July 1908, influential in Salonika in 1909–1910; after break-
ing with the CUP, he became a one of the leaders of the Liberals: Ahmad, The Young Turks, op.
cit., pp. 89–90 et p. 178.

18. AMAE, Correspondance politique, Turquie, n. s., vol. 8, f° 121, letter from French consul in
Salonika, Josselin, to Selves, minister of Foreign affairs, Salonika, 5 October 1911.
19. CADN, Ambassade de Constantinople, série E/126, letter from the French vice-consul in Üsküb
to Bompard, 20 September 1910, “translation of a speech attributed to Talât Bey, minister of the
interior”; the same speech is cited by a British source: Ahmad, The Young Turks, op. cit., p. 85, n. 1,
notes that he has found no Turkish sources on this discourse; Vahakn Dadrian, Histoire du géno-
cide arménien, Paris 1996, pp. 301–3, n. 2–7, adds Austrian consular sources that are independent
of the other diplomatic documents.
20. CADN, Ambassade de Constantinople, série E/126, letter from the French vice-consul in Üsküb
to Bompard, 20 September 1910.
21. Halil bey [Menteşe] (1874–1948), jurist, member of the Young Turk Central Committee (1910),
deputy from Menteşe, president of the Young Turk parliamentary group, president of the Council
of State (June 1913), president of parliament, foreign minister (October 1915–February 1917),
deported to Malta in 1919: Ahmad, The Young Turks, op. cit., p. 171; AMAE, Correspondance poli-
tique, Turquie, n. s., vol. 9, f° 220, telegram from the French chargé d’affaire in Constantinople, to
Boppe, 17 June 1913.
22. Giritli Ahmed Nesimi (?–1958), born in Crete, educated at the Ecole des Sciences Politiques in
Paris, member of the Young Turk Central Committee (1911), foreign minister (February 1917–
October 1918), deported to Malta in 1919: Ahmad, The Young Turks, op. cit., pp. 175–6.
23. AMAE, Correspondance politique, Turquie, n. s., vol. 7, f° 124, letter from the French consul
in Salonika, Max Soublier, to Bompard, 1 November 1910. Dr. Nâzım was then secretary gen-
eral of the Central Committee. The consul notes that the Committee of Union and Progress
and the party for Union and Progress had functioned independently of one another until
then: ibidem, ff. 132–4, letter from Max Choublier to Pichon, Salonika, 7 and 8 November
1910.
24. AMAE, Correspondance politique, Turquie, n. s., vol. 7, f° 149 v°, letter from Max Choublier to
Pichon, Salonika, 16 November 1910, speech of Ihsan bey.
25. Ibidem, f° 150.
26. AMAE, Correspondance politique, Turquie, n. s., vol. 7, f° 151 v°, letter from Max Choublier to
Pichon, Salonika, 17 November 1910.
27. AMAE, Correspondance politique, Turquie, n. s., vol. 7, ff. 152–3, letter from Max Choublier to
Pichon and Bompard, Salonika, 17 November 1910.
28. Ibidem, f° 154. The consul states that this information is corroborated by information that his
European colleagues in Salonika had obtained from others sources (f° 157).
29. Ibidem, f° 164 v°, speech.
30. Ibidem, f° 158.
31. Infra, p. 833, n. 45.
32. Infra, p. 822, n. 174.
33. Infra, p. 822, n. 164.
34. A newcomer about whom very little is known, apart from the fact that during the First World
War he was one of the pivotal members of the commissions responsible for “abandoned property”
(Emvalı Metruke), and thus for “nationalizing” the economy–in other words, for confiscating the
moveable assets and real estate of the Armenians and then the Greeks: APC/PAJ, PCI Bureau, Ի
201, list of murterers in Eskişehir, and Դ 177–178.
35. Infra, p. 821, n. 160.
36. Aram Andonian, Պատմութիւն Պալքանեան Պատերազﬕն [History of the Balkan war], II,
Istanbul 1913, pp. 349, 355.
37. AMAE, Correspondance politique, Turquie, n. s., vol. 8, f° 107, letter from the French consul
in Salonika, Max Soublier, to Selves, minister of Foreign affairs, and to Bompard, Salonika, 3
September 1911.
38. Infra, p. 814, n. 4.
39. AMAE, Correspondance politique, Turquie, n. s., vol. 8, f° 117, letter from the French consul in
Salonika, Josselin, to Bompard, Salonika, 30 September 1911. The consul also points out that the
congress decided to increase the number of members on the Central Committee from 7 to 12:
ibidem, f° 117v°.

Notes 839
40. Ali Fethi [Okyar] (1880–1943), member of the CUP in 1907 (Salonika), of the Central Committee
in 1911, deputy, ambassador and minister in 1917, helped found the CUP again in October 1918,
one of the organizers of war of liberation: Zürcher, The Unionist, op. cit., p. 28.
41. AMAE, Correspondance politique, Turquie, n. s., vol. 8, f° 121, letter from the French consul in
Salonika, Josselin, to Selves, minister of Foreign affairs, Salonika, 10 October 1911.
Hüseyinzâde Ali [Turan] (1864–1941), Turkish-speaker born in Russian Azerbaijan, close asso-
ciate of Ziya Gökalp’s, physician trained at the Military Medical School in Constantinople,
one of the four founders of the CUP (1889), member of the Central Committee in 1911:
Zürcher, The Unionist, op. cit., p. 78. Hüseyinzâde Ali introduced Russian populism and the
accompanying revolutionary ideology to Turkey: cf. Ş. Mardin, Jön Türklerin Siyasi Fikirleri
1895–1908, Ankara 1964, pp. 32–3.
5 Armenian Revolutionaries and Young Turks: The

Anatolian Provinces and Istanbul, 1910–12
1. Simon Zavarian: on the occasion of the seventieth anniversary of his death, op. cit., III, p. 345, letter
from Zavarian to Hovnan Tavtian, Mush, 20 May 1910.
2. Ibidem.
3. Ibidem.
4. Ibidem, pp. 347–8, letter from Zavarian to the Bureau oriental of the ARF, Mush, 25 May 1910.
5. Ibidem, p. 361: letter from S. Zavarian to the Occidental Bureau of the ARF, Mush, 4 August.
6. Ibidem.
7. Ibidem, pp. 427–8, letter from Zavarian to the Bureau oriental of the ARF, Mush, 6 July 1911.
8. Ibidem, p. 428.
9. Ibidem, p. 438, letter from Zavarian to Avetis Aharonian, Constantinople, 19 November 1912.
11. Ibidem, p. 154.
12. Ibidem, p. 161.
13. Ibidem, p. 154.
14. Infra, p. 827, n. 73.
15. Infra, p. 827, n. 68.
17. Ibidem, p. 162.
18. Stepanos Sapah-Giulian, Memories of Armenia Minor, Part 1, 10 May-1 August 1911, op. cit.
19. Ibidem, p. 80.
20. Ibidem, p. 93.
21. Ibidem, p. 96.
22. Ibidem, pp. 97–8.
23. Ibidem, p. 99.
24. Ibidem, pp. 103, 114, 116. On the way, he passed through a village of Nogayi muhacirs from
Roumelia whom the government had authorized to loot in order to meet their basic needs.
25. Ibidem, pp. 123, 140.
26. Ibidem, pp. 130–1.
27. Ibidem, p. 127.
28. Ibidem, pp. 137–8.
29. Ibidem, pp. 154–6.
30. Ibidem, pp. 157–8. Meeting of 23 May.
31. Ibidem, pp. 168–9. The Greeks of this village were almost all Armenian-speakers and often mem-
bers of the Hnchak club.
32. Ibidem, pp. 171–3.
33. Ibidem, p. 176.
34. Ibidem, p. 178.
35. Ibidem, pp. 184–5, 188.
36. Ibidem, pp. 191–4.

37. Bekir Sâmi (1865–1933), a native of Daghestan, received his higher education in Paris. A Young
Turk leader, successively mutesarif of Amasia (1909), vali of Van (1911), Trebizond, Bursa, Beirut
(1914), and Aleppo (24 June to 25 September 1915), where he was replaced by Mustafa Abdülhalik
(nicknamed “the butcher of Bitlis”) after being criticized for not carrying out the orders of the
interior minister to liquidate the Armenians. Immediately following the First World War, he
joined the Kemalist movement and became foreign minister (1920–1921). Arrested in 1926 in
connection with the Smyrna plot, he was eventually released.
38. Ibidem, pp. 195–197. Ohannes Pasha Kuyumjian, governor general of Mount Lebanon when Bekir
Sâmi was vali of Beirut (1913–1915), notes that Bekir Sâmi, after zealously serving the CUP,
refused to implement CUP policy–to do “the Committee’s dirty work”–vis-à-vis the Lebanese
and then the Syrian population: Ohannès pacha Kouyoumdjian, Le Liban à la veille et au début de
la Grande Guerre. Mémoires d’un gouverneur, 1913–1915, Raymond Kévorkian, V. Tachjian, and
M. Paboudjian (eds.), RHAC V, Paris 2003, p. 154.
39. Ibidem, pp. 199–203.
40. Ibidem, p. 214. Let us note in passing that most Hnchak leaders in Amasia were Protestants (ibi-
dem, p. 205). As he crossed the plain of Ardova on the road to Sıvas, Sapah-Giulian saw five
Armenian villages. In the first, Çiflik, the inhabitants had been burned alive in the village church
in 1895 (ibidem, p. 245).
41. Ibidem, pp. 256–61.
42. Ibidem, p. 294.
43. Ibidem, pp. 296–7.
44. Ibidem, pp. 317–18.
45. Ibidem, p. 319.
46. Ibidem, p. 322.
47. AMAE, Turquie, Politique intérieure, n. s., vol. 9, ff. 42–5, letter from the French vice-consul
in Van, to Poincaré, Van, 15 March 1912. This document puts the number of men in the city
at 17,240 and the number of those in the 33 surrounding villages at 6,760. The joint Hnchak-
Ramgavar candidate was Nigoghos Aghasian, the kaymakam of Ispir (Erzerum) (ibidem, f°
45v°).
48. AMAE, Turquie, Politique intérieure, n. s., vol. 9, f° 56, letter from the French vice-consul in
Erzerum to the ministry, 2 March 1912.
49. Ibidem, report from the French general consul in Smyrnia, June 1911, f° 73.
50. AMAE, Turquie, Politique intérieure, n. s., vol. 9, f° 110, letter from the French vice-consul in
Van to the ministry, 20 June 1912; CADN, Ambassade de Constantinople, série E/132, letter from
the French vice-consul in Van to Bompard, 20 June 1912. A native of Constantinople, 35-years
old, official in the Interior Ministry, former inspector of the public debt in Siirt, and başmudir in
Erzerum, son-in-law of Haci Adıl Bey, he spoke French, which he had learned from the Jesuits in
Beirut; one of the founders of the club at Siirt.
52. Ibidem, II, p. 151.
53. Bozarslan, Les Courants de pensée, op. cit., II, p. 124. AMAE, Turquie, Politique intérieure, n. s., vol.
9, f° 177, letter from the French consul in Salonika, Josselin, to Poincaré, Salonika, 26 September
1912 announced the creation of Türk Ocaği, the “Turkish National Association.”
54. Bozarslan, Les Courants de pensée, op. cit., II, p. 233, Lütfi Fikri and Gümülcineli İsmail were also
members of the party; Zürcher, Turkey: A Modern History, op. cit., p. 107.
57. Ռոստոմ. Մահուան Վաթսունաﬔակին առթիւ [Rostom: On the occasion of the sixtieth anni-
versary of his death], ed Hrach Dasnabedian, Beirut 1999, pp. 295–9, report of Kurken Mkhitarian.
Mkhitarian, a student in Constantinople in fall 1911, underscores the spirit of revolt characteristic
of young Armenians, who were critical of parties such as the ARF.
58. Ibidem; Papazian, Memoirs, op. cit., II, p. 159, notes: “At the time, we were naive enough to believe
that there could be progressive circles among the Turks.”
59. [S. Sapah-Giulian], “Իթթիհատ-Դաշնակցական Գաղտնի Համաձայնութեան Պարուն-
ակութիւնը եւ Անոր Հետեւանքները [The Content of the Secret Accord between the Ittihadists

Notes 841
and the Dashnaks and Its Consequences],” in Gohag, 23 January/6 February 1913, no. 2 (127),
p. 18, The sequel appears in the following issues.
60. Gohag, 6/19 February 1913, no. 4 (127), p. 41, reviews the history of Ottoman penetration into
Persia after the Russian defeat at the hands of the Japanese in 1904, and also the role played by
Ephrem Khan and his commandos, whose activity basically benefited Russia, making it possible
for the Czarist Empire to return to the forefront of the local stage and conclude an agreement with
Great Britain delineating Russian and British zones of influence.
61. Gohag, 13/26 February 1913, no. 5 (130), p. 54. Ephrem was the head of the Persian gendarmerie and,
as such, all-powerful in Teheran. He seems to have opposed his party’s pro-Turkish policy; he was, in
any case, excluded from its ranks in this period: Gohag, 20 March/2 April 1913, no. 10 (135), p. 114.
62. Gohag, 30 January/12 February 1913, no. 3 (128), p. 27. Under pressure from the British, who had
clearly seen that the Armenians’ activity furthered Russian interests, St. Petersburg finally ceased
to support the fedayis, effectively handing the CUP what it had hoped to obtain from the ARF;
the CUP accordingly failed to honor its pledge to give its Armenian ally twenty seats in parlia-
ment: Gohag, 3/16 April 1913, no. 12 (137), p. 138.
64. Ibidem, p. 270. Parvus, the pseudonym of Alexander Helphand, was in fact an agent of the German
intelligence service who took advantage of his undeserved reputation as a socialist to make his way
into non-Turkish circles of all kinds. He was working for the CUP at the time and was rewarded for
it during the war, when he was granted a monopoly on importing certain goods. Vahan Papazian,
who was introducted to him by a Bulgarian deputy, Vlakhov, limits himself to saying that Parvus
often came to visit Azadamard’s editorial offices. He does, however, acknowledge that they had
not understood who he was in 1914; he suddenly became a millionaire in his capacity as a com-
mercial agent responsible for the purchase of coal and grain for the government. When Papazian
encountered him in Berlin in 1923, he was living “with a much younger woman in a private villa
surrounded by a park with a pond”: Papazian, Memoirs, op. cit., II, pp. 173–4; Zürcher, Turkey: A
Modern History, op. cit., pp. 129–30.
66. Ibidem, p. 272.
67. Ibidem, p. 275.
68. Ibidem, p. 276.
69. Ibidem, p. 280. Parvus cultivated his relations with the Armenian militants for some time after
this, but eventually came to the conclusion that it was impossible to manipulate the SDHP.
70. Ibidem, pp. 280–3. The author raises the question and provides arguments in its favor.
71. Ibidem, pp. 284, 291–2.
72. Ibidem, pp. 299–301.
73. Ibidem, pp. 302–3.
74. Ibidem, pp. 302–3. In summer 1911, when Sapah-Giulian was on mission in Anatolia, the mutesarif
of Kayseri, an Albanian, is supposed to have told him: “If these Ittihadists remain [in power], they
are going to create a new catastrophe, one still more terrible for the Armenian people. Endeavor
to save your people from this danger as fast as you can.”
75. “Preuves et réalité,” Hnchak, no. 3, March 1913, p. 6.
77. Zürcher, Turkey: A Modern History, op. cit., p. 107.
78. Ibidem, p. 108; Bozarslan, Les Courants de pensée, op. cit., II, p. 124. The secret committee of “free-
dom officers” included, notably, Kemal Bey, Hilmi Bey, Receb Bey, İbrahim Aşkı Bey, Kudret Bey. It
demanded that the army withdraw from politics and sent threatening letters to the Unionist leaders.
79. AMAE, Turquie, Politique intérieure, n. s., vol. 9, f° 177, letter from the French consul in Salonika,
Josselin, to Poincaré, Salonika, 26 September 1912.
80. Aram Andonian, History of the Balkan war, op. cit., III, Istanbul 1913, pp. 484–90. Exiled to
Erzincan in 1908, he succeeded in fleeing in May with the help of Armenians from the city, in
particular, one Suren Sarafian, thanks to whom he was able to take refuge in Batum, again in an
Armenian milieu, and arrived in Istanbul shortly after the armistice. It was Nâzım who managed
to calm the rebels after the events of 31 March 1909. H was strongly opposed to Mahmud Şevket
and did not enjoy the favor of the Ittihadists.


82. See in the chapters devoted to this question.
83. Simon Zavarian: on the occasion of the seventieth anniversary of his death, op. cit., III, pp. 117–18,
letter from Zavarian to Mikayel Varantian, Constantinople, 22 September 1912.
84. Aram Andonian, History of the Balkan war, op. cit., III, p. 433. Aram Andonian (1873–1951) was
a journalist and, from 1911 on, a deputy in the Armenian Chamber.
85. Ibidem, p. 434.
86. Ibidem, pp. 437–8.
87. Garabed Khan Pashayan (1864–1915), also known by the pseudonym Taparig, was a physician. He
was an ARF military leader in the region of Erzincan and later in Cilicia under Abdülhamid. He
was a member of the editorial board of Azadamard and the Central Committee in Constantinople
at the time. He was elected as a deputy from Harput in the 1912 elections.
88. Ibidem, pp. 439–40.
89. Ibidem, p. 442.
90. Ibidem, pp. 458–9. The day after this demonstration, Talât, Nâzım, and other Young Turk leaders
left for their fief of Salonika. It is possible that they were thus seeking to assure their safety in
the event that the government reacted: AMAE, Turquie, Politique intérieure, n. s., vol. 9, f° 177,
letter from the French consul in Salonika, Josselin, to Poincaré, Salonika, 26 September 1912.
91. Ibidem, p. 461.
92. Ibidem, pp. 498–9.
94. Simon Zavarian: on the occasion of the seventieth anniversary of his death, op. cit., pp. 118–19, letter
from S. Zavarian to the ARF’s Balkanian Committee, Constantinople, 10 October 1912.
95. Papazian, Memoirs, op. cit.., II, p. 181.
96. Andonian, History of the Balkan War, V, op. cit., pp. 889–91.
97. Georges Rémond and Alain Penennrun, Sur les lignes de feu: le carnet de champ de bataille du colo-
nel Djémal bey, de Kırk-Kilissé à Tchataldja, Paris 1914, pp. 188–90. Cemal encountered Mehmed
Talât in Viza on 2 November 1912, in the middle of the night. Talât, completely downcast,
“seated on a large rock” in “a volunteer’s uniform,” and brought him back to the capital. We are
then told that, during the battle, Talât was with Mahmud Muhtar Pasha’s general staff. On their
way back to the capital, they discovered an army in complete disarray: “It was the end of every-
thing, the ruin, the collapse of the fatherland.”
98. Andonian, History of the Balkan war, IV, op. cit., pp. 826–7. The Times of London and Le Temps
of Paris gave detailed accounts of these exactions.
100. Zürcher, The Unionist factor, op. cit., pp. 114–15
101. 25 December 1912 Declaration of the SDHP’s Central Committee, published in Hntchak, no. 1,
January 1913, pp. 1–2.
Part III Young Turks and Armenians Face to Face

1 Transformations in the Committee of Union and Progress

after the First Balkan War, 1913
1. CADN, Ambassade de Constantinople, série E/86, letter from the French ambassador in Vienna,
Dumaine, distributed by the Direction des Affaires politiques of the minister of Foreign Affairs,
26 March 1913. The massive arrival of Muslim refugees from Thrace is abundantly attested by
the French consulatees in the provinces; their dispatches clearly bring out the tensions that
resulted: AMAE, Correspondance politique, Turquie, n. s., vol. 85 and 86 especially.
2. Turfan, Rise of the Young Turks, op. cit., p. 286; Hanioğlu, Preparation for a Revolution, op. cit.,
p. 285, notes that from 1908 to 1918, power changed hands only through the use of force, as in
June–July 1912, with the Liberals, or the 23 January 1913 “raid” on the Sublime Porte.

Notes 843
3. The reporter for the Diary de Paris, Paul Erio, gives a detailed account of the intervention. Some
100 Young Turks led by Enver and Talât are supposed to have succeeded in forcing their way past
the barriers. An exchange of gunfire is supposed to have followed, leading to the death of five
men, among them Mutafa Negib, a close associate of Enver’s: Le Diary, daté du 27 January 1913.
AMAE, Turquie, Politique intérieure, n. s., vol. 9, f° 204, letter from the French ambassador in
Constantinople, Bompard, to Quai d’Orsay, 3 March 1913, announced Cemal nomination to the
post of military governor of Constantinople.
4. Ibidem, p. 322.
5. Ibidem, pp. 310–11. The decision to reorganize the Ottoman Army was taken on 14 February 1913
(1 Şubat 1329) – that is, several months before the arrival of the German mission headed Liman
von Sanders, a general in the cavalry. It was initially kept secret, prepared by the Ministry of War
and the general staff, confirmed by the council of ministers, and, finally, ratified by the sultan and
officially announced on 11 December 1913.
6. Infra, p. 839, n. 40.
7. AMAE, Turquie, Politique intérieure, n. s., vol. 9, f° 199, letter from the French consul in Salonika,
Josselin, to Poincaré, Salonika, February 1913.
8. Supra, p. 200, n. 26.
9. Turfan, Rise of the Young Turks, op. cit., p. 404, n. 2. It is revealing that Ali Fethi took care to resign
from the army.
10. Ibidem, p. 319. The grand vizier did not, however, dare to make an official declaration on this
subject and even recommended to the German ambassador that he say nothing in public about
his plan. The Chief of Staff, Ahmed İzzet Pasha, was himself opposed to the appointment of a
foreigner to the supreme command. He favored, at most, a nomination to the head of a corps of
the army that would have served as an experimental model (ibidem, pp. 324–5).
11. Ibidem, p. 326. CADN, Ambassade de Constantinople, E 132, three communiques of 11 June
1913 from the Ottoman Wire Agency, announcing the assassination of the grand vizier and the
probable nomination of Prince Said Halim to the post; AMAE, Turquie, Politique intérieure,
n. s., vol. 9, f° 211, telegram from the French chargé d’affaires in Constantinople, Boppe, to Quai
d’Orsay, 11 June 1913.
12. CADN, Ambassade de Constantinople, E 132, rapport des services de renseignements “donné à
M. Nichan par Tahir bey, Tarla Bachi, Ladjar Djadessi, no. 4 bis.”
13. AMAE, Turquie, Politique intérieure, n. s., vol. 9, ff. 202–4, letter from the French ambassador in
Constantinople, Bompard, to Quai d’Orsay, 3 March 1913. Frank G Weber, Eagles on the Crescent:
Germany, Austria and the Diplomacy of the Turkish Alliance, 1914–1918, Ithaca & London, 1970,
pp. 27–8, cites diplomatic sources that note that it was Enver who benefited the most from this
murder, for the grand vizier had been standing in the way of his ambitions; they add that the
committee criticized him for his willingness to make concessions to non-Turks, but that Mahmud
Şevket had made up his mind to accept the German and Russian propositions.
In a 7 January 1914 dispatch to his minister, the Austro-Hungarian ambassador, Pallavicini,
reputed to be very knowledgable about on Turkey, explicitly accused Enver of having had
the grand vizier assassinated in order to arrive at his ends: ibidem, p. 31.
14. AMAE, Turquie, Politique intérieure, n. s., vol. 9, f° 213, telegram from the chargé d’affaires in
Constantinople, Boppe, to Quai d’Orsay, 11 June 1913.
18. Turfan, Rise of the Young Turks, op. cit., p. 346: Enver’s partisans were, above all, the young offic-
ers of the general staff and the fedayis of committee; from this point on, Enver was a preeminent,
indispensable member of the CUP.
19. Ibidem, p. 329.
20. Ibidem, p. 331. Weber, Eagles on the Crescent, op. cit., p. 34, notes that “la haute autorité [de Said
Halim] reposait sur ses mains bien manucurées.”

21. AMAE, Turquie, Politique intérieure, n. s., vol. 9, ff. 230–44, report from Guy de Feriec to
Stéphane Pichon, 3 November 1913.
22. Ibidem, f° 232.
23. Ibidem, f° 232v°.
24. Ibidem, f° 233. In Tanin, İsmail Hakkı Babanzâde, who participated in the Congress, condemned
“exaggeration of the principle of equality.”
25. Ibidem, f° 235v°.
26. Ibidem, f° 236v°. For the full text, see pp. 240–2. Said Halim was elected president of the General
Council. The General Congress was made up of the members of the General Council, the inspec-
tors of the party, the responsible secretaries in the sancaks, and the delegates of the provincial
congresses. The General Congress elected the members of the General Council, its president, the
general secretary, and the members of the Central Committee.
27. Ibidem, f° 239.
28. Ibidem, f° 239, annexe 1.
29. In 1915, these party cadres acquired, as we shall see, powers greater than those of the valis and
military commanders in everything that bore on the eradication of the Armenians. They were
judged at a special trial in 1919–20.
30. Ibidem, f° 240. “The party had correspondents in all the towns and villages of the interior; they
served as intermediaries between the Committee and rank-and-file party members.” All of these
decisions as well as the party program were adopted on 3 November 1913, indication that the
congress was continued beyond the official date of adjournment.
31. Ibidem, f° 244.
32. Ahmed İzzet pasha (Furgaç) (1864–1937), minister of war (1913), commander on the Caucasian
front during the First World War, grand vizier in November 1918: Zürcher, The Unionist, op. cit.,
p. 46.
33. Turfan, Rise of the Young Turks, op. cit., pp. 332–7.
34. Gohag, 10/23 July 1913, no. 36 (161), p. 345, editorial on the Rodosto massacres, which occurred
1–3 July. Other massacres took place in 1912 in a town nearby, Malgara, and in Ada-Bazar, 55 miles
east of the capital. Period: Տեղեկագիր Համառատու ութեան 1912–1914 Շրջանին Ազգային
Կեդրոնական Վարջութեան [Report on the Activity of the Central Leadership of the Nation for the
Period 1912–1914], Constantinople 1914 (November 1912–February 1914), pp. 69–71.
35. Ibidem, pp. 32–3.
36. Archives of the Patriarchate of Constantinople (hereinafter abbreviated: APC), Armenian
Patriarchate of Jerusalem (hereinafter abbreviated: APJ), The Patriarchate’s Constantinople
Information Bureau (hereinafter abbreviated: PCI Bureau), Է 336–7, file no. 5, letter from Patriarch
Arsharuni to the Russian, British and French ambassadors, 14 May 1913.
37. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Է 338–9, file no. 17, Takrir to the grand vizier Mahmud Şevket, 18/31 May
1913.
38. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Է 340–2, List of the murders, acts of banditry, kidnappings, illegal sei-
zures of property and other crimes committed in the various vilayets of Anatolia since 29 April
1913.
39. Ibidem. The consular sources of the day abound in similar examples, notably in AMAE,
Correspondance politique, Turquie, n. s. 85, 86, 87. Thus, we read in a 10 May 1913 letter from the
French ambassador to the minister to whom he answered, that “in Hajin and Sis, speeches were
made; mysterious figures who are said to be emissaries of the Committee of Union and Progress,
hold conclaves with the Muslim notables and visit the villages where the Armenians tried to
defend themselves in 1896 and 1909. Hence, throughout eastern Anatolia, the Christian popula-
tion is living in terror. The accounts given by the Patriarchate and the reports of the consuls paint
a similar picture of the general malaise prevailing in Armenia” (see. vol. 87, p. 21 sq). Better than
the euphemism describing the situation in the Armenian provinces as a “malaise,” the consular
correspondence reports the incendiary speeches that influential figures from the Committee of
Union and Progress made on many different occasions in the intention of enflaming the local
populations against the Armenians, Greeks, and Syriacs (see vol. 87, pp. 31, 69). The calls for mur-
der were published in the newspaper Babaghan is confirmed in the correspondence of the French
vice-consul in Mersina and Adana (see vol. 86, p. 217).

Notes 845
40. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Է 343, file no. 901, an extract from the teskere of the grand vizier, addressed
to the department of justice and religious dominations, in connection with the correspondence
between the grand vizier’s office and the Ministry of the Interior on the takrir of 18/31 May 1913
(1229) presented by the Armenian Patriarchate to His Highness the grand vizier.
41. Hmayag Aramiantz, “Ծրագիրներու Շարանը [The Series of Projects],” an editorial in Gohag, 30
January 1913, no. 3 (128), pp. 25–6. Infra, p. 833, n. 45, for biographical information on Haci Adıl,
elected a member of Central Committee and general secretary to replace Dr. Nâzım in November
1910.
42. “Մահաբեր Պատրանք [Deadly Illusion],” Droschak, no. 4/231, April 1913, pp. 49–51.
43. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Է 344–50, the grand vizier’s response to the Patriarchate’s takrir, teskere of
the Ministry of Justice and religious denominations, 22 June 1329 (1913), file no. 78.
44. Ibidem. At the 21 July 1913 session of the Armenian Chamber, information from the provinces
indicated that, on a single day, 100 people left Kghi for the Americas, that 1,000 left from Erzincan
in a single week, and that, between 1908 and 1912, some 20,000 people emigrated to the United
States alone: Papazian, Memoirs, op. cit., II, p. 215.
45. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Է 356–60, file no. 78, response of the Mixed Council to the teskere of the
Ministry of Justice and the religious denominations (22 June 1329/1913), no. 78, Patriarcat, 3/16
August 1329/1913.
46. Ibidem.
47. Ibidem.
48. “Մահաբեր Պատրանք [Deadly Illusion],” Droschak, no. 4/231, April 1913, p. 49.
49. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Է 406–12, internal report of the Patriarchate, 21 November 1913.
50. Tanin, 1/14 November 1913.
51. Tasfiri Efkiar, 12/25 and 13/26 November 1913.
52. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Է 406–12, internal report of the Patriarchate, 21 November 1913.
2 The Armenian Organizations’ Handling

of the Reform Question
1. Hmayag Aramiantz, “Իթթիհատը եւ Ազգերը [The Ittihad and the Nations],” Gohag, 6/19
November 1913, no. 69 (174), pp. 601–2.
2. “Հայերու Կացութիւնը Թիւրքիոյ մէջ 1908–1912 [The Situation of the Armenians in Turkey,
1908–1912],” Droschak, no. 2–3/230, February-mars 1913, p. 31.
3. Krikor Zohrab, Երկերի Ժողովածոյ [Complete Works] ed. Albert Sharurian, vol. 4, Yerevan
2003, pp. 341–432 [AU: 342?], Diary, 1912–1915 (Museum of Litterature and Art, Fonds Zohrab,
ms. 17, 1–70 and ms. 5, 7–12), p. 344 (9 December 1912) and p. 572, nn. 19–20.
4. One has only to leaf through the party’s official organ, Droschak, to see that the Dashnaks stood
squarely in the tradition of the other Russian revolutionary movements; they, too, were struggling
against the Czarist regime and did not hesitate to use terror to achieve their ends. Also worth
noting are the harshness of the policy that St. Petersburg adopted toward the Armenians of the
Caucasus and the incessant efforts of the secret police to dismantle the revolutionary committees
and imprison or exile their militants, for whom Ittihadist Turkey represented a safe haven.
5. Sharurian, Chronology ... of Krikor Zohrab, op. cit., p. 388, from the Archives of the Armenian
Catholicosate, Matenadaran, vol. 20, f° 238.
6. See p. 65, n. 62.
7. Nerses Zakarian (1883–1915), teacher, writer, journalist, member of the Hnchak Central
Committee.
8. See p. 207, n. 3.
9. Diran Erganian (?–1915), lawyer born in Istanbul, professor in the Istanbul Law School, and mem-
ber of parliament. He was deported in April 1915 and murdered in Damascus.
10. Levon Demirjibashian (1863–1926), architect, member of the Ottoman parliament in 1914.
11. Oskan Mardikian (1867–1947), born in Erzincan, jurist, writer, minister of the postal and
telegraph office (1913–1915) who resigned in August 1915 and later found refuge in Cairo
(1920).

12. Sarkis Svin or Sunkujian (1870–1915), Istanbul physician, high-ranking official in the Ministry of
Health, journalist, deported and executed in 1915.
14. Ibidem, p. 183.
15. Ibidem, p. 184. Vahan Papazian’s memoirs are thus a basic source of information on the hidden
aspects of the reform question.
16. Report on the activity of the central leadership of the nation for the period 1912–1914, op. cit.,
p. 49 ff.
17. Boghos Nubar Pasha (1851–1930), engineer, a son of the Egyptian prime minister, was the head
of the Egyptian railways and one of the founders (in 1906) of the Armenian General Benevolent
Union.
18. The best overview of the question is still R.H. Davison, “The Armenian Crisis, 1912–1914,” The
American Historical Review, LIII/3 (April 1948), pp. 481–5. For the details, the Archives of the
Délégation arménienne (Bibliothèque Nubar, Paris), files 2 and 3, are essential (hereinafter cites
as ADA/BNu).
19. Report on the activity of the central leadership of the nation for the period 1912–1914, op. cit.,
pp. 73–90.
21. Ատենագրութիւն Ազգային Ժողովոյ [Minutes of the National Chamber], Constantinople 1913,
17 May 1913, Session, speech of S. Karayan, p. 49 sq.
23. Ibidem, p. 216.
24. Richard Hovannisian, Armenia on the Road to Independence, 1918, Berkeley-Los Angeles-London
1967, pp. 32–5.
25. Ibidem. It was Zohrab who negotiated St. Petersburg’s diplomatic intervention with the Russian
Ambassador to Turkey, N. Tcharikov, and it was under his leadership that the bargaining
with the representatives of the powers took place: Zohrab, Complete works, op. cit., IV, Diary,
p. 343. The passage that the Patriarch Zaven Der Yeghiayan, Memoirs, op. cit., devotes to this
affair is worth reading, as is L. Etmekjian, “The Armenian National Assembly of Turkey and
Reform,” Armenian Review 29/1 (1976), pp. 38–52. Les volumes 86, 87 ff. of the AMAE, Turquie,
Correspondance politique, n. s., also make it possible to follow the question of the reforms very
closely.
26. ADA/BNu, file 2, letter of 2 August 1913 from Boghos Nubar to A. Williams, president of the British-
Armenian Committee, which also reveals that the plan was elaborated by the Patriarchate.
27. Hovannisian, op. cit., p. 32; Gabriel Lazian, Հայաստանը եւ Հայ Դատը [Armenia and the
Armenian Question], Cairo 1957, p. 155.
29. Davison, art. cit., p. 500 sq.
30. Ibidem.
31. Ibidem, pp. 491–6.
32. Ibidem, p. 491.
33. ADA/BNu, file 2, letter from B. Nubar to V. Karanfilian, 16 June 1913, in which Nubar clearly
indicates that in April, in the wings of the London Conference, he conferred with Johannes
Lepsius on the proper course to follow in order to convince Western diplomats that his analysis
was accurate.
The principal members of the British-Armenian Committee were Lord J. A. Bryce, N.
Buxton, Sir E. Bayle, T. P. O’Connors, A. Williams, and A. G. Symonds; the president of
the French Committee was Robert de Caix, the co-presidents of the German groups were
Dr. G. V. Greenfield and Lepsius, and the president of the Swiss Committee was Léopold
Favre: AMAE, Turquie, Correspondance politique, vol. 86, pp. 253–5.
34. ADA/BNu, file 2, letter from B. Nubar to A. Williams, 19 June 1913, in which Nubar again men-
tions the results of his second voyage to London in mid-May.
35. Davison, art. cit., pp. 500–1.
36. ADA/BNu, file 2, Letter from B. Nubar to A. Williams, 26 June 1913.
37. Ibidem, letter from B. Nubar to Galli, 25 June 1913.

Notes 847
38. Ibidem, letter from B. Nubar to A. Williams, 6 July 1913.

39. Ibidem, letter from B. Nubar to G.V. Greenfield, 23 June 1913.
40. Ibidem, letter from Kevork Nubar to B. Nubar, San Stefano, 3 July 1913.
41. Ibidem, confidential letter from. Williams to B. Nubar, 29 July 1913; see also Les réformes arméni-
ennes et l’intégrité de la Turquie d’Asie, Constantinople 22 March 1913, 4 pp.; Les réformes arméni-
ennes et les populations musulmanes: les émigrants (mohadjirs) dans les provinces arméniennes,
Constantinople, 5 May 1913; Les réformes arméniennes et le contrôle européen, Constantinople, 14
June 1913, 4 pp.
42. Ibidem, review of the newspapers between 2 June and 10 July 1913; Note sur quelques objections
faites au projet de réformes arméniennes, Constantinople, 5 August 1913, 4 pp.
43. Ibidem, letters from Greenfield to B. Nubar, 31 July and 5 August 1913.
44. Ibidem, letters from B. Nubar to A. Symonds, member of the British-Armenian Committee, 12
August, and to Yakoub Artin Pasha, in London, 13 August 1913.
45. Ibidem, telegram, 14 August 1913.
46. Ibidem, letter from B. Nubar to J. Lepsius, 22 August 1913.
47. Ibidem, letter from B. Nubar to Baron Robert de Caix, general secretary of the Comité de l’Asie
française, section du Levant, 27 August 1913.
48. Ibidem, letter from vartabed Krikoris Balakian, secretary of Special Committee of Constantinople
Patriarchate, to Nubar, 24 August 1913, Berlin, brings out the behind-the-scenes role played by
Zohrab, an eminent member of the Special Committee.
49. Ibidem, letter from James Greenfield to B. Nubar, 28 September 1913, in Berlin.
50. Ibidem, letters from B. Nubar to Lepsius, 13 and 18 October 1913, which reveals the tenor of
Sazonov’s remarks of theirng his interview in Paris.
51. Ibidem, letter from Lepsius to B. Nubar, October 1913.
52. Ibidem, letter from B. Nubar to Lepsius, 18 October 1913, in which he mentions his 17 October
conversation with Minister Pichon.
Weber, Eagles on the Crescent, op. cit., pp. 20–1, shows that German policy was modified in
favor of the Armenians and that the ambassador’s attitude toward them changed. At this
time, says Weber, Berlin considered looking to the Armenians to support its plans for eco-
nomic development around the Bagdadbahn. To prevent the Germans from drawing closer
to the Armenians, the Ottoman government is supposed to have proposed that the British
send inspectors to Armenia. We are even told that the minister of foreign affairs, Jagow,
ordered that negotiations be conof thected with Kurdish leaders so that they would “stop
playing their favorite sport, murdering Armenians and burning down their villages” (p. 24).
53. Ibidem for the correspondence with these personalities and the preparations for the Paris
Conference.
54. Davison, art. cit., pp. 501–3.
56. Ibidem, pp. 201–2.
57. Papazian, Memoirs, op. cit., II, p. 190. Let us recall that the ARF had officially broken off its
relations with Ittihad on 5/18 May 1912, publishing a memorandum of them on the occasion:
“Դաշնակցութեան Դիրքը Իթթիհատի Հանդէպ [The Position of the Dashnaktsutiun vis-à-vis
the Ittihad],” Droschak, no. 9–10, Septembre-October 1913, p. 147.
59. Charourian, Chronology ... of Krikor Zohrab, op. cit., p. 393; Azadamard, no. 1127, 2/15 February 1913.
61. Ibidem, p. 198.
62. Ibidem, pp. 198–9.
63. Ibidem, p. 199.
64. Ibidem, p. 215.
65. Ibidem, p. 223.
66. He founded a clinic in Mush, where he spent two years before he came to Istanbul in December
1912, probably in order to participate in the negotiations between the Russians and Armenians.
He met with Zohrab at Zohrab’s home on 9 December 1912 in order to bring this question up with
him: Zohrab, Complete works, op. cit., IV, p. 343.


68. Zohrab, Complete works, op. cit., IV, p. 343.
69. Papazian, Memoirs, op. cit., II, p. 267, announces the September 1913 death of this founder of the
ARF and his imposing funeral in Galata.
70. Sharurian, Chronology ... of Krikor Zohrab, op. cit., pp. 396–7.
72. Ibidem, p. 191. This Dashnak leader was hanged in Adana in June 1915 by the vali, Avni Bey. His
“friend” Cemal, the region’s strongman, did not intervene.
73. Ibidem, p. 191.
74. Ibidem, p. 192.
75. Ibidem, pp. 192–3; Azadamard, 15 July 1913, pp. 1–2, interview conducted by Parsegh Shahbaz.
76. Ibidem.
77. Reprinted in Azadamard, 25 June/7 July 1913, p. 1; Papazian, Memoirs, op. cit., II, p. 193.
78. Ibidem, p. 235. The meetings took place at Zohrab’s house and at Vartkes’s by turns; both men
lived in Pera.
79. Ibidem, pp. 235–6.
80. Gohag, 23 June 1913, no. 31 (156), pp. 307–8.
81. “The position of the Dashnaktsutiun vis-a-vis the Ittihad,” art. cit., p. 147.
83. Ibidem.
84. Ibidem, p. 255.
85. Zohrab, Complete works, IV, op. cit., pp. 344–5, Diary, 7/20 December 1913. AMAE, Turquie,
Politique intérieure, n. s., vol. 9, ff. 249–50, letter from the French Ambassador, Bompard, to
S. Pichon, 16 December 1913, announces the publication of an imperial irade ratifying certain
modifications of Articles 81 and 103 of the law of the vilayets. The irade, reprinted in a com-
munique issued by the Agence Ottomane, provided for 1) utilization of local languages in the
administration; recruitment of gendarmes and policemen among the Muslim and non-Muslim
population “in proportion to their numbers”; 2) proportional distribution of the budget for ele-
mentary education among the different communties; and 3) the attribution of subsidies to non-
Muslim elementary schools.
86. Ibidem, p. 305, letter in French to German Ambassador, Hans Wangenheim, Aleppo, 14/24 June
1915: one night in April 1909 – during the events of 31 March – he brought Halil Bey home
with him; “for twenty days, we extended him hospitality to protect him from persecution by the
Helaskiars.” The author informed the diplomat of this fact in order to show him how close he was
to the Ittihadists.
87. Ibidem, pp. 344–5, 379.
88. Ibidem, p. 379.
89. Ibidem, p. 345.
90. Ibidem, p. 379. This section of the diary was written a few weeks after the interview, around
February 1914, after signature of the official decree ordering reforms.
91. Ibidem, p. 349, Diary, 8/21 December.
92. Ibidem, p. 353, Diary, 8/21 to 11/24 December 1913, that is, the day after his conversation with
Halil.
93. Ibidem, pp. 351–6.
94. Ibidem, p. 353.
95. Ibidem, p. 379, a section of the diary written after the interview, around February 1914.
96. Ibidem, p. 379.
97. Turfan, Rise of the Young Turks, op. cit., p. 353.
98. Zohrab, Complete works, op. cit., IV, Diary, p. 377.
99. Ibidem, p. 379, a section of the diary written around February 1914.
100. Ibidem, p. 385.
101. Ibidem, pp. 346–7, Diary, 8/21 December 1913.
102. Ibidem, p. 386.
103. Ibidem, p. 349, Diary, 8/21 December.
104. Ibidem, pp. 356–7, Diary, 11/24 December.

Notes 849
105. Ibidem, pp. 356–7, Diary, 12/25 December, in which he completed his notes of the previous evening.
106. Ibidem, pp. 358–9, Diary, 13/26 December.
107. Ibidem, p. 365, Diary.
108. Ibidem, p. 366, Diary, 2/15 January 1914. Weber, Eagles on the Crescent ..., op. cit., pp. 35–6, gives
details about the circumstances surrounding the nomination of Otto Liman von Sanders as well
as his surprising appointment, by an imperial decree of 4 December 1913, to the post of com-
mander of the First Army, based in Constantinople. The appointment provoked a sharp reaction
from Russia and generated diplomatic tensions.
109. Zohrab, Complete works, op. cit., IV, Diary, pp. 367–8, Diary, 4/17 January 1914.
110. Ibidem.
111. Ibidem, p. 370, Diary, 22 January/4 February 1914.
112. Ibidem, p. 370, Diary, 24 January/5 February 1914.
113. Adenakrutiun, op. cit., record of the 3 May 1913 Session, p. 3 ff.
114. Adenakrutiun, op. cit., record of the 30 August 1913 Session, p. 200.
115. Report on the activity of the central leadership of the nation for the period 1912–1914, op. cit., pp. 98–9,
We learn from this report that the posts of the deputies representing the Armenians were to be
distributed as follows: two for Constantinople, one for Arghana, two for Bitlis, one for Smyrna,
two for Erzerum, one for Kayseri, one for Aleppo, one for Marash, one for Ismit, one for Sıvas,
two for Van, and one for Sis/Kozan; Féroz Ahmad, The Young Turks, op. cit., p. 144, alludes to
these discussions about the number of Armenian deputies in the Ottoman parliament, which
had a total of 259 members in 1914, but included only 14 Armenians, as opposed to 144 Turks, 84
Arabs, 13 Greeks, and 4 Jews.
3 The Establishment of the Ittihadist Dictatorship

and the Plan to “Homogenize” Anatolia
1. Turfan, Rise of the Young Turks, op. cit., p. 351. On 15 December, Enver was promoted to the rank
of colonel.
2. Ibidem, p. 348.
3. Ibidem.
4. Liman von Sanders, Cinq ans de Turquie, Paris 1923, p. 12.
6. Ibidem, pp. 352–3. The act of nomination, however, was never published in the Official Gazette,
whereas an irade of 5 January announced Colonel Cemal Bey’s promotion to the rank of brigadier
general. The fact that no irade ever mentioned Enver’s promotion to the rank of pasha would
seem to indicate that the decision was made without the sultan’s agreement (p. 354). This is
confirmed in Sanders, 16, where the Sultan’s reaction is cites: “I’ve read that Enver has become
minister of war. This is simply not possible; he is still much too young for that.” On the 8th, Enver
was appointed Chief of Staff (ibidem, p. 354).
7. AMAE, Turquie, Politique intérieure, n. s., vol. 9, f° 252, telegram from the French chargé
d’affaires in Constantinople, Boppe, to S. Pichon, 3 January 1914.
8. Turfan, Rise of the Young Turks, op. cit., p. 312: a 7 January 1914 irade lists the commanders of the
different army corps, the inspectors of four armies, and the generals and ranking officers assigned
to the reserves (280 people); they were blamed for the defeat in the Balkans. L. von Sanders, op.
cit., p. 16, puts the total at 1,100.
9. Ibidem, p. 17.
10. Ibidem.
11. Ibidem, pp. 16–17.
12. Ibidem, p. 16.
13. Turfan, Rise of the Young Turks, op. cit., p. 315, attributes this mutation to Enver above all, thus
downplaying the role of the committee in bringing about this shift.
14. Ibidem, p. 355.
15. Ibidem, pp. 358–9; L. von Sanders, op. cit., pp. 17–18.

16. Turfan, Rise of the Young Turks, op. cit., p. 359; Weber, Eagles on the Crescent, op. cit., pp. 38–9, cites
German diplomatic dispatches which indicate that Enver was approached by Mikaël de Giers, the
Russian Ambassador, as soon as he was nominated in January 1914; de Giers offered him money
and proposed to support him in the attempt to overthrow the dynasty of Osman and reign in its
place. The Russians also offered to support him against Austria in the Macedonian affair and to
promote the creatin of an Albania under Ottoman sovereignty (p. 47).
17. L. von Sanders, op. cit., pp. 18–19.
18. Ibidem, pp. 20–1. The author also points out that “the situation was appalling in most military
hospitals. Insalubrity and bad odors of all imaginable kinds made it impossible to remain in the
overfilled wards,” to say nothing of the fact that “the education given to Turkish army doctors...
was very different from [The German Equivalent].”
19. Ibidem, p. 23.
20. AMAE, Turquie, Politique intérieure, n. s., vol. 9, f° 257, report from the French consul in Trebizonde
to the president of Conseil and minister of Foreign Affairs, Doumergue, 2 February 1914.
21. AMAE, Turquie, Politique intérieure, n. s., vol. 9, f° 261, letter from the chargé d’affaires in
Constantinople, Boppe, to the president of Conseil and minister of Foreign Affairs, Doumergue,
14 February 1914.
22. AMAE, Turquie, Politique intérieure, n. s., vol. 9, f° 257, report from the French consul in Trebizonde
23. AMAE, Turquie, Politique intérieure, n. s., vol. 9, ff. 261 et 262v°, letter from the chargé d’affaires
in Constantinople, Boppe, to the president of Conseil and minister of Foreign Affairs, Doumergue,
14 February 1914.
24. Supra, p. 161.
25. AMAE, Turquie, Politique intérieure, n. s., vol. 9, f° 263, letter from the chargé d’affaires in
Constantinople, Boppe, to the president of Conseil and minister of Foreign Affairs, Doumergue,
14 February 1914. Six were Arabs and a majority were non-Turks. Among the latter were several
Armenians: Hrachia Effendi in Van, Hagop Effendi in Stamboul-Ismit, Krikor Sidky Bey in Bitlis,
Karnig Fikri Effendi in Trebizonde (f° 265).
26. Kouyoumdjian, Le Liban à la veille et au début de la Grande Guerre. Memoirs d’un gouverneur, op.
cit., pp. 26–8, “This revolution made itself felt immediately in Syria in the form of measures more
or less openly directed against the national feeling of the Arab people. An effort was made to
promote the use of the Turkish language in the schools, town halls and courts, in the ridiculous,
vain intention of improvising, all at once and from one day to the next, an ‘Ottoman patriotism.’
School curricula were modified to this end; the signs on street corners and in stores had to be writ-
ten in the dialect of the ruling people. Finally, the Committee for ‘Union and Progress,’ which had
its tentacles in every part of the empire and was taking control of the state in the guise of a much
more powerful, influential state than the official one, began to play an active role in Beirut as well,
turning things topsy-turvy and making life more difficult. It offended everybody and contravened
the interests on one and all, recruiting its partisans and agents from the least respectable strata of
the population, from the déclassés.”
27. CADN, Ambassade de Constantinople, série E/86, letter from the French consul in Damascus to
Bompard, the French ambassador in Constantinople, 21 March 1914, conversation between Talât
Bey and the owner and publisher of the newspaper Moktabay, Mohamed Effendi Kürd Ali, who
reported the substance of their conversation to the French consul in Damascus.
28. AMAE, Turquie, Politique intérieure, n. s., vol. 9, f° 284, letter from the general Sherif Pasha,
“chef de l’Entente Libérale ottomane,” to the minister of Foreign affairs, Paris, 16 April 1914. The
same document points out that “Monsignor Zaven declaree that the agitation is directed against
the government, not the Armenians.”
29. Akçam, From Empire to Republic, op. cit., pp. 144–9.
30. Cemal Kutay, Birinci Dünya Harbinde Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa ve Heyber’de Türk Cengi, Istanbul 1962,
pp. 60–3.
31. Akçam, From Empire to Republic, op. cit., p. 150.
32. Diary, 27 February/12 March 1914, in Zohrab, Complete works, IV, op. cit., p. 373.
33. On a suggestion of Zohrab’s, the Armenian Chamber considered, during its 4 February 1914 ses-
sion, creating posts for legal consultants in all the dioceses; their task was to consist in monitoring

Notes 851
cases of illegal land confiscations, various trials, and the treatment of population statistics:
Papazian, Memoirs, op. cit., II, p. 264.
34. Adenakrutiun, op. cit., record of 7 February 1914 Session, p. 438 sq.
35. Ibidem, record of 9 May 1914 Session, p. 1.
36. Papazian, Memoirs, op. cit., II, pp. 271–2; Armen Garo (Karekin Pastermadjian), “Մեր վերջին
տեսակցութիւնը Թալէաթ Փաշայի հետ [Our Last Conversation with Talât Pasha],” Hayrenik
2 (1922), p. 41, points out that he left for Europe with Dr. Zavriev in order to meet the inspectors
there and inform them of the situation in the region. This is the reason, he says, that the CUP did
everything it could to prevent his reelection.
37. Davison, art. cit., pp. 504–5; essential to grasping the context in which the two inspectors found
themselves during their stay in Constantinople are “Diary Concerning the Armenian Mission,”
from L. C. Westenenk, in the Armenian Review 39/1 (spring 1986), pp. 29–89, and W. van der
Dussen, “The Question of Armenian Reforms in 1913–1914,” ibidem, pp. 11–28. Armen Garo,
“Our last conversation with Talât Pasha,” art. cit., pp. 41–2, indicates that he was supposed to
become Major Hoff’s advisor, but that Talât was opposed to this.
38. Ibidem.
39. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Յ 470–2, Faits et documents, no. 37, the Van affair.
The French ambassador confirms that Hoff was recalled, without giving a precise date, and
that Westenenk was put on “half-pay” and then furloughed: AMAE, Guerre 1914–1918,
Turquie, vol. 846, f° 234, letter from the French ambassador in Constantinople, Bompard,
to the president of Conseil and minister of Foreign Affairs, Doumergue, 30 September
1914. A-To [Hovhannes Ter Martirosian], Մեծ դեպքերը Վասպուրականում [The
Major Events in Vasbouragan, 1914–1915], Yerevan 1917, p. 72, points out that Hoff arrived
in Van on 4 August, but did not make his official entry into the city until 9 August and
was recalled to Constantinople on 16/29 August.
40. Diary, 3/16 November 1914, in Zohrab, Complete works, IV, op. cit., p. 411, reports this conversa-
tion, which someone else present at it, the Dashnak leader Aknuni, recounted to Zohrab. A defi-
nite end was put to the reforms only on 16 December 1914, by imperial decree: V. Dadrian, Histoire
du Génocide, op. cit., p. 349 and n. 1.
41. AMAE, Turquie, Politique intérieure, n. s., vol. 9, f° 290r°-v°, letter from the French ambassa-
dor in Constantinople, Bompard, to the president of Conseil and minister of Foreign Affairs,
Doumergue, 17 May 1914.
42. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau Մ 979–82, letters from the bishop of Erzerum to the patriarche Zaven Der
Yeghiayan, about the reforms in the Armenian provinces, no. 543, 16 July 1914 and another 2
May 1914, APJ Մ 970–2; APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Շ 296, correspondence of 8 June 1914 between
the A.G.B.U. on the one hand and Catholicos Kevork V and Patriarch Zaven on the other, about
plans to be carried out in connection with the reforms in the provinces.
44. Ibidem.
45. Adenakrutiun, op. cit., record of 4 July 1914 Session, pp. 15–20.
46. Arsen Gidur (ed.), Պատմութիւն Ս. Դ. Հնչակեան Կուսակցութեան [History of the Social
Democratic Hnchak Party], I, Beirut 1962, constitutes the official history SDHP. The editor
was himself the secretary of the Third Congress of the Branches of Turkey, which was held
In Istanbul in July 1914, and was informed of the decisions of his party. Other, more detailed
information is provided by Hmayag Aramiants, Վերածնունդի Երկունքը [La cruelle dou-
leur de la Renaissance], I, Constantinople, 1918, p. 64; ibidem, Դէպի Կախաղան [Towards the
Gallows], II, Constantinople 1918, p. 48; ibidem, Անկախ Հայաստան [Independent Armenia],
III, Constantinople 1919, p. 48. Excluded from the SDHP at the September-December 1913
Congress of Constanza, the author diverges from other’s official account on a few important
points.
47. La vérité sur le mouvement révolutionnaire arménien et les mesures gouvernementales, Constantinople
1916. This brochure was widely distributed in Europe to justify the government’s measures against
Ottoman-Armenian population.
48. Gidur (ed.), History of the Social Democratic Hnchak Party, op. cit., I, pp. 323–35. A Central
Committee for Turkey was created and held its first general assembly in 1910 (pp. 336–8).

The SDHP was officially registered by the Ministry of the Interior, receiving its authoriza-
tion (no. 90) on 26 January 1910: Aramiants, La cruelle douleur de la Renaissance, op. cit.,
p. 39. On the Sixth Congress, see pp. 39–41.
49. Gidur (ed.), History of the Social Democratic Hnchak Party, op. cit., I, pp. 343–8.
50. Ibidem, pp. 348–9. The agreement was signed on 7 February 1912.
51. Ibidem, pp. 364–6. Fifty-nine delegates, representing the same number of regional committees,
were present at the opening of the congress, but only 17 branches from Turkey (of a total of 61
branches) were represented there.
The congress had been officially announced in the Istanbul press and the Ministry of
the Interior was informed that it would be convened: Aramiants, La cruelle douleur de la
Renaissance, op. cit., p. 46. The Eighth Congress appointed the following people to the
SDHP’s Central Committee: S. Sapah-Giulian, Varaztad, Paramaz [Mattheos Sarkisian],
Kakig Ozanian et Siunik: ibidem, p. 48.
52. Gidur (ed.), History of the Social Democratic Hnchak Party, op. cit., I, p. 365.
53. Ibidem, I, p. 373.
54. Aramiants, La cruelle douleur de la Renaissance, op. cit., pp. 48–9.
55. In 1911, Arshavir Sahagian appeared to be a Hnchak militant in Cairo and Alexandria. In this
capacity, he was chosen by the Committee of Egypt to represent it at the Congress of Constanza
in September 1913. Shortly after returning to Cairo, he met in Alexandria with Cemal Azmi Bey,
the head of State Security (who, as the vali of Trebizond, would organize the eradication of the
Armenian population of the Black Sea Coast in 1915). After Sahagian was unmasked, he managed
to make his way to Istanbul, thanks to the Ottoman charge d’affaires in Cairo (pp. 377–9). He was
executed by Hnchak militants in Adana on 25 December 1919, shortly after being liberated by the
French authorities: CADN, Mandat Syrie-Liban, 1er versement, Cilicie-administration, vol. 133.
56. Gidur (ed.), History of the Social Democratic Hnchak Party, op. cit., I, pp. 371–3, full text of the open
letter.
57. This call, along with other evidence, provided the grounds for the indictment at the Hnchaks’
April-May 1915 trial.
58. Aramiants, La cruelle douleur de la Renaissance, op. cit., pp. 56–9. Nerses Zakarian, Murad, H.
Aramiants, Mgrdich Pnaguni, Samuel Tumajian, Ardzruni (Hagop Avedisian), Dr. Jelalian, H.
Jangulian, Dr. Benne, etc., were the first to be arrested. Murad and Dr. Jelalian were released the
same evening. In the next few days, a total of 120 militants were imprisoned, including Paramaz
(Mattheos Sarkisian [1863–1915] a military official of the SDHP, a native of Karabagh, who was
executed on 15 June 1915).
59. Ibidem, p. 61. The 1913 attempt on the life of General Şerif Pasha, the leader of the opposition in
exile, was probably ordered by the Ittihad: Sapah-Gulian, The Responsibles, op. cit., p. 267.
60. Hmayag Aramiants, Towards the gallows, II, op. cit., pp. 6–7. Fewer than 20 of the accused remained
in prison.
61. Gidur (ed.), History of the Social Democratic Hnchak Party, op. cit., I, p. 374.
62. Infra, p. 845, n. 7.
63. Vahan Zeytuntsian (1882–1959), born in Gürün, teacher, journalist, writer: IBN, IV, p. 280.
64. Harutiun Jangulian (1855–1915), born in Van, a historian educated in Paris, deputy in the
Ottoman parliament in 1908, executed on 15 June 1915.
65. Dr. Benne, pseudonym of Bedros Manukian (1881–1915), born in Huseynik (Harput), a physician
trained in Beirut and the United States, member of the Hnchak Central Committee, executed on
15 June 1915.
66. Gidur (ed.), History of the Social Democratic Hnchak Party, op. cit., I, pp. 376, 380–1. See pp. 380–90
for an account of the trial.
67. Hratch Dasnabédian, Histoire de la Fédération révolutionnaire arménienne dachnaktsoutioun, 1890–
1924, Milan 1988, pp. 107–8.
68. Simon Vratsian, Հայաստանի Հանրապետութիւն [The Republic of Armenia], Paris 1928,
pp. 6–7.
69. Dasnabédian, Histoire de la Fédération révolutionnaire arménienne ..., op. cit., p. 107–8.
70. Arthur Beylérian, Les Grandes puissances, l’Empire ottoman et les Arméniens dans les archives
françaises (1914–1918), Paris 1983, p. XXIV.

Notes 853
71. The indictment, drawn up on 12 April 1919 and presented before the court-martial on 27 April
1919, proves that the late July 1914 meeting of the main leaders of the party in the offices of the
Central Committee in Nuri Osmaniye Street constituted a crucial step toward the “founding” of
the new Special Organization: Takvim-ı Vakayi, no. 3540, du 5 May 1919, p. 6. The three Ittihadists
must have left for Erzerum immediately after the party made these decisions. We shall examine
this question in detail later.
72. Beylérian, Les Grandes puissances ..., op. cit., p. XXIV, gives a complete bibliography on these
proposals.
73. According to a 15 August 1914 telegram of Dr. Şakir, that was read at the fifth session of the trial
of the Unionists, 12 May 1919: Takvim-ı Vakayi, no. 3554, du 21 May 1919, p. 69; this document was
presented at the beginning of the interrogation of Colonel Ahmed Cevad Bey, who had succeeded
Halil [Kut] as the military commander of Istanbul and was a member of the Special Organization’s
Executive Committee.
74. Encrypted telegram read at the Sixth Session of the Trial of the Unionists, 14 May 1919, pub-
lished in Takvim-ı Vakayi, no. 3557, 25 May 1919, p. 98. At the fourth session of the trial, Midhat
Şükrü gave rather similar testimony about the CUP’s relations with the Dashnaks: “We could see
that they did not want to take part in the war; they wanted to remain neutral”: transcription in
SHAT, Service historique de la Marine (Château de Vincennes), Service de Renseignements de
la Marine, Turquie, 1BB7 232, doc. no. 676, Constantinople, May 1919, lieutenant Goybet, adjoint
du chef du S.R. Marine, p. 2.
75. Papazian, Memoirs, op. cit., II, p. 280. Papazian also indicates that Talât, in a conversation with his
friend Armen Garo that took place after Garo’s return from Erzerum, made it clear to him that he
was not happy about the position the ARF took at the Congress of Erzerum: ibidem, p. 276.
76. Ibidem, pp. 280–1. Vartkes Seringiulian and Armen Garo were also present. Dr. Papazian took
“the last Italian ship bound for Batum” in 14 August.
77. Diary, 3/16 August 1914, in Zohrab, Complete works, IV, op. cit., pp. 383–4. In the course of the
evening, Zohrab noted that “all the Turks, like the Jews, are Germanophiles.”
78. Gabriel Lazian, Հայաստան եւ Հայ Դատը [Armenia and the Armenian Question], Cairo 1957,
p. 175.
79. Ibidem, p. 176. Malkhas succeeded in making his way to the Caucasus shortly afterwards; he gave
a report to the Eastern Bureau in Tiflis, at Arshak Jamalian’s house, in the presence of Dr. Zavriev,
Ishkhan, and a score of local notables (ibidem, p. 177).
80. “Հայութիւնը Ռուս-Տաճկական Պատերազﬕ Հանդէպ [The Armenians in the Face of the
Russo-Turkish war],” Droschak, no. 9–12, September–December 1914, pp. 129–30.
81. U. Trumpener, Germany and Ottoman Empire, 1914–1918, Princeton 1967, gives a detailed descrip-
tion of the circumstances surrounding the signature of the treaty. SHAT, Service historique de
la Marine (Château de Vincennes), Service de Renseignements de la Marine, Turquie, 1BB7 236,
doc. no. 1593 B-9, Constantinople, 16 January 1920, lieutenant Goybet, adjoint du chef du S.R.
Marine, annexe 5, “Explications de Saïd Halim pacha” to the Fifth Commission of the Ottoman
parliament, 24 November 1918.
82. Weber, Eagles on the Crescent ..., op. cit., pp. 60–8.
83. L. von Sanders, op. cit., p. 31.
85. Osman Selim Kocahanoğlu (ed.), Ittihat-Terakki’nin sorgulanması ve Yargılanması (1918–1919),
Istanbul 1998. Weber, Eagles on the Crescent, op. cit., pp. 63–5, indicates that on 22 July Enver threat-
ened Wangenheim, saying that Turkey would turn toward the Triple Entente if Germany rejected its
offer of an alliance; that Kaiser Wilhelm gave the “green light” on 24 July, against the advice of his
minister of foreign affairs; and that the naval attache, Humann, a friend of Enver’s, played a decisive
role thanks to his relations with the minister the navy, Tirpitz, a friend of his father’s.
87. SHAT, Service historique de la Marine (Château de Vincennes), Service de Renseignements de
la Marine, Turquie, 1BB7 236, doc. no. 1593 B-9, Constantinople, 16 January 1920, annexe 4,
“Explanations provided by Cavid Bey, the minister of finance,” in testimony given to the Fifth
Commission of the Ottoman parliament on 25 November 1919. That same morning, Liman von
Sanders went to the German embassy in Tarabia, where Wangenheim and Enver asked him for

his opinion on the plan to make a secret treaty of alliance between Germany and Turkey: L. von
Sanders, op. cit., p. 31.
88. At the fourth session of the of the Ittihadists’ trial, the party’s secretary general, Midhat Şükrü,
eventually confirmed that the ministers went to the Central Committee to discuss Turkey’s entry
into the war: SHAT, Service historique de la Marine, Service de Renseignements de la Marine,
Turquie, 1BB7 232, doc. no. 676, Constantinople, May 1919, lieutenant Goybet, adjoint du chef
du S.R. Marine, p. 3.
89. Ibidem, annexe 4, “Explications fournies par Cavid bey, ministre des Finances,” pp. 2–3.
90. Ibidem, annexe 6, “Déclaration du ministre des Travaux publics,” p. 1.
91. Ibidem, annexe 7, “Déclaration du ministre des Travaux publics,” “Les dessous de la politique
unioniste,” p. 2.
92. Ibidem.
93. Ibidem.
95. V. Dadrian, Histoire du Génocide, op. cit., pp. 335–44, cites, notably, the ambassador of Austria-
Hungary, who indicated that the Turks were using the alliance like a “trampoline” to “deal in the
harshest possible manner” with the Armenians; the German consul in Aleppo remaked that the
Turks wanted to “ solve the Armenian question while benefitting from the war and [that] their
government uses alliance with the central powers to this end.”
96. J. Pomiankowski, Der Zusammenbruch des Ottomanischen Reiches, Vienne 1969, p. 162; Dadrian,
Histoire du Génocide, op. cit., p. 341.
97. SHAT, Service historique de la Marine, Service des renseignements de la Marine, Turquie, 1BB7
236, doc. no. 1595 B-9, Constantinople, 17 January 1920, lieutenant Goybet, adjoint du chef
du S.R. Marine, annexe 11 and 1BB7 236, doc. no. 1651 B-9, Constantinople, 24 January 1920,
annexe 14, p. 7, déposition du ministre des Finances. At the fourth session of the Ittihadists’
trial, the CUP’s secretary general, Midhat Şükrü, confirmed that “the [mobilization] order came
abruptly”: SHAT, Service historique de la Marine, Service des renseignements de la Marine,
Turquie, 1BB7 232, doc. no. 676, Constantinople, May 1919, lieutenant Goybet, adjoint du chef
du S.R. Marine, p. 3.
Yervant Odian, Անիծեալ Տարիներ, 1914–1919, Անձնական Յիշատակներ [The Cursed
Years, 1914–1919, Personal Recollections] published in instalments in Jamanag, 6 February
1919, no. 3440. According to Odian, the posters announcing mobilization were put up the
same day in the provinces, which would tend to indicate that they had been prepared and
distributed earlier (first installment).
98. Diary, 3/16 August 1914, in Zohrab, Complete works, IV, op. cit., pp. 383–4.
J. Pomiankowski, Der Zusammenbruch des Ottomanischen Reiches, op. cit., p. 162. Pomiankowski
was Austria-Hungary’s military attache in Constantinople for ten years – at the beginning of
the war, there existed around 120 Christian battalions, made up mainly of Armenians.
Odian, The cursed years, 1914–1919, op. cit., no. 2. According to Odian, most of the
young conscripts in the capital were persuaded that the war would not last long and had
chosen to enlist rather than pay the 50 pound bedel required to avoid the draft.
99. Zaven Der Yeghiayan, Memoirs, op. cit., p. 61, letter from the Bishop of Bayazid to the Patriarch
Zaven, 19 August 1914.
100. Ibidem, p. 60, letter from the Bishop of Erzerum, Smpad Saadetian, to the Patriarch Zaven, 28
September 1914; APC/APJ, Թ 334 (in French), no. 35, Rapport sur Les événements de Keghi
depuis la mobilization jusqu’à la déportation (récit d’une rescapée), affirms that mobilization took
place under good conditions.
101. Papazian, Memoirs, op. cit., II, pp. 312, 316.
102. Ibidem, p. 326.
103. Zaven Der Yeghiayan, Memoirs, op. cit., p. 59, letter from the Bishop of Erzerum, Smpad Saadetian,
to the Patriarch Zaven, 1/14 August 1914.
104. Ibidem. Bishop Smpad Saadetian affirms that the ARF’s Congress had left a very bad impres-
sion on the local authorities and that Aknuni, who had expressed a desire to remain in
Erzerum for some time, was told to leave the city in 24 hours. He found the authorities’ mistrust
alarming.

Notes 855
105. Philip H. Stoddard, The Ottoman Government and the Arabs, 1911–1918: Preliminary Study of the
Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa, Ann Arbor, MI, 1963, pp. 6, 50.
106. Zürcher, Turkey: A Modern History, op. cit., pp. 114–15.
107. Halil Paşa, Ittihad ve Terraki’den Cumhuriyet’e: Bitmeyen Savaş [From the Ittihad to the Republic:
The Endless Struggle], M. T. Sorgun (ed.), Istanbul 1972, p. 125; T. Z. Tunaya, Türkiyede Siyasi
Partiler [The Political Parties in Turkey], 3 vol., 2nd completed edition, Istanbul 1984, p. 123.
108. Cemal Kutay, Birinci Dünya Harbinde Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa ve Heyber’de Türk Cengi, op. cit.,
pp. 60–3
109. AMAE, Turquie, Correspondance politique, n. s., vol. 86, p. 244, letter from the vice-consul in
Adana to the Minister Pichon, 19 April 1913.
110. Zürcher, Turkey: A Modern History, op. cit., pp. 114–15. The author also indicates that the Special
Organization played an important role in liquidating separatist movements during the First
World War, especially in the Arab provinces, and also in the terror campaign directed against
Greek businessmen in western Asia Minor.
111. Cemal Kutay, Birinci Dünya Harbinde Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa, op. cit., p. 36.
112. Sixth Session of the Trial of the Unionists, 14 May 1919: Takvim-ı Vakayi no. 3557, 25 May 1919,
p. 98, statement of Midhat Şükrü.
113. The indictment, drawn up on 12 April 1919, was presented to the court-martial on 27 April 1919,
along with a series of letters and various other documents substantiating the charges: Takvim-ı
Vakayi, no. 3540, 5 May 1919, p. 6.
114. Mil [= Arif Cemil], Umumi Harpte Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa [The Special Organization in the General
War], published in instalments (90 issues) in Vakıt, from 2 November 1933 to 7 February 1934,
and almost simultaneously reprinted in V. Ishkhanian’s Armenian translation in Haratch from
19 November 1933 to 7 April 1934 (92 issues), then published separately as: Arif Cemil, Dünya
savasıńda Teskilat-ı Mahsusa [The Special Organization during the First World War), Istanbul
1997.
115. Ibidem.
116. Ibidem.
117. A physician trained in Istanbul’s Military Medical School, a classmate of Bahaeddin Şakir’s,
executed in 1926 in connection with the plot against Mustafa Kemal.
118. Retired officer, CUP inspector in Bursa, an associate of Enver’s, nicknamed “Sevkiyatçı Rıza” for
his role in the deportation of the Armenians, one of the founding members of the Karakol, the
successor to the Special Organization after the latter was officially disbanded.
119. CUP fedayi in 1908, deputy first from Çanakale, then from Angora, member of the CUP’s Central
Committee.
120. First Session of the Trial of the Unionists, that was held on 27 April 1919, beginning at 1:50 p.m.:
Takvim-ı Vakayi, no. 3540, 5 May 1919, p. 5.
121. First Session of the Trial of the kâtibi mesullari (“responsible secretaries”), 21 June 1919 (21
Haziran 1335), in Takvim-ı Vakayi, no. 3586, 28 June 1919, p. 168.
122. First Session of the Trial of the Unionists that was held on 27 April 1919, beginning at 1:50 p.m.:
Takvim-ı Vakayi, no. 3540, 5 May 1919, p. 5. Ziya Bey is not referred to again in the following
sessions.
123. Ibidem, p. 5, col. 1, lines 1–28. Teskere 59, bearing the signatures of Halil, Nâzım, Atıf, and Aziz
and addressed to Midhat Şükrü, proves that Halil [Kut] was a member of the Political Bureau of
the Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa when he was a commander of the garnison in Constantinople, before he
set out for the Iranian border on mission.
124. Sixth Session of the Trial of the Unionists, 14 May 1919: Takvim-ı Vakayi, no. 3557, 25 May 1919,
statement of Rıza, pp. 104–7.
125. Third Session of the Trial of the Unionists, 8 May 1335/1919, statement of the colonel Cevad:
Takvim-ı Vakayi, no. 3547, 15 May 1919, pp. 63–6. The same day, Yusuf Rıza was interrogated by
the presiding judge (pp. 59–62), but refused to say anything else on the subject.
126. Seventh Session of the Trial of the Unionists, 17 June 1919, statement of Midhat Sükrü: Takvim-ı
Vakayi, no. 3561, 29 May 1919, pp. 115–26. For the declaration of the CUP’s Secretary General,
see p. 119. Information revealed at the trial suggests that the Central Committee of the Political
Bureau of the Special Organization had five members.

The term “Central Committee” has to be treated with caution, because it seems that it
was used indiscriminately to refer to both the 40-man-strong General Council and the
Central Committee or bureau of the CUP, which had only about ten members in fall 1914:
Trumpener, Germany and Ottoman Empire, 1914–1918, op. cit., p. 44, n. 5 cites a secret
report that spells out the way the party functioned internally.
127. Arif Cemil, The Special Organization, op. cit., Vakıt/ Haratch pp. 2, 3 (nos 2350–1, 21 and 22
November 1933). Şakir’s group (“some twenty people in disguise”) set foot in Angora two days
before the group of fedayis (which took three days to reach the city). It was there, says Cemil,
that it learned that the two German battleships, renamed the Yavuz and the Midilli, had reached
the Bosphorus (on 16 August 1914). This allows us to say that Şakir’s group left Constantinople
around 11 August, the group of fedayis on 13 August.
128. Ibidem, Vakıt/Haratch 3. Most of these military cadres were already active in the CUP in 1908,
in Salonika, and cited infra, pp. 821–822, n. 160–167: Ismitli Mümtaz, Hüsrev Sâmi [Kızıldoğan],
Abdülkadır, Ali [Çetinkaya], Atıf [Kamçıl], Sarı Efe Edip, Sabancalı Hakkı, Nuri [Conker],
Kâzım [Özalp], Yenibahçeli Sükrü, and Yakup Cemil. The responsible secretaries mentioned are:
Kemal Ferid, Hasan Basri, Memduh Şevket, Ethem, and Ihsan Bey.
129. Ibidem, Vakıt/Haratch 3.
131. Son of General Vehib Pasha; Young Turk fedayi prior to 1908; member of the general staff of the
Tenth Army in the Balkans in 1913, under Enver’s command. The vali of Basra in 1914, he led
the unsuccessful battles against the British troops in Basorah, committing suicide in April 1915:
Zürcher, The Unionist ..., op. cit., p. 48, n. 14 (a typographical error puts his death a year earlier, in
April 1914). One describes him as the leader of the military branch of the Special Organization
in fall 1914: Arif Cemil, The Special Organization, op. cit., Vakıt/ Haratch no. 11, affirms that this
close associate of Enver’s lost both his legs in the course of the fighting with the British, and
committed suicide thereafter.
132. Kutay, The Special Organization, op. cit., p. 36; Vahakn Dadrian, “Documentation of the Armenian
Genocide in Turkish Sources,” in Genocide: A Critical Bibliographic Review, II, I. Charny (ed.),
Londres 1991, p. 126. Arif Cemil, The Special Organization, op. cit., Vakıt/Haratch no. 69–70,
confirms that Enver initially resisted the Ittihadist Central Committee’s absolute control over
the Special Organization, but that the defeat at Sarıkamiş caused him to lose his influence in the
committee, along with a good deal of his credibility, so that he was forced to cede.
133. Vahakn Dadrian, “The Role of the Special Organization in the Armenian Genocide during the
First World War,” in Minorities in Wartime, P. Panayi (ed.), Oxford 1993, pp. 50–82, provides a
number of references on these questions, notably in Turkish sources.
134. Zürcher, The Unionist ..., op. cit., p. 59. His more recent manual on contemporary Turkish history
suggests, however, that his approach to the question of the Special Organization has evolved.
p. 98.
136. First Session of the Trial of the Unionists, 27 April 1919, à 13h 50: Takvim-ı Vakayi, no. 3540, 5
May 1919, p. 5, col. 2, lines 8–14; Fifth Session, 12 May 1919: Takvim-ı Vakayi, no. 3554, 21 May
1919, p. 69.
137. Fifth Session of the Trial of the Unionists, 12 May 1919: Takvim-ı Vakayi, no. 3554, 21 May 1919,
pp. 67–9. The telegram from the bureau, which bears the signatures of Aziz, Atıf, Nâzım, and
Halil, is dated 13 November 1914. The presiding judge ordered another telegram read out and
then asked Colonel Cevad if he was the one who had written “destroy” in the margin of the
encrypted telegram and if he had received orders to do so (p. 68).
p. 97.
139. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Մ 497.
140. Krieger, Եոզղատի Հայասպանութեան Վաւերագրական Պատմութիւնը [Documentary his-
tory of the massacre of the Armenians of Yozgat], New York 1980, p. 215.
141. Ibidem.
142. Sixth Session of the Trial of the Unionists, 14 May 1919, questioning of Midhat Şükrü (pp. 91–9):
Takvim-ı Vakayi no. 3557, 25 May 1919, p. 92.

Notes 857
143. SHAT, Service historique de la Marine, S.R. Marine, Turquie, 1BB7 236, doc. no. 2054 B-9,
Constantinople, 3 May 1920, L. Feuillet, statement of İbrahim bey, pp. 40–2; Ittihat-Terakki’nin
sorgulanması, op. cit., pp. 133–69.
144. Ibidem, p. 42.
145. Second Session of the Trial of the Unionists, 4 May 1919, Takvim-ı Vakayi, no. 3543, 12 May 1919,
pp. 28–9; Dadrian, “The Role of the Special Organisation...,” art. cit., pp. 30–1.
146. Ibidem.
147. Dadrian, “The Role of the Special Organisation...,” art. cit., pp. 26–7, cites, notably revelations
in the Istanbul press, reports by the British intelligence service, and Fuat Balkan’s Hatıralar
(Memoirs), II, Istanbul 1962, p. 297.
148. SHAT, Service historique de la Marine, S.R. Marine, Turquie, 1BB7 236, doc. no. 1805 B-9,
Constantinople, 26 February 1920, L. Feuillet, annexe 20, statement of Said Halim, pp. 18, 29–30.
149. A telegram sent by the responsible secretary in Samsun, Ruşdü, to the Central Committee of the
Committee of Union and Progress, and forwarded on 16 December 1914 by Midhat Şukrü to Dr.
Nâzım, the head of the Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa (First Session of the Trial of the Unionists, 27 April
1919: Takvim-ı Vakayi, no. 3540, 5 May 1919, p. 6, col. 2, lines 4–13), reads: “The fifth squadron,
on Tufan Ağa’s orders, comprising fifty-five men, was today dispatched by automobile.” Thus, the
CUP and the Teşkilât-i Mahsusa were working closely together to form squadrons.
A 20 November 1914 letter from the CUP inspector in Balıkeser, Musa sent to Midhat
Şukrü and forwarded to Dr. Nâzım, also suggests that the Ministry of the Interior and
CUP were directly involved in organizing squadrons (Ibidem).
150. Sixth Session of the Trial of the Unionists, 14 May 1919, questioning of Atıf Bey (pp. 99–104):
Takvim-ı Vakayi no. 3557, 25 May 1919, p. 102.
151. Seventh Session of the Trial of the Unionists, 17 June 1919: Takvim-ı Vakayi, no. 3561, 29 May
1919, p. 124; Fifth Session of the Trial of the Unionists, 12 May 1919: Takvim-ı Vakayi, no. 3554,
21 May 1919, pp. 88–9.
152. Second Session of the Trial of the Unionists, 4 May 1919: Takvim-ı Vakayi, no. 3543, 12 May 1919,
p. 28. The presiding judge then ordered that the document be read before the court.
153. First Session of the Trial of the Unionists, 27 April 1919, abstract of the report of Vehib pasha:
Takvim-ı Vakayi, no. 3540, 5 May 1919, p. 7, col. 2.
154. Takvim-ı Vakayi, no. 3771, 9 February 1920, p. 48, col. 2.
155. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Հ 171–Հ 182, a deposition of 12 handwritten pages, in Ottoman Turkish,
addressed to Emiyeti Umumîye Dairesinde, Sevkiyat Komisyonı Riyasetine, followed by French and
Armenian translations of the text, probably of thee to the Information Bureau of the Armenian
Patriarchate in Constantinople, whose members had access to the pretrial investigation files
until mid-March 1919 because, as employees of the Patriarchate, they were acting on behalf of
the victims and therefore of the plaintiffs.
4 Destruction as Self-Construction: Ideology in Command

1. Bozarslan, Les Courants de pensée, op. cit., 2 vol.; Hanioğlu, Preparation for a Revolution, op. cit.
2. Ibidem, p. 310.
3. Ibidem, p. 308.
4. Ibidem, p. 313.
5. Bozarslan, Les Courants de pensée, op. cit., I, p. 91.
8. Ibidem, I, p. 97.
10. Ibidem, p. 295.
11. M. Ş. Hanioğlu, Bir Siyasal Örgüt Olarak Osmanlı Ittihat ve Terakki Cemiyeti ve Jön-Türklük,
Istanbul, s.d., pp. 52–4; Bozarslan, Les Courants de pensée, op. cit., I, p. 102.
12. Albert Fua, Dr. Refik Nevzad, La trahison du gouvernement turc Comité Union et Progrès, Paris
1914, p. 13.


14. Ibidem, I, p. 122.
15. P. Risal [Tekin Alp, ps. of Moïse Cohen], “Les Turcs à la recherche d’une âme nationale,” in, Jacob
M. Landau, Tekin Akp, Turkish Patriot 1883–1961, Istanbul 1984, pp. 66–7; Bozarslan, Les Courants
16. S. Akşin, Jön-Türkler ve İttihat ve Terakki, Istanbul 1980, pp. 168–9.
17. Letter from Enver pasha, in O. Koloğlu, “Enver Paşa Efsanesinde Alman Katkısı, 1908–1913,”
Tarih ve Toplum, no. 78 (1989), p. 19.
20. B. Kuran, İnkilâp Hareketleri ve Millî Mücadele, Istanbul 1956, p. 483; Bozarslan, Les Courants de
pensée, op. cit., I, p. 207.
21. See ibidem, II, p. 52. Mehmed Emin [Yurdakul] (1869–1914), writer and Pan-Turkist poet.
22. Ibidem.
23. Ibidem.
25. Yusuf Akçura, Yeni Türk Devletinin Kurucuları, 1928 Yazıları, Ankara 1981, p. 143; Bozarslan, Les
Courants de pensée, op. cit., II, p. 57.
26. Ahmed Ağaoğlu, “Islâm’da Davay-ı Milliyet,” in İ. Kara, Türkiye’de Islâmcılık Düşüncesi ? Metinler/
Kişiler, Istanbul 1986, p. 452; Bozarslan, Les Courants de pensée, op. cit., II, p. 58.
27. Ahmed Agayef, “Türk Alemi,” Tarih ve Toplum, no. 63 (1989), pp. 18–21, in Bozarslan, Les Courants
28. Infra, p. 847, n. 3.
29. This is what is indicated by the file that the British authorities file prepared on him when he was
imprisoned in Malta in spring 1919: FO 371/6500, no. 2764.
30. Supra, p. 194, n. 25.
32. Tekin Alp, Türkler bu Muharebede Ne Kzanabilirler ? [What Can the Turks Hope to Gain in This
Struggle?], Istanbul 1914.
34. Infra, p. 837, n. 1.
36. Bozarslan, Les Courants de pensée, op. cit., II, p. 90, in Ziya Gökalp, Makaleler, IX, ed. Ş. Beysanoğlu,
Istanbul 1980, p. 41.
37. Ibidem, p. 28, in Bozarslan, Les Courants de pensée, op. cit., II, p. 95.
38. Ziya Gökalp, Makaleler, I, ed. Ş. Beysanoğlu, Istanbul 1976, p. 70, in Bozarslan, Les Courants de
pensée, op. cit., II, p. 92.
39. Ziya Gökalp, Ziya Gökalp Külliyatı, II, Limni ve Malta Mektupları, F. A. Tansel (ed.), Ankara 1965,
pp. LVI, in Bozarslan, Les Courants de pensée, op. cit., II, p. 92.
40. According to the formula of Bozarslan, Les Courants de pensée, op. cit., II, p. 93.
41. Kouyoumdjian, Le Liban à la veille et au début de la Grande Guerre. Memoirs d’un gouverneur, op.
cit., explains this very well with regard to Lebanon and Syria.
43. Midhat Şükrü Bleda, Imparatorluğun Çöküşü, Istanbul 1979, p. 58.
44. Ziya Gökalp, Makaleler, X, ed. F. R. Tuncer, Ankara 1981, p. 76, in Bozarslan, Les Courants de
pensée, op. cit., II, p. 103.
45. Ziya Gökalp, Türkçülüğün Esasları, Istanbul 1976, p. 20, in Bozarslan, Les Courants de pensée, op.
cit., II, p. 103.
46. E. B. Şapolyo, Ziya Gökalp, Ittihat ve Terakki ve Meşrutiyet Tarihi, Istanbul 1974, in Bozarslan, Les
Courants de pensée, op. cit., II, p. 103.
47. Sebuh Aguni, Միլիոն մը Հայերու Ջարդի Պատմութիւնը [History of the Massacre of One
Million Armenians], Constantinople 1921, p. 62.
48. Greek Deputy hostile to the Unionists: Bozarslan, Les Courants de pensée, op. cit., II, p. 104,
n. 720.

Notes 859
49. Ziya Gökalp, Yeni Hayat Doğru Yol, ed. M. Cunbur, Ankara 1976, p. 11, in Bozarslan, Les Courants
50. Arif Cemil, The Special Organization, op. cit., Vakıt/ Haratch 89. According to Cemil, the Ittihad’s
Pan-Turk projects for Russia, which aimed to unify the “Turks” of the Caucasus, Volga Basin,
Siberia, Turkestan, and Crimea, were thwarted by the “penetration of foreign elements that hin-
dered the development of the Turks, who do not possess the attributes of a nation”: Ibidem, Vakıt/
Haratch 88.
52. Based in Erzerum.
56. Ibidem.
58. Transcription of the third Session of the Trial of Unionists: SHAT, Service historique de la
Marine, S. R. de la Marine, Turquie, 1BB7 232, doc. no. 676, Constantinople, May 1919, lieuten-
ant Goybet, adjoint du chef du S.R. Marine, pp. 3–5, questioning of Ziya Gökalp.
59. The Meydan Larousse, the Turkish version of the French Larousse, seems to be the only bio-
graphical dictionary to mention this figure, whose name it spells “Bahaittin Şakir.”
Arslan Terzioğlu (holder of the chair of the history of medicine and medical ethics at the
Faculty of Medicine in Istanbul, and also a diplomat), “The Assassination of Dr Bahaeddin
Şakir in Berlin and the Armenian Relocation in line with National and Foreign Sources
of Information,” internet, 2002. Concerning the doctor’s date of birth, he points out that
the date “1878” engraved on his tombstone is obviously wrong: Şakir finished his study of
medicine in 1896. His family probably emigrated to Istanbul after the war of 1877–1878,
when Bulgaria became autonomous. Terzioğu notes that he specialized in forensic medi-
cine and psychiatry in Paris. He concludes his notice with the suggestion that the mortal
remains of this “great patriot” be repatriated to Turkey
60. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Զ 947–950, file of Bahaeddin Şakir, pp. 1–2.
61. Ibidem, p. 3.
62. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, file XXIX, Մ 576, encrypted telegram no. 5, from the head of the Teşkilât-ı
Mahsusa, Bahaeddin Şakir, from his headquarter in Erzerum, 21 Haziran 1331 (4 July 1915), to
the vali of Mamuret ul-Aziz, Sabit Bey, for transmission to the delegate of the CUP in Mamuret
ul-Aziz, Resneli Nâzım Bey, encrypted, with the decoded version, in Takvim-ı Vakayi no. 3540 (ses-
sion of 12 April 1919), 5 May 1919, p. 6, col. 1–2, and no. 3771, 13 January 1920, p. 48, col. 1, with
Bahaeddin Şakir’s condemnation to death.
Be it noted that this document is often dated 21 April 1915, although the telegram indi-
cates “21 Haziran 1331.”
63. Supra, p. 187, n. 155.
64. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Զ 947–950, file of Bahaeddin Şakir, p. 3. The Bosphore of 20 April 1922,
published shortly his assassination in Berlin on 17 April 1922, cites Vehib Pasha’s report when it
evokes his criminal activities throughout Asia Minor and associates Dr. Nâzım with him. The
daily also refers to a document discovered by General Nâzım Pasha, minister of war in the Kâmil
cabinet, shortly before he was assassinated on 23 January 1913 by the Ittihadists. This document,
which bears Şakir’s signature, reads: “For the moment, try to win over the Armenians. We know
what we will do to them later.”
65. Joghovourti Tsayn, 21 April 1922 and Vakıt, 20 April 1922. In 1909, the Military Medical School
and the Medical School merged and the new institution was established in Haydarpaşa: Terzioğlu,
art. cit.
66. Bibliothèque Nubar, ms. 17, 18, PJ 1–3, Aram Andonian, Ժամանակագրական Նօթեր
[Chronological Notes, 1914–1916] [written in 1925], f° 53, points out that Şakir’s father was burned
alive at the age of 83 when, on 30 July 1915, the Şakirs’ family home in Kasım Paşa was destroyed
in a fire. The colonel was “on mission” in the eastern provinces at the time.
67. Weber, Eagles on the Crescent ..., op. cit., pp. 77, 165, points out that this also led to problems with
the empire’s German and Austro-Hungarian allies.


69. Ibidem, p. 129.
72. Ibidem, II, p. 102.
73. Tekin Alp, “Tesanütçülük,” in Z. Toprak, Türkiye’de “Millî İktisat” (1908–1918), Ankara 1987,
pp. 08–9, cité par Bozarslan, Les Courants de pensée, op. cit., I, p. 215.
74. Y. Akçura, “Pour une bourgeoisie nationale,” in F. Georgeon, Yusuf Akçura, Aux origines du nation-
alisme turc (1876–1935), Paris 1980. p. 129.
75. André Autheman, La Banque impériale ottomane, Paris 1996, p. 239. The author notes that on
9 January 1915, the three members of the board who were French or English nationals had
to give up their posts at Talât’s request. The three highest-ranking officials, all Ottoman sub-
jects – Cartali, the bank’s director, Hanemoğlu, its inspector general, and Kerestejian, the head
of the operational division – then formed a collegial board, with Kartali as its president. On
17 July 1915, Talât, then interim minister of finance, summoned Kartali to his office to inform
him of the decision of Council of Ministers, which, in the end, remained a dead letter (ibidem,
pp. 233–4).
77. In Bozarslan, Les Courants de pensée, op. cit., I, p. 217.
Constantinople, Boppe, to S. Pichon, 3 January 1914.
79. AMAE, Turquie, Politique intérieure, n. s., vol. 9, ff. 277–8, letter from the French ambassador in
Constantinople, Bompard, to the president of Conseil and minister of Foreign Affairs, Doumergue,
31 March 1914.
81. Ibidem.
82. Ibidem. Akçam, From Empire to Republic, op. cit., p. 141, notes that the first sign of a plan for a
“national economy” was the 3 July 1913 creation of the İstiklal-i Milli Cemiyeti (Committee for
National Independence), the task of which was to promote the founding of new companies. The
biggest companies were created by Kara Kemal, the minister responsible for food and supplies dur-
ing the War.
83. Zürcher, Turkey: A Modern History, op. cit., p. 130. Yervant Odian notes that, in late July 1915,
the authorities began to arrest certain businessmen and merchants in the capital in order to
take control of their companies (Odian, The cursed years, op.cit., no. 17). Odian also relates a
discussion he had in May 1915 with Oskan Mardikian, a former minister who had long moved
in Young Turk circles. Mardikian told him that he was convinced that the CUP leaders were
going to attack merchants and entrepreneurs: “they are going to appropriate the Armenians’
property.”
84. Ibidem, p. 131.
85. Especially the “Explications fournies par Cavid bey, ministre des Finances,” Cinquième commis-
sion du parlement ottoman, 25 November 1919: SHAT, Service historique de la Marine, Service
des renseignements de la Marine, Turquie, 1BB7 236, doc. no. 1593 B-9, Constantinople, 16
January 1920, annexe 4. Let us note that Cavid was the head of the Ottoman National Credit
Company, which he founded as a minister after resigning from the cabinet until he returned to
government in January 1917: Autheman, La Banque impériale ottomane, op. cit., p. 240.
86. L. von Sanders, op. cit., pp. 52–3.
87. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Ի 125–30, a list of war criminals complicit in the massacres and
deportations.
88. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Յ 202, file no. 31/1–2, Turks Responsible for the Armenian Atrocities.
Born in Ortaköy, Reşad learned Armenian. He was a kaymakam in the vilayet of Erzerum, an
interim mutesarif in Bayazid, and in 1913 was charged with reorganizing the police force in three
departments. One of these was the Department of Political Affairs, where he served as an assist-
ant to the police chief of the capital, Bedri. He was appointed mutesarif of Aydın in June 1917.
Under the Kemalist regime, he adopted the surname Mimaroğlu and continued to hold important
posts before being elected parliamentary deputy from.

Notes 861
89. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Հ 144, certified copies of the encrypted telegram from the Sublime Porte,
minister of the Interior, Talât, to the vilayet of Konya, 6 February 1916, certified on 27 March
1919 by the departement of the Ministry of the Interior, published in Takvim-ı Vakayi no. 3540,
pp. 1–14.
90. Askeri Tarih Belgeleri Dergisi, no. 81 (December 1982), doc. 1832.
91. Original in Ottoman Turkish: Takvim-ı Vakayi, no. 2303, 14 September 1915, pp. 1–7; Armenian
transcription: APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Ը 177–9; French version of the Law of 13/26 September
1915, published on 2 April 1923, supplément B, de La Législation turque, Constantinople,
édition Rizzo & Son, pp. 1–6 (Archives of the SHAT, série E, carton 320, Turquie, 260, ff.
49–51v°).
92. Original in Ottoman Turkish: Takvim-ı Vakayi, no. 2343, 28 October 1915, in 25 articles; APC/APJ,
PCI Bureau, Ը 205; French version of the Law of 13/26 September 1915, published on 2 April 1923,
supplément B, de La Législation turque, Constantinople, édition Rizzo & Son, pp. 7–15 (Archives
of the SHAT, série E, carton 320, Turquie, 260, ff. 52–6). Dadrian, Histoire ..., op. cit., p. 361, speaks
of a complementary law of 26 September, based on an erroneous source that is not cites.
93. Original in Ottoman Turkish: Takvim-ı Vakayi, no. 2189, 19 May/1 June 1915/2 Moharrem 1333.
We will examine the provisions of this law later.
94. French version of the Law of 13/26 September 1915, published on 2 April 1923, supplément B, de
La Législation turque, Constantinople, édition Rizzo & Son, p. 3.
95. Ibidem.
96. Ibidem, pp. 3–4.
97. Ibidem, p. 6.
98. Ibidem, p. 6, the text bears the signature of Sultan Mehmed Reşad, and of “Ibrahim, ministre de
la Justice, Talaat, ministre de l’Intérieur, Mehmed Saïd [Halim], grand vizir, Haïri, ministre de
l’Evkaf.”
99. Ibidem, p. 7.
100. Ibidem, pp. 7–8.
101. Ibidem, p. 9.
102. Ibidem, p. 10.
103. Ibidem, p. 11.
104. Ibidem, p. 12.
105. Ibidem, p. 13.
106. Ibidem, p. 14.
107. Österreichisches Staatsarchiv, HHStA PA Beilage, file 69 D, report no. 441 P, from the Austrian
consular agent in Bursa, L. Trano, 16 August 1915, to the ambassador in Constantinople and the
Baron Burian, minister of foreign affairs, ff. 333–4.
108. Österreichisches Staatsarchiv, HHStA PA Beilage, file 70 B, report no. 453 P, from the Austrian
consular agent in Bursa, L. Trano, 19 August 1915, to the ambassador in Constantinople and the
Baron Burian, minister of foreign affairs s.
109. Österreichisches Staatsarchiv, HHStA PA XII 209, no. 71 P-B, report from the Austrian ambas-
sador in Constantinople, Pallavicini, to the minister, Burian, 31 August 1915, f° 352.
110. Österreichisches Staatsarchiv, HHStA PA XII 209, no. 7P P-A, report from the Austrian ambas-
sador in Constantinople, Pallavicini, to the Minister Burian, 30 September 1915, f° 367.
111. Autheman, La Banque impériale ottomane, op. cit., p. 242.
112. Ibidem, pp. 244–5.
5 Turkey’s Entry into the War

1. Diary, 3 November 1914: Zohrab, Complete works, op. cit., IV, pp. 400–1. Zohrab reports that
Cavid resigned in order to be in a position to “do something in case of catastrophe.”
2. Ibidem, the same day, around midnight, p. 403.
3. Weber, Eagles on the Crescent..., op. cit., p. 73.
4. Ibidem, p. 82.
5. Ibidem, p. 64, n. 14; Trumpener, Germany and Ottoman Empire, 1914–1918, op. cit., pp. 108–12.

6. SHAT, Service historique de la Marine, Service des renseignements de la Marine, Turquie, 1BB7 236,
doc. no. 1662 B-9, Constantinople, 19 March 1920, lieutenant de vaisseau Feuillet, annexe 20.
7. Turfan, Rise of the Young Turks, op. cit., p. 363; Weber, Eagles on the Crescent ..., op. cit., pp. 83–5, con-
firms, on the basis of many different sources, that it was Enver who gave the order to attack the fleet.
8. SHAT, Service historique de la Marine, Service des renseignements de la Marine, Turquie, 1BB7
232, doc. no. 676, Constantinople, May 1919, p. 3. Trumpener, Germany and Ottoman Empire,
1914–1918, op. cit., p. 56, n. 33, notes that the General Council – that is, the broader leadership
body of the CUP, which, in theory, had some 40 members – was convened on the morning of 30
October and that, by a vote of 17 to 10, it opted to enter the war on the German side.
9. Weber, Eagles on the Crescent ..., op. cit., p. 65; U. Trumpener, Germany and Ottoman Empire,
1914–1918, op. cit.
10. Vahakn Dadrian, German Responsibility in the Armenian Genocide, Watertown 1996.
12. Weber, Eagles on the Crescent ..., op. cit., p. 65; Trumpener, Germany and Ottoman Empire, 1914–
1918, op. cit., pp. 234–6.
14. Sebuh Aguni, op. cit., p. 60.
15. Andonian, Chronological notes, 1914–1916, ms. cit., f° 10.
16. Ibidem, f° 12.
17. Ibidem, f° 13.
18. Ibidem, ff. 13–14.
19. Ibidem, ff. 14–16.
20. Yervant Perdahdjian, Evénements et faits observés à Constantinople par le vicariat [Patriarcal] (1914–1916),
transl. by Raymond Kévorkian, Revue d’Histoire Arménienne Contemporaine I (1995), pp. 251–2.
21. Ibidem, p. 252.
22. Zaven Der Yeghiayan, Memoirs, op. cit., p. 72.
23. Ibidem, p. 73.
24. Diary, 30 October and November 1914: Zohrab, Complete works, op. cit., IV, pp. 392, 396–7.
26. Ibidem.
27. Ibidem, pp. 74–5.
28. We have published a French translation of the circular in its entirety: Yervant Perdahdjian,
Evénements et faits observés à Constantinople, op. cit., pp. 250–1.
29. Ibidem.
30. Zaven Der Yeghiayan, Memoirs, op. cit., pp. 76–7; Andonian, Chronological notes, 1914–1916, ms.
cit., ff. 20–1, notes that, on 6 November 1914, Piuzantion had published an initial circular that
called on the Armenians to demonstrate “loyalty and a sense of patriotic of thety”; it received, he
says, a warm reception in the press.
31. Zaven Der Yeghiayan, Memoirs, op. cit., p. 77. Andonian, Chronological notes, 1914–1916, ms. cit., f°
22: Dr. Torkomian launched the project of founding a training school for nurses on 13 November.
32. Ibidem, p. 78.
33. Sanders, op. cit., p. 45. He adds, with a touch of humor: “That is why these demonstrations, in
Constantinople – whatever they are about – almost always involve the same people.”
35. Diary, 16 November 1914: Zohrab, Complete works, op. cit., IV, pp. 408–9; Sanders, op. cit., p. 46,
also notes that it was these “demonstrators who broke all the windows and mirrors in the Tokatlian
Hotel” (Sanders mistakenly dates the event to 20 November).
Odian, The cursed years, op. cit., no. 6, reports that the demonstration was organized by
the CUP together with the members of those guilds, notably the butchers’ guild and the
porters’ guild, whose leaderships the Ittihad controlled.
36. Sanders, op. cit., p. 46.
37. The text of the call for a jihad was read out at the first session of the trial of the cabinet, on 3
June 1919 (3 Haziran 1335) and published in Takvim-ı Vakayi, no. 3571, 11 June 1919, pp. 127–40.
The text was not published until 23 November 1914; the Information Bureau of the Patriarchate
assembled prepared a file on Hayri Effendi in which he is described as a member of the Central

Notes 863
Committee: APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Յ 139, with a French translation of the full text of the declara-
tion of jihad, signed by şeyh ul-Islam Hayri, Ziyaeddin and Musa Kâzım. Kâzım would later succeed
Hayri as şeyh ul-Islam and launch a more explicit call to murder Armenians.
38. Diary, 16 November 1914: Zohrab, Complete works, op. cit., IV, pp. 409–10.
39. Diary, 18 November 1914: ibidem., IV, pp. 412–13.
40. Ibidem.
41. Ibidem.
42. Ibidem, p. 414.
43. Diary, 19 November 1914: ibidem, IV, p. 419. Since the declaration of jihad, notes Zohrab, it is
preferable not to look like a European. In the streets of Pera, he remarks, hats have been replaced
by fezes: Ibidem, p. 415.
44. Diary, 5 December 1914: ibidem, IV, p. 419.
45. Diary, 7 December 1914: ibidem, IV, p. 421.
46. Diary, 17 December 1914: ibidem, IV, pp. 421–2.
47. In French in the original.
50. Diary, 18 November 1914: ibidem, IV, p. 416.
51. Diary, 20 December 1914: ibidem, IV, pp. 424–5.
52. Dadrian, Histoire ..., op. cit., p. 382, n. 6.
53. C. Kutay, Talât Paşanin Gurbet Hatiraları [The Memoirs of Talât Pasha in Exile], II, 1983, p. 907;
Dadrian, Histoire ..., op. cit., p. 382, n. 5.
54. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, file 23, The indications of the horrors to come in Sıvas; see infra,
pp. 431–3.
55. Sebuh Aguni, op. cit., p. 25.
On 5 January 1915, the Istanbul press revealed a somber affair: poisoned bread had been
distributed to soldiers in a barracks in Sıvas. Armenian bakers were accused of the crime.
An investigation would later show that the bakers, who had been tortured, were the vic-
tims of false rumors, and clear their names. This affair is indicative of the state of public
opinion in this period.
57. Ibidem.
58. Ibidem, ff. 34–5.
60. Ibidem, p. 79.
6 The Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa on the Caucasian Front and

the First Military Operations
1. Arif Cemil, The Special Organization, op. cit., Vakıt/ Haratch 4–5. Kara Kemal arrival may perhaps
also be explained by the fact that the National Defense Committee, of which Kemal was an emi-
nent member, provided the Special Organization with financial support: see the 12 May 1919 dec-
laration made at the fifth session of the trial of the Unionist leaders by Atıf Bey, a CUP delegate
and, later, vali of Angora, who was elected to the Ittihadist Central Committee in September
1917: Takvim-ı Vakayi, no. 3554, 21 May 1919, pp. 6–8.
2. Ibidem, Vakıt/Haratch no. 4–5.
3. Ibidem, Vakıt/Haratch no. 6–7. Kemal returned rather soon to Istanbul.
5. Ibidem, Vakıt/Haratch no. 9–10, cites Şakir 23 August/5 September 1914 telegram to Askeri, in
which he informs him of the imminent arrival of the Azerbaijani dignitary.
6. Ibidem, Vakıt/Haratch no. 11.
9. Ibidem, Vakıt/Haratch no. 13, 14.

10. Ibidem, Vakıt/Haratch no. 15. These methods of recruitment are indirectly confirmed by the par-
liamentary deputy Vahan, who was in Bayazid in September. There he met a former fedayi leader,
Tro, a Dashnak who was very well known and highly respected by the Kurds for his past. Tro
informed him that a number of leaders of squadrons of hamidiye had been in Bayazid for a few days:
Papazian, Memoirs, op. cit., II, p. 285.
A 17 September 1914 letter from the primate of Erzerum, Smpad Saadetian, to Patriarch
Zaven, reveals that in Kghi/Kıği, an Ittihadist by the name of Midhat who had recently
come back from Erzerum was organizing meetings and forming militias to which he was
distributing the weapons that he had brought back with him: Zaven Der Yeghiayan,
Memoirs, op. cit., p. 67
11. Ibidem, Vakıt/Haratch no. 14. He also suggested dismissing Erzerum main commissaire, Yeghishe,
who happened to be an Armenian; he complained that İsmail Canbolat, the head of State Security
and second in command at the Ministry of the Interior, was not responding to his suggestions on
this subject.
12. Ibidem, Vakıt/Haratch 17, 34, for his role as leader of the Special Organization in Van. On the way
to Van, in Berkri, Papazian met one of the leaders Kurdish Haydaranlı, Mehmed Sadık, an old
acquaintance; Sadık told him that his tribe, which maintained squadrons of hamidiye, had been
asked to make sure that is was prepared for all eventualities. He himself, he said, had been sum-
moned to Bayazid: Papazian, Memoirs, op. cit., II, p. 285.
13. Arif Cemil, The Special Organization, op. cit., Vakıt/ Haratch no. 17.
19. Ibidem, Vakıt/Haratch no. 22, 23.
20. Document read au cours in Fifth Session of the Trial of Unionists, 12 May 1919: Takvim-ı Vakayi,
no. 3554, 21 May 1919, p. 70.
22. Ibidem, Vakıt/Haratch no. 37, 43. Cemil adds that these Georgians abandoned the positions as soon
as the troops Russian advanced.
23. Ibidem, Vakıt/ Haratch no. 44; Dadrian, “The Role of the Special Organization,” art. cit., p. 13.
24. Vakıt/ Haratch 46, letter to his wife, in which he reveals that he soon hopes to see the Turks take
control of the whole Caucasus; Dadrian, “The Role of the Special Organization,” art. cit., p. 13.
25. Vahakn Dadrian, “Documentation of the Armenian Genocide in German and Austrian Sources,”
in The Widening Circle of Genocide, I. Charny (ed.), New Brunswick, NJ 1994, pp. 110–11, cites a
23 August 1915 report by Stanger about the operations carried out during this campaign and the
massacres perpetrated by the çetes of the Special Organization, to which he had been assigned to
carry out sabotage operations in the Caucasus.
26. Arif Cemil, The Special Organization, op. cit., Vakıt/Haratch no. 51–2.
27. Ibidem, Vakıt/Haratch no. 54. A Turkish officer captured by the Russians confirms that the Russian
army operating in the region was made up of Cossacks and regular troops, including Turkish-
speaking troops from the Caucasus: ibidem, Vakıt/Haratch no. 57.
28. Cemil indicates that Hakkı died of typhus after a little more than a month as commander of the
Third Army; his death, he says, had a deep impact on Şakir, who was very close to the general.
30. Ibidem, p. 48.
31. Ibidem, p. 50.
32. Among his harshest detractors was Lieutenant Colonel Şerif Bey of the general staff, who sharply
criticized the way he had conducted the offensive: Turfan, op. cit., p. 357.
34. Dadrian, “The Role of the Special Organization,” art. cit., pp. 12–14; Hilmar Kaiser, “A Scene
from the Inferno,” The Armenians of Erzerum and the Genocide, 1915–1916,” in H.-L. Kieser et
D. J. Schaller (ed.), Der Völkermord an den Armeniern und die Shoah, Zürich 2002, p. 130–1.

Notes 865
35. Dadrian, “The Role of the Special Organization,” art. cit., p. 12; Kaiser, “A Scene from the
Inferno” ..., art. cit., p. 130.
36. Johannès Lepsius, Rapport secret sur les massacres d’Arménie, Paris 1919, p. 90; Dadrian, “The Role
of the Special Organization,” art. cit., pp. 13–14.
37. Lepsius, Rapport secret, op. cit., p. 90; Dadrian, “The Role of the Special Organization,” art. cit.,
p. 14.
38. BNu/ Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 40, Deportations in Başkale, ff. 1–12; Henry Barby, Au Pays
de l’épouvante, Paris [1917], p. 234; Kévorkian & Paboudjian, Les Arméniens dans l’Empire otto-
man, op. cit., p. 564 puts the number of Armenians in the kaza at 3,505; Kemal Karpat, Ottoman
Population, 1830–1914, Demography and Social Characteristics, Wisconsin 1985, p. 182, puts it at
4,297.
39. Barby, Au Pays de l’épouvante, op. cit., pp. 235–40; Kévorkian & Paboudjian, Les Arméniens dans
l’Empire ottoman, op. cit., p. 544, estimates that 800 Armenians were living in these towns and
villages in 1914.
40. Bloxham, “The Beginning of the Armenian Catastrophe,” art. cit., p. 115, n. 45–6.
41. Erik J. Zürcher, “Between Death and Desertion. The Experience of the Ottoman Soldier in World
War I,” Turcica 28 (1996), pp. 235–57.
For an overview of the operations conof thected by the regiments of Armenian volun-
teers, see Magdalena Golnazarian-Nichanian, Les Arméniens d’Azerbaïdjan: histoire locale
et enjeux régionaux, 1828–1918, thèse de doctorat, Université Paris III 2002, pp. 145–52.
42. Ibidem, p. 244, n. 29.
43. “The liberation of the Armenian prisoners,” an article published in the Tiflis Armenian daily
Horizon, 30 June 1916.
44. Zaven Der Yeghiayan, Memoirs, op. cit., p. 96; Krieger, op. cit., p. 29. This soldier was Lieutenant
Hovhannes Aginian, who died at the front shortly thereafter.
45. Arif Cemil, The Special Organization, op. cit., Vakıt/ Haratch no. 58–9.
48. Bloxham, “The Beginning of the Armenian Catastrophe,” art. cit., p. 117.
51. Ibidem, Vakıt/Haratch no. 83–5.
52. Original title of the work: Մարտական Հրահանգներ [The Military Orders], Genève 1906. This
manual for fedayi commandos recommends, for example, traveling at night, maintaining group
discipline, and obeying one’s commanding officer. It was utilized in the Hamidian period, when
the ARF maintained mobile units in the regions of Van and Bitlis.
57. Ibidem, Vakıt/Haratch.
58. Dadrian, “The Role of the Special Organization,” art. cit., p. 18, cites Ali İhsan Sabis, Harp
Hatiralarım [War Memoirs], II, Ankara 1951, p. 192.
60. Ibidem, Vakıt/ Haratch no. 88.
61. SHAT, Service des renseignements de la Marine, Turquie, 1BB7 236, doc. no. 1689 B-9,
Constantinople, 2 February 1920, lieutenant de vaisseau Goybet, annexe 18, complétant les
annexes 6, 7, “Déposition de Tchuruk Soulou Mahmoud pacha.”
7 The First Acts of Violence

1. Supra, p. 175, n. 70. They arrived with Dr. Şakir.
2. Supra, pp. 218–9.
3. Supra, p. 219, n. 13.

4. AMAE, Perse, n.s., vol. 18, ff. 112, 113, for the proclamation.
5. Ibidem, f° 112.
6. AMAE, Perse, n.s., vol. 18, f° 201v°, letter from the French consul in Tabriz, Nicolas, to MAE,
14 December 1914. For more details, see Golnazarian-Nichanian, Les Arméniens d’Azerbaïdjan,
op. cit., p. 109. We owe much of this information to Mary Schauffer Platt of the Presbyterian
mission in Urmia: her account covers the events of 9 January to 3 June 1915. It was published in
V. Bryce, The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, 1915–1916, Londres 1916.
7. Golnazarian-Nichanian, Les Arméniens d’Azerbaïdjan, op. cit., pp. 110–11. Sanders, op. cit.,
p. 57, affirms that Turkish troops entered Tabriz on 15 January. The reference, however, may be
to Cevdet’s forces.
8. Andonian, Chronological notes, 1914–1916, ms. cit., f° 24, says that he was already in the post, but
had not been immediately confirmed in his functions.
9. AMAE, Perse, n.s., vol. 18, f° 142.
10. AMAE, Perse, n.s., vol. 18, f° 142v°. A-To, The Major Events in Vasburagan, 1914–1917, op. cit.,
pp. 97–8, indicates that the deputy from Van, Vramian, received a cable from Ömer Naci on 17
December, sent from Bazergan, on the Turkish-Persian border; Naci was there with the “army of
Mosul,” probably made up of local çetes.
11. Golnazarian-Nichanian, Les Arméniens d’Azerbaïdjan, op. cit., pp. 111–14.
12. Ibidem, pp. 127–30.
13. Ibidem, pp. 132–4.
14. Ibidem, pp. 136–9.
15. Ibidem, pp. 139–40, cites ACEHA, fonds 121, vol. 2, file 153, published in extenso, p. 305.
16. Ibidem, pp. 140–2.
17. Supra, p. 184.
18. Golnazarian-Nichanian, Les Arméniens d’Azerbaïdjan, op. cit., pp. 151–3. That is, 8,000 regular
Russian troops, including many Cossack cavalrymen, and 1,000 Armenian volunteers.
Sebuh, Էջեր իմ Յուշերէն [Pages from My Memoirs], I, Boston 1925, pp. 188–243. Sebuh,
a brigade commander in this campaign, describes in detail the battles in which the First
Battalion took part as well as spectacle offered by the villages whose Armenian population
had just been massacred during their march into Ottoman territory way of the district of
Nordüz.
20. Ibidem, p. 293.
21. Ibidem, p. 295.
22. Zaven Der Yeghiayan, Memoirs, op. cit., p. 52, letter from the Archbishop of Van to the Patriarchate,
27 September 1914. Initially, mobilization concerned all of the males up to the age of 45, but the
local authorities took the initiative of reducing the upper limit to 42, and then to 36, so as not to
paralyze the local economy. However, orders arrived from Istanbul to maintain the upper limit at
45.
A-To, The Major Events in Vasburagan, 1914–1917, op. cit., is the fullest Armenian source
on the Van events. A-To affirms that the population resisted conscription and that Aram
took it upon himself to assemble 300 young men in front of the konak so that they could
be enrolled (ibidem, p. 71).
Clarence D. Ussher, An American Physician in Turkey, London 2002 (2nd ed.), pp. 116–18,
observes that gendarmes invested the villages in the southern part of the vilayet and took
the Armenian conscripts without further ado to the recruitment center in Van; those
responsible for logistics, however, were unprepared to feed or equip the recruits. A-To also
notes that the proportion of Turks and Kurds who refused to perform their military service
were therefore considered to be deserters was higher than among the Armenians. The
Armenian conscripts of Van served on the Caucasian front (p. 117).
24. Ibidem, p. 53; Ussher, An American Physician in Turkey, op. cit., p. 118, confirms that conscription
and the requisitions touched off an “economic crisis” in the region and that all means of transport
were confiscated by the authorities.

Notes 867
26. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau Յ 470–2, Faits et documents, no. 37, L’affaire de Van.
27. Supra, pp. 220, 225. A-To, The Major Events in Vasburagan, 1914–1917, op. cit., p. 80, indicates that
Naci went to Persia before war was declared at the head of several squadrons of çetes comprising,
above all, Çerkez and Laz, as well as Kurdish tribes “known for their cruelty.”
28. A-To, The Major Events in Vasburagan, 1914–1917, op. cit., pp. 132–3 (Pelu), pp. 134–6 (kaza of
Gargar, mid-February).
This incident is presented as follows in an official brochure published in 1916: “Late in the year
[1914] gendarmes were attacked by armed men in Mush and Hizan. Communications between
Van and Bitlis were cut off and telegraph wires were severed” (La Vérité sur le mouvement révo-
lutionnaire arménien et les mesures gouvernementales, Constantinople 1916, pp. 16–17).
29. Ibidem, pp. 134–6.
30. Ibidem, pp. 136–41.
31. Ibidem, pp. 141–5.
32. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Զ 58, Memorandum from Vramian, representative for Van, to Talât Bey,
minister of the interior, March 1915. The author states that very many women and girls were
raped, forced to convert to Islam, and carried off to various areas.
When the vali of Van, Tahsin Bey, was transferred to Erzerum and replaced by Cevdet, the
newly designated vali was in Persia; he named an interim vali to conof thect affairs in his
absence: Ussher, An American Physician in Turkey, op. cit., p. 126.
33. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Զ 58, Memorandum from Vramian, representative for Van, to Talât Bey,
minister of the interior, March 1915. Vramian notes that only the miller in Akhorig, Bedros, and
another artisan, Yegho, remained in the village: “they were needed.”
34. Ibidem.
35. Ibidem.
36. Encrypted telegram from the vali of Erzerum, Tahsin Bey, to the Ministry of the Interior, 13 May
1915: APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, file XLIX, Մ 285, original in Ottoman Turkish, transcription in the
Armenian alphabet and French translation.
37. Ibidem.
38. Ibidem.
39. A-To, The Major Events in Vasburagan, 1914–1917, op. cit., pp. 146–8. Thus the CUP delegate
and head of the Special Organization in the region returned from the Persian campaign with
Cevdet.
40. Ibidem, pp. 148–50.
41. Ibidem, pp. 150–1.
42. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau Յ 470–2, Faits et documents, no. 37, L’affaire de Van; Ussher, An American
Physician in Turkey, op. cit., p. 126, puts the number of additional draftees at 4,000.
43. It was Topal Rasul who murdered Ishkhan several weeks later.
44. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau Յ 563, Report on Cevdet bey.
45. A-To, The Major Events in Vasburagan, 1914–1917, op. cit., pp. 152, 372 for more details.
46. Ibidem, p. 155: Boghos Tutunjian, Vahan Khranian, and Mihran Der Markarian.
47. Ibidem, p. 155; Aguni, op. cit., p. 34; Zaven Der Yeghiayan, Memoirs, op. cit., p. 92; Lepsius pub-
lished a 26 April 1915 telegram from the German vice-consul in Erzerum, Max Erwin Scheubner-
Richter, announcing the murder of Ishkhan and the siege of the Armenian quarter; Ussher, An
American Physician in Turkey, op. cit., p. 127.
48. A-To, The Major Events in Vasburagan, 1914–1917, op. cit., p. 156.
49. Ibidem, p. 158.
50. Ibidem. We do not know where Vramian was murdered. For more details on the murder of Vramian
and Cevdet’s involvement in the crime: APC/APJ, PCI Bureau Յ 561–2, accompanied by an arti-
cle from the daily La Renaissance.
51. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau Յ 563, Report on Cevdet Bey.
52. Ussher, An American Physician in Turkey, op. cit., p. 127; for a more general view, see: Grace H.
Knapp, The Tragedy of Bitlis, London 2002 (2nd ed.), pp. 13–27.
54. Ibidem, p. 158.
55. Rafaël de Nogales, Four Years Beneath the Crescent, trad. Muna Lee, London 1926, pp. 59–60.

56. A-To, The Major Events in Vasburagan, 1914–1917, op. cit., pp. 168–90.
57. Rafaël de Nogales, Four Years Beneath the Crescent, op. cit., pp. 59–61. In the following weeks,
Nogales took part in the siege of the Armenian quarter; in particular, the batteries of canons
positioned in the citadel were under his responsibility.
58. Ussher, An American Physician in Turkey, op. cit., p. 129.
59. Ibidem, p. 130.
60. Ibidem, p. 131.
61. La vérité sur le mouvement révolutionnaire arménien et les mesures gouvernementales, Constantino-
ple 1916, pp. 17–18.
62. Ibidem, p. 15.
63. Zaven Der Yeghiayan, Memoirs, op. cit., p. 68, cites a 21 November 1914 letter that he received
from the primate of Mush, Nersès Kharakhanian.
64. Ibidem, p. 69.
66. Ibidem, p. 304.
67. Ibidem, pp. 305–6. The vali’s tenure in Bitlis ran from 19 March 1914 to 1 September 1915.
He later served as minister of finance and then as president of the Grand Assembly of
Turkey.
68. Ibidem, p. 320.
69. Assistant of Bahaeddin Şakir, vice-president of the Special Organization, based in Erzerum.
71. Zaven Der Yeghiayan, Memoirs, op. cit., p. 71, cites a 21 November 1914 letter that he received
from the primate of Mush, Nerses Kharakhanian.
73. Ibidem, p. 326.
74. Ibidem, p. 327.
75. Ibidem, p. 327. Logistical support for the Third Army was apparently coordinated from Hnis,
approximately halfway between Erzerum and Mush.
76. Ibidem, p. 328.
77. Ibidem, p. 329.
78. Ibidem, p. 332.
79. Ibidem, p. 333.
80. Ibidem, p. 335.
81. Ibidem, pp. 336–7.
82. Ibidem, pp. 338–9.
83. Ibidem, pp. 338–40.
84. Ibidem, p. 340; another report has it that one Mehmed Emin, the leader of a squadron of Kurdish
çetes, followed Goriun to Goms and was killed there: BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 51,
Mush-Daron, f° 4, according to information provided by Mushegh Turnian.
86. Ibidem, p. 341.
87. BNu/ Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 51, Mush-Daron, f° 2, according to information provided by
Mushegh Turnian.
88. Papazian, Memoirs, op. cit., II, p. 341; another source states that most of the Kurdish leaders
recruited had been wanted criminals for years and were “amnistied” for the occasion. These bands
of çetes carried out “indirect massacres” that the mutesarif ofscribed as “acts of banditry.” He never
punished them, confining himself to sending gendarmes to the towns and villages in which the
“çetes had not succeeded in doing what they had set out to”: BNu/ Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file
51, Mush-Daron, f° 3, according to information provided by Mushegh Turnian.
89. Ibidem, f° 3.
90. Papazian, Memoirs, op. cit., II, p. 341. We estimate the height of the precipice halfway to the mon-
astery at 150 yards.
91. Ibidem, p. 343.
92. Ibidem.
93. Ibidem, p. 345.

Notes 869
94. Ibidem, p. 347. While a guest of Schwester (“nun/nurse”) Kristin, who directed Mush’s German
mission, Papazian met one of these officers, who mistook him for a Turk; a few days later, he made
the acquaintance of the German consul in Mosul, Holstein, who “ wanted information about the
military situation behind the lines.”
96. La vérité sur le mouvement révolutionnaire arménien et les mesures gouvernementales, op. cit.,
pp. 16–17.
98. Ibidem, pp. 351–4.
99. Ibidem, p. 355.
100. Ibidem, pp. 356–63.
101. Ibidem, p. 357.
102. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Յ 529–530, file no. 26, 27.
103. First Session of the Trial of the Unionists, 27 April 1919, Extract from the 5 December 1918
deposition of Vehib Pasha: Takvim-ı Vakayi, no. 3540, 5 May 1919, p. 7, col. 2 and the full
deposition of handwritten pages: APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Հ 171–Հ 182, 5 December 1918, in
French.
p. 15.
105. BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 51, Mush-Daron, f° 1, according to information provided by
Mushegh Turnian. Sending soldiers recruited from “minorities” into the most dangerous combat
zones is a practice that is still widespread in certain countries.
106. Supra, p. 221.
108. Zürcher, “Ottoman Labour Battalions in World War I,” in H.-L. Kieser and D. J. Schaller (ed.),
Der Völkermord an den Armeniern und die Shoah, Zürich 2002, pp. 190–2.
109. Ibidem, p. 187.
110. Ibidem, p. 192.
111. BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 51, Mush-Daron, f° 1.
113. Taner Akçam, İnsan Hakları ve Ermeni Sorunu. İttihat ve Terakki’den Kurtuluş Savaşına, Ankara
1999, p. 243, in Zürcher, “Ottoman Labour Battalions in World War I,” art. cit., p. 187, n. 2.
115. BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 51, Mush-Daron, f° 2; Papazian, Memoirs, op. cit., II,
pp. 304, 307.
116. Vahakn Dadrian, “The Secret Young-Turk Ittihadist Conference and the Decision for the World
War I Genocide of the Armenians,” in Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 7, 2 (fall 1993).
117. “Recueil de témoignages sur l’extermination des amele tabouri ou bataillons de soldats-ouvriers
de l’armée ottomane pendant la Première Guerre mondiale,” in RHAC I (1995).
118. Zürcher, “Ottoman Labour Battalions in World War I,” art. cit., p. 187.
119. HHSA, PA XL 272, Constantinople, 23 February 1915, in Donald Bloxham, “Power Politics,
Prejudice, Protest and Propaganda: a Reassessment of the German Role in the Armenian
Genocide of WWI,” in H.L. Kieser and D. J. Schaller (ed.), Der Völkermord an den Armeniern und
die Shoah, Zürich 2002, p. 220, n. 47.
120. A-To, The Major Events in Vasburagan, 1914–1917, op. cit., pp. 107–8, 113–14.
8 Putting the Plan into Practice and the

“Temporary Deportation Law”
1. Arthur Beylerian, Les grandes puissances, l’Empire ottoman et les Arméniens dans les archives
françaises (1914–1918), Paris 1983, pp. XXIX–XXX, publish the French translation of the “Ten
commandments,” from FO 371/ 4172/31307; Vahakn Dadrian, “The Secret Young-Turk Ittihadist
Conference and the Decision for the World War I Genocide of the Armenians,” Diary of Political
and Military Sociology 22/1 (summer 1994), pp. 173–201.

2. French translation of this document: SHAT, Service historique de la Marine, Service de

Renseignements de la Marine, Turquie, 1BB7 231, doc. no. 508, Constantinople, 27 March 1919,
Armenian translation in Verchin Lur, 25 March 1919.
3. Ibidem, the Yeni Gazetta from 26 March.
4. Dadrian, “The Secret Young-Turk Ittihadist Conference,” art. cit., p. 175.
5. See supra, p. 171; the article in İktam is reprinted in Teotig, Յուշարձան Նահատակ
Մտաւորականութեան [Monument to the Martyred Intellectuals], Constantinople 1919,
pp. 114–15.
6. Taner Akçam, Armenien und der Völkermord, Hamburg 1996, p. 43; Akçam, From Empire to
Republic, op. cit., pp. 166–7.
7. Arif Cemil, The Special Organization, op. cit., Vakıt/Haratch 88.
8. Jay Winter, “Under Cover of War: the Armenian Genocide in the context of Total War,” in Jay
Winter (ed.), America and the Armenian Genocide of 1915, Cambridge 2003, p. 39.
9. Efraim Karsh & Inari Karsh, Empires of the Sand, The Struggle for Mastery in the Middle East,
1789–1923, Cambridge 2001, pp. 142–6, provides a good description of the context in which this
battle occurred.
10. Winter, “Under Cover of War: the Armenian Genocide,” art. cit., p. 41; Bloxham, “The Beginning
of the Armenian Catastrophe,” art. cit., p. 106, also mentions this escalation in the means used to
wage war.
11. Winter, “Under Cover of War: the Armenian Genocide,” art. cit., p. 42.
12. First session of the trial of the Cabinet members, 3 June 1919 (3 Haziran 1335): Takvim-ı Vakayi,
no. 3571, 11 June 1919, p. 141.
13. Dadrian, Histoire du Génocide, op. cit., p. 362 shows that news of the law was disseminated by the
Istanbul press even before the Council of Ministers adopted it.
14. Takvim-ı Vakayi, no. 3586, 21 June 1919.
15. Haigazn K. Kazarian, Ցեղասպան Թուրքը [The Genocidal Turk], Beirut 1968, who was an agent
of the British intelligence service in Istanbul in 1919–20, affirms that he had access to this docu-
ment in the archives of the Ottoman Ministry of the Navy, where his division of the intelligence
service had its headquarters (ibidem, pp. 27–8). The reference is perhaps to the terms of the 10
June 1915 directive that created committees charged with “protecting” “abandoned property”; the
text of the directive was published rather late in the day, in Askeri Tarih Belgeleri Dergisi, no. 81
(December 1982), doc. 1832.
16. See supra, p. 204.
17. See infra, Part 6 of the present work.
p. 15.
19. First Session of the Trial of the Cabinet members, 3 June 1919 (3 Haziran 1335): Takvim-ı Vakayi,
no. 3571, 11 June 1919, p. 141.
20. Encrypted telegram from the vali of Erzerum, Tahsin bey, to the Ministry of Interior, 13 May
21. Ibidem.
22. Supra, p. 231. Hakkı died of typhus on 12 February and was replaced by a classmate of Enver’s,
Mahmud Kâmil (Sanders, Cinq ans ..., op. cit., p. 61).
23. Encrypted telegram from the vali of Erzerum, Tahsin bey, to the Ministry of Interior, 13 May 1915:
APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, file XLIX, Մ 285, doc. cit.
24. Ibidem.
25. Ibidem.
26. Hans-Lukas Kieser, “Dr Mehmed Reshid (1873–1919): A Political Doctor,” in H.-L. Kieser and
D. J. Schaller (ed.), Der Völkermord an den Armeniern und die Shoah, Zürich 2002, pp. 245–80,
especially p. 261.
27. Verdict in the trial of the responsible secretaries and delegates of the CUP, handed down by the
court-martial of Constantinople, 8 January 1920: Takvim-ı Vakayi, no. 3772, February 1920, p. 2,
col. 2, p. 3, col. 1, pp. 53–66.
28. Ibidem.

Notes 871
29. The murder of the two kaymakams was mentioned at the first session of the trial of the Unionists,
27 April 1919: Takvim-ı Vakayi, no. 3540, 5 May 1919, p. 8, col. 1, lines 15–20; we also have, on this
subject, the report of a committee of inquiry into the exactions committed by Dr. Reşid: APC/
APJ, PCI Bureau, , Հ 119 (original ottoman) and Հ 465 (transcription).
30. Supra, p. 214, n. 52.
31. Supra, p. 144.
32. Krieger, op. cit., p. 30.
33. Aguni, op. cit., p. 25.
34. About Information Bureau, see supra, introduction.
35. Mevlanzâde Rifat, Օսմանեան Յեղափոխութեան մութ ծալքերը [Les dessous obscurs de la révo-
lution ottomane], Armenian translation of the ottoman edition, Aleppo 1929 (Türkiye Inkilabinin iş
yüzür), Beirut 1968.
36. La Renaissance, no. 7, 15 December 1918, p. 1, and Ariamard, 18 December 1918, p. 2, reports the
police search and the nature of the confiscated documents.
37. Krieger, op. cit., pp. 76–7, notes that Aguni gives an account of only one meeting, whereas
Mevlanzâde Rifat, who provides lengthier extracts, apparently conflates the minutes of a number
of different meetings.
39. Ibidem, pp. 26–9.
40. Stepan Astourian, “The Armenian Genocide: An Interpretation,” The History Teacher, 23/2
(February 1990), pp. 138–40, n. 64–5, 122–3. The author points to factors indicating that CUP
officials such as Sabancalı Hakkı and Hüsrev Sâmi were also opposed to the “deportations” (p. 141,
n. 72–3).
41. Letter from the catholicos Sahag to the patriarch Zaven, 21 April 1915: J. Lepsius (ed.), Archives
du génocide des Arméniens, Paris 1986, doc. 34, pp. 79–84; Aguni, op. cit., p. 47.
42. Kévorkian & Paboudjian, Les Arméniens dans l’Empire ottoman, op. cit., p. 313. By 20 April, the
deportation of the Armenians of Zeitun and the surrounding area had been completed.
43. As we shall see, they were later set marching toward Der Zor and were all killed.
44. Infra, pp. 585–6.
45. Infra, pp. 431–2.
47. Ibidem, p. 85.
48. Ibidem, p. 86, extract from his Diary. The patriarch states that Zohrab received the same proposi-
tion; it was agreed that the Armenian deputies would discuss the matter with the government in
order to obtain its authorization.
49. J. Lepsius (ed.), Deutschland und Armenien, Berlin-Potsdam 1919, pp. 51–2, doc. 31, report of
Mordtmann, Constantinople, 26 April 1915. Moreover, the general denied that the Armenians
had opened fire on their Turkish comrades and that they had always served behind the lines.
50. Zaven Der Yeghiayan, Memoirs, op. cit., p. 93. After being appointed Ottoman representative to
The Hague on 18 March, he declined to leave Turkey.
51. Ibidem.
52. Ibidem, p. 93.
53. Ibidem, pp. 94–5.
54. Ibidem, pp. 95–6.
55. Ibidem, p. 86.
56. Téotig, Monument to the martyred intellectuals, op. cit., pp. 20–70, gives biographical information
on 143 of those arrested in Constantinople and executed, and of another 618 people apprehended
and executed in the provinces, but does not discuss those who survived (pp. 71–111).
57. Zohrab, Complete works, op. cit., IV, Diary, 25 April 1915, pp. 431–2.
58. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Յ 202, file no. 31/1–2, Turks Responsible for the Armenian Atrocities.
59. İsmail Canbolat (1880–1926): see infra, p. 821, n. 162; Born in Kosovo, of Circasian origin,
graduate from Harbiye, deputy from Constantinople, Canbolat was a member of the Ittihadist
Central Committee; he was responsible for deporting Armenians from the provinces living in
Constantinople and for the murder of those imprisoned in Çankırı: APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, file
no. 13/1, Յ 144 and Դ 279–80 (in English).

60. See supra, p. 203, n. 88.

61. Born in Smyrna, a jurist by profession, Murad Bey became, after 1908, police chief in Salonika,
and then Bedri Bey’s assistant in Constantinople; he was one of the organizers of the roundup of
24 April: APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, file 3/1, Յ 822.
62. Odian, The cursed years, op. cit., Jamanag, no. 7.
63. Ibidem, no. 8.
65. Ibidem, p. 99.
66. Ibidem, p. 100.
67. Supra, pp. 30–2.
68. The present synthesis is based on Piuzant Bozajian: Teotig, Monument to the martyred intellectu-
als, op. cit., pp. 113–25. Dr. Boghosian, “Պատմութեան համար Ճշդում մը [A Correction for
History],” in Baykar, 16 July 1927.
69. Dr. Boghosian, “Իսմայիլ Ճանպօլաթի Իտէալը [İsmail Canbolat’s Ideal],” in Arev, no. 2267, 3
August 1926, p. 1.
70. Zohrab, Complete works, op. cit., IV, Diary, 1 May 1915, p. 432.
71. Ibidem, IV, Diary, 9 May 1915, p. 432.
74. A complete record of the proceedings is given by one of the two defendants ultimately amnestied
by the court: Hmayag Aramiants, Դէպի Կախաղան [Towards the Gallows], II, Constantinople
1918, pp. 41–2.
75. Cf. supra, p. 174, n. 55.
76. Aramiants, Towards the gallows, op. cit., pp. 43–4.
77. Ibidem, pp. 44–6.
78. Ibidem, p. 276; Hmayag Aramiants, Անկախ Հայաստան [Independent Armenia], III,
Constantinople 1919, pp. 30–2.
79. Ibidem, pp. 37–8.
80. Ibidem, pp. 39–40.
81. “Պոլսոյ Կախաղանները [The Gallows of Constantinople],” Hnchak, no. 3, August 1915, p. 1;
Andonian, Chronological notes, 1914–1916, ms. cit., Armenian translation of the announcement
of the Constantinople military high command, on two sheets glued to f° 49.
82. Andonian, Chronological notes, 1914–1916, ms. cit., ff. 38–46, gives lengthy extracts from this
series of articles; Aguni, op. cit., p. 30, also mentions these articles.
83. Ibidem, pp. 39–40.
84. Hmayag Aramiants, Վերածնունդի Երկունքը [The Cruel Pain of the Renaissance], I,
Constantinople, 1918, p. 51.
85. Sapah-Gulian, The Responsibles, op. cit., pp. 267–8. We have not been able to obtain information
on Azuri.
86. La vérité sur le mouvement révolutionnaire arménien et les mesures gouvernementales, op. cit., p. 19.
87. Eighth session of the trial of Yozgat: Jamanag, 22 February 1919, p. 4, col. 1–4.
88. Ibidem.
89. La vérité sur le mouvement révolutionnaire arménien et les mesures gouvernementales, op. cit., p. 17.
90. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Մ 451, encrypted telegram from the commandant by interim of the 15th
division, the Colonel Şahabeddin, in Kayseri, to the commandant by interim of the 5th Army, in
Angora, Halil Recayi Bey, 2 June 1915 [2 Haziran 1331], no. 945/1/2 (Զ 58, in French).
91. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau Մ 451, encrypted telegram from the commandant by interim of the 5th
Army, in Angora, Halil Recayi Bey, to the Ministry of the War, 3 June 1915 [3 Haziran 1331].
division, the Colonel Şahabeddin, in Kayseri, to the commandant by interim of the 5th Army, in
Angora, Halil Recayi Bey, 9 June 1915 [9 Haziran 1331].
93. Ibidem.
Army, in Angora, Halil Recayi Bey, to the Ministry of the War, 25 June 1915.
95. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Մ 757, no. 48, p. 43.

Notes 873
96. Teotig, Monument to the martyred intellectuals, op. cit., pp. 110.
97. Յուշամատեան Նուիրուած Սօցեալ Դեմոկրատ Հնչակեան Կուսակցութեան
Քառասնաﬔակին [Book of Memory for the Fortieth Anniversary of the Founding of the Social
Democratic Hnchak Party], Paris 1930, pp. 234–5.
98. Ibidem, p. 238.
99. La vérité sur le mouvement révolutionnaire arménien et les mesures gouvernementales, op. cit., pp. 18_19.
Part IV In the Vortex of the War: The First

1 The Armenian Population of the Empire on the Eve

of the War: The Demographic Issue
1. Ministère des Affaires étrangères, Livre jaune, documents diplomatiques, 1875–1877, Paris 1877,
p. 135, annexe I au 7e protocole de la Conférence de Constantinople, séance du 11 janvier 1877.
Let us note, in connection with the eyalet of Ermenistan, that the name “Armenia” has, in the
re-editions of seventeenth-century and eighteenth-century Turkish authors published in the past
few decades, quite simply become “Eastern Anatolia.” This holds, notably, for the second edition
of the work of the seventeenth-century author Kâtip Çelebi (Hayati ve eserleri hakkinda inceleme-
ler, Ankara 1957, p. 127) in which the title of Chapter 41, “About the Land of Armenia,” has
been replaced by “Eastern Anatolia (cf. the first edition, Constantinople, 1732, p. 227). For more
detail, see A. Papazyan, “Քյաթիբ Չելեպիի “Ճիհան–Նուման Որպես Աղբյուր Հայաստանի
Պատմական Աշխարհագրութեան [The “Jihan–Numa” of Kâtip Çelebi of the Geographical
History of Armenia],” Badma–Panasiragan Hantes 3 (1983), pp. 229–32. For more detail on the
administrative subdivisions of the Ottoman Empire, see the excellent article by K. Patalyan,
“Վանի Նահանգը 1840–ական–1914 թթ. [The Province of Van in the Years 1840–1914],” Panper
Erevani Hamalsarani 3 (1986), pp. 13–20 which makes systematic use of the Ottoman Salname.
2. La Turquie d’Asie, 4 vol., Paris 1890–1895, in the introduction to vol. 1.
3. Armenia, the Armenians and the Treaties, London 1891, pp. 8–10.
4. Lettres sur la Turquie, Paris 1853.
5. Ibidem, pp. 20–7. Ubicini also puts Constantinople’s Armenian population at 222,000 in 1844, of
whom 17,000 he says were Catholics, making a total population of 866,000 inhabitants.
6. Salaheddin Bey, La Turquie à l’exposition universelle de 1867, Paris 1867, pp. 214–17.
7. Projet de règlement organique pour l’Arménie turque, Constantinople 1878, pp. 18–23; Rolin-
Jaequemyns, op. cit., pp. 8–10; the major Ahmed Cevad, later grand vizier of the empire, also says
that it counted 3 million Armenians in 1873 (cf. Malûmat-i el-Kâfiyé fi Memalik-i el-Osmaniye,
Istanbul 1298/1873, p. 85, cited by A. Beylérian, op. cit., p. XXII.
8. Karpat, op. cit., pp. 122–46.
9. This census was carried out from April 1878 to late 1879 by Archbishop Karekin Srvantsdiants
at the request of Patriarch Nerses Varzhabedian. The Armenian census takers, however, were
unable to travel to certain regions that the Kurds had rendered unsafe. On the basis of these
statistics, Srvantsdiants published two volumes in Constantinople in 1879 (Toros Aghpar). The
censuses of Pasın, Tercan, Kemah, Bayazid, Alaşkert, Ispir, Keskin, and Erzerum, as well as those
of their dioceses, were left in manuscript form in the archives; they were only recently pub-
lished by Emma Gostantyan, “Արեվմտյան Հայաստանի Հայաբնակ Վայրերի Վերաբերյալ
Գ. Սրվանձտյանցի Կազմած Վիճակագրություններից [K. Srvantsdiants’s Population
Statistics on the Regions Inhabited by Armenians],” Panper Hayastani Arkhivneri 45/2 (1976),
pp. 62–93 (see also Réponse au mémoire de la Sublime Porte, Constantinople 1919, p. 43); Ararat
9 (1914), p. 808 sq. Minutes of the session of Armenian National Chamber, 12 December 1908
(Adenakrutiun, op. cit., p. 152) also show us that Bishop Srvantsdiants and two assistants were
charged with carrying out this census, which he himself conducted in the field with help from
the diocesan administrations.

10. These numbers summarize information available in the four volumes of La Turquie d’Asie, op. cit.
Le Livre jaune français, op. cit., uses Cuinet’s figures, but adds: “Generally speaking, the preceding
figures must be treated with caution, since the statistical information we have on Asia Minor is,
as is well known, most inadequate” (pp. 1–8 for the commentary).
11. Karpat, op. cit., p. 25; Salaheddin bey, op. cit., pp. 210–14.
12. Léart, op. cit., pp. 10–11 and annexe 1, p. 64 (extrait du Salname de 1298 [1882], pp. 413–14).
13. In the census of 1881/1882–93: Karpat, op. cit., pp. 126, 152.
14. Kévorkian & Paboudjian, Les Arméniens dans l’Empire ottoman, op. cit., p. 75.
15. Karpat, op. cit., p. 124.
16. Ibidem, p. 126.
17. The photographic documents of the period that we have published in Kévorkian & Paboudjian,
Les Arméniens dans l’Empire ottoman, op. cit., in the chapter on the vilayet of Angora, reveal a
great deal about the importance of the village and the number of households it contained.
18. To verify this, it is enough to compare the figures in the censuses published by Karpat, op. cit.,
pp. 122–46 (statistiques 1881/2–1893) and p. 152 ff.
19. Ibidem, pp. 196–7 and footnote.
20. Ibidem, pp. 162–7; Ararat 1–2 (1914), pp. 49 ,132.
21. Léart, op. cit., pp. 60–1; Réponse au mémoire de la Sublime Porte, op. cit., pp. 44–5.
22. Supra, pp. 158–9.
24. Census available in the archives of the Bibliothèque Nubar: APC, DOR 3/1–3/4.
26. Ibidem, p. 233.
27. Letter accompanying the census: Bibliothèque Nubar, APC, DOR 3/1–3/4.
28. We published this work in 1992: Kévorkian & Paboudjian, Les Arméniens dans l’Empire ottoman, op.
cit., p. 75. To exploit this census, we had to overcome the handicap represented by the inadequacy or
the total lack of figures for certain regions. Since the problem was confined to the vilayet of Van and
certain areas in western Anatolia, we have chosen to fill in these lacunae, wherever possible, with
figures provided by the dioceses and published in various sources, so as to arrive at globally significant
results. The number of schools and schoolchildren and churches and monasteries has been established
on the basis of the official statistics of 1913/1914 or earlier documents published by the Patriarchate.
29. A. Hamparian, “Արեւմտահայերի Թվագանակի Հարցի Շուրջ [On the Question of the
Number of Western Armenians],” Panper Erevani Hamalsarani 2 (1969), pp. 98–113.
30. Ibidem.
31. Takvim-ı Vakayi, no. 3540, p. 7, col. 1, published the encrypted telegram of 15 September 1915
sent by the vali, Dr. Mehmed Reşid, to the Ministry of the Interior; it indicates that the 120,000
Armenians of the vilayet have been deported.
32. APC/BNu, DOR 3/2, f° 47 and Karpat, op. cit., p. 176.
33. Bulletin trimestriel de statistique, 6e année, Constantinople, X–XII (1332/1916), pp. 30–1.
34. APC/BNu, DOR 3/1–3/3, for details concerning the figures listed in the tables below, see
Kévorkian & Paboudjian, Les Arméniens dans l’Empire ottoman, op. cit. Statistics on the schools
that are marked with an asterisk have been drawn from an official publication of the Patriarchate
dating from 1901/1902. Where the number of churches and monasteries was lacking, we have
made use of the census conducted by the Patriarchate in 1912/1913 at the request of the Ministry
of Justice and Religions. We have preferred to use the work of Kemal Karpat rather than Justin
McCarty, Muslim and Minorities: The Population of Ottoman Anatolia and the End of Empire (New
York and London 1983) in comparing or completing some of the figures that we publish here.
2 The Ottoman Armenians’ Socio-Economic

Situation on the Eve of the War
1. Bulletin trimestriel de statistiques, 2e année, Constantinople 1913.
2. J. P. Mahé, “Structures sociales et vocabulaire de la parenté en arménien contemporain,” REArm
18 (1984), pp. 339–40.

Notes 875
3. J. D. Tholozan, Histoire de la peste bubonique au Caucase, en Arménie et en Anatolie, Paris 1876.
2.1 The Eradication of the Armenian Population in

the Provinces of the Ottoman Empire: Reasons
for a Regional Approach
1. The indictment, drawn up on 12 April 1919, was presented to the court-martial on 27 April
1919, along with a long series of letters and other documents substantiating the charges: Takvim-ı
Vakayi, no. 3540, 5 May 1919, p. 6.
2. APC/APJ, The Patriarchate’s Constantinople Information Bureau (hereinafter abbreviated: PCI
Bureau), Յ 152 and Դ 281 (in English), doc. no. 14/1, file on Midhat Şükrü Bey.
3. The indictment presented to the court-martial on 27 April 1919, along with other documents
substantiating the charges: Takvim-ı Vakayi, no. 3540, 5 May 1919, p. 6.
4. Ibidem.
5. The long report by Captain Fazıl, a judge at the court-martial of Malatia during the war and a local
notable, as well as that of General Vehib Pasha, comprise two of the main Turkish accounts. Fazıl’s
report was completed on 30 November 1918 and later sent by courier to the grand vizier, the interior
and justice ministries, the president of the Senate, and “various interested parties.” It clearly indi-
cates how orders were transmitted from Constantinople APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, file XXIII, Յ 432–64,
copy in Ottoman Turkish and English translation probably made by the Information Bureau.
6. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Հ 183–5, documents transmitted to the court-martial by the authorities
in Konya, certified on 27 March 1919 by the department of the Ministry of the Interior; response
of 9 February 1919 from Zami Bey, the vali of Angora, to the encrypted telegram of 2 February
1919 from the president of the court-martial in Constantinople, confirming that certified copies
of documents and telegrams were posted to him the same day.
3 Deportations and Massacres in the Vilayet of Erzerum

1. L. von Sanders, op. cit., p. 61. The German vice-consul in Erzerum, Max Erwin von Scheubner-
Richter, informed him of the state of the troops. BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 59, Erzerum,
f° 58, report by Boghos Vartanian, from Erzerum, 5 august 1916, indicates that the Armenian
soldiers represented a mere 10% of the conscripts serving in combat units, but constituted 100%
of the battalions of worker–soldiers.
2. Ibidem, pp. 127–8; APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Յ 165–6, file of the General Mahmud Kâmil, born in
Aleppo, of Arab origin.
3. Tahsin Bey held his post until 14 July 1916.
4. Supra, pp. 222–3.
5. Supra, pp. 220 and 221.
6. Letter from Hans von Wangenheim to Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg, Pera, 30 December 1914:
Joannes Lepsius (ed.), Archives du génocide des Arméniens, Paris 1986, doc. 14, pp. 68–9. A hospi-
tal with a capacity of 350 to 400 beds was nevertheless created by the Armenian authorities in
Erzerum to provide care for the soldiers: BNu/ Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 59, Erzerum, f° 63v°,
report by Boghos Vartanian, from Erzerum, 5 August 1916.
7. Ibidem, p. 69. Localities in the Russian zones occupied in the early stages of the conflict were also
sacked: the church in Olti, for example, was systematically demolished as soon as it was occu-
pied BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 59, Erzerum, ff. 39–45, report by Rupen Toroyan, from
Erzerum, 5 February 1917, f° 39.
8. Ibidem, f° 39v°: this happened, for example, in Mansur, where the church was converted into a
lumberyard, or in the village of Odzni, where Rupen Toroyan’s regiment took up quarters after
expelling the villagers: ibidem, f° 41.
9. Yervant Odian, The Accursed Years, op. cit., Zhamanag no. 7.
10. Ibidem, no. 48. Karekin vartabed was not in Konya when Enver traveled through the city on his
way back from the Caucasus: he excused himself for his absence in a polite note that the minister
of war answered.

11. BNu, Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 59, Erzerum, ff. 39–45, report by Rupen Toroyan, from
Erzerum, 5 February 1917, f° 39; BNu/Fonds Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 59, Erzerum, f° 61v°, report by
Boghos Vartanian, from Erzerum, 5 August 1916, says that Enver arrived in Erzerum one evening
in mid-January, defeated and silent, spending the night there before setting out for the capital.
12. Aguni, History of the Massacre of one Million Armenians, op. cit., p. 139.
13. André Autheman, La Banque impériale ottomane, Paris 1996, p. 235; Aguni, History of the Massacre
of one Million Armenians, op. cit., p. 138.
14. Hilmar Kaiser, “ ‘A Scene from the Inferno,’ The Armenians of Erzerum and the Genocide, 1915–
1916,” in H. L. Kieser and D. J. Schaller (eds.), Der Völkermord an den Armeniern und die Shoah,
Zürich 2002, p. 130–1.
15. BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 59, Erzerum, ff. 35–6, report by Constantin Trianfidili, and
written down by Kr[ikor] Ghamarian, from Erzerum, 16 January 1917.
16. See the examples that we have given, supra, p. 246.
17. BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 59, Erzerum, f° 3v°, report by Alphonse Arakelian, “Armenian
deported from Erzerum, an eyewitness to most of the events described in the narrative,” Alep, 24
February 1919.
20. BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 59, Erzerum, f° 35, report by Constantin Trianfidili, and written
down by Kr[ikor] Ghamarian, from Erzerum, 16 January 1917. It was later learned that these peasants
were massacred in the vicinity of Malatia, where most of the slaughterhouses maintained by the
Special Organization were located; Kaiser, “ ‘A Scene from the Inferno’, ” art. cit., p. 134, cites a 14 May
dispatch from vice-consul Scheubner that states that these deportees were bound for Mamahatun.
21. Ibidem.
22. Ibidem, f° 36.
23. BNu/Fonds Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 59, Erzerum, f° 19, report by Kh. Oskanian, Sarıkamiş, 3 November
1916; APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Թ 348–9, Sur le chemin du calvaire: Erzerum; Aguni, History of the
Massacre of one Million Armenians, op. cit., p. 139; Kaiser, “A Scene from the Inferno,” art. cit., p. 133,
exploits above all the dispatches of the German vice-consul to the German ambassador in Istanbul.
24. Ibidem, p. 134, dispatch from Scheubner to embassy, 9 May 1915.
25. Aguni, History of the Massacre of one Million Armenians, op. cit., p. 139; Kh. Oskanian, arrested
in Trebizond, was himself imprisoned along with Vartazar Dakesian, Hampartsum Balasanian,
Khachig Ghugasian, a former activist from Trebizond, and Archag Zelpichigian: BNu/Fonds A.
Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 59, Erzerum, f° 19.
26. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Մ 576, encrypted telegram no. 5 of 21 April 1915 from Erzerum, from the
head of the Special Organization, Bahaeddin Şakir, to the vali of Mamuret ul-Aziz, Sabit Bey, for
transmission to the delegate of the CUP on 21 April 1915, encrypted, with the decoded version:
Takvim-ı Vakayi no. 3540, p. 6, col. 1–2, and no. 3771, p. 48, col. 1.
27. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Յ 775, doc. no. 14 (in English), Թ 347 (in French) and Է 89, Report about
facts to prove the Culpability of Cemal Bey in the Deportation of Armenians of Erzerum and
Dercan; Kaiser, “A Scene from the Inferno,” art. cit., pp. 141–2, brings out Hulusi’s role in the kill-
ing fields of Mamahatun and Kemah.
28. Ibidem, p. 134.
29. BNu/Fonds Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 59, Erzerum, f° 62, report by Boghos Vartanian, from Erzerum,
5 August 1916.
30. Takvim-ı Vakayi no. 3540, p. 6, col. 1–2 (cf. n. 26).
31. Encrypted telegram from the vali of Erzerum, Tahsin bey, to minister of the Interior, 13 May
32. See supra, pp. 231–2.
33. BOA, DH. şfr no. 53/93, telegram from Talât to the vilayets of Van, Erzerum, and Bitlis, 23 May
1915: Osmanli Belgelerinde Ermeniler (1915–1920), T.C. Başbakanlik Devlet Arşivleri Genel
Müdürlüğü, Osmanli Arşivi Daire Başkanliği, Armenians in Ottoman Documents (1915–1920),
no. 25, Ankara 1995, pp. 36–7.

Notes 877
35. BOA, Meclis-i Vükelâ Mazbatası, 198/163, the Cabinet’s deportation decision of 13 May 1915:
Armenians in Ottoman Documents (1915–1920), op. cit., pp. 33–5.
36. See supra, p. 204, n. 93.
37. BOA, Meclis-i Vükelâ Mazbatası, 198/163, the cabinet’s deportation decision of 13 May 1915:
Armenians in Ottoman Documents (1915–1920), op. cit., pp. 33–5.
38. BOA, DH. şfr no. 53/89, 23 May 1915 circular from the Ministry of the Post and Telegraph Office:
Armenians in Ottoman Documents (1915–1920), op. cit.
39. Kaiser, “ ‘A Scene from the Inferno’,” art. cit., p. 137, cites two letters from Mordtmann and
Wangenheim to the vice-consul in Erzerum, 29 and 30 May 1915.
40. BNu/Fonds Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 59, Erzerum, ff. 64–7, report by Boghos Vartanian, from Erzerum,
5 August 1916.
41. Kaiser, “ ‘A Scene from the Inferno’,” art. cit., p. 139, dépêche à l’ambassade, 22 June 1915. Süleyman
Nuran Pasha, a dönme physician born in Salonika and a member of the Ittihad’s General Council,
was at the time officially director of the military health services of the Third Army; it is probable,
however, that he was also in Erzerum to assist Dr. Bahaeddin Şakir. He was, moreover, considered
responsible for executing Armenian army doctors and for poisoning civilian populations in tests
involving microbes carried out in the regions of Erzerum, Sıvas, and Erzincan: APC/APJ, PCI
Bureau, Յ 154–6, file of Süleyman Nuran Pasha.
42. Ibidem, p. 139 and n. 21. BNu/Fonds Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 59, Erzerum, ff. 56–70 and 78–91, report
by Boghos Vartanian, from Erzerum, 5 August 1916, f° 65 v°: the leading families received the
order to get ready to leave on 28 May.
43. BNu/Fonds Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 59, Erzerum, ff. 9–17, report by Shushanig M. Dikranian, Les
premiers exilés partis d’Erzerum; BNu/Fonds Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 59, Erzerum, ff. 52–5, report by
Adelina Mazmanian.
44. According to Scheubner-Richter, there were 15 gendarmes and 500 deportees in the convoy:
Kaiser, “ ‘A Scene from the Inferno’,” art. cit., p. 139. A survivor from the fifth convoy, Armenag
Madatian, who left Erzerum early in July, gives an erroneous date of departure, 14 June: APC/APJ,
PCI Bureau, Հ 107 APJ, doc. no. 56.
45. Report by Shushanig M. Dikranian, doc. cit., f° 9v°.
46. Report by Shushanig M. Dikranian, doc. cit., f° 10; report by Adelina Mazmanian, doc. cit., f° 52:
proposals of marriage and conversion naturally followed, but were rejected.
47. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Թ 348–9, Sur le chemin du calvaire: Erzerum, states that one of the lead-
ers of çetes in the vilayet was Kürd Ziya Beg, a relative of a parliamentary deputy from Erzerum,
Seyfullah.
48. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Ի 218–19, those responsible for the deportations and massacres in the
region of Erzerum.
49. Report by Adelina Mazmanian, doc. cit, f° 53. The massacre of Şoğ is also described by a witness born in
Kıği, who states that heads of family were murdered by çetes under the command of Yazilci Zâde Husni
Bey: APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Է 351–6, report in English on the massacres in the region of Erzerum.
50. Ibidem.
51. Report by Shushanig M. Dikranian, doc. cit., ff. 10–11.
52. Ibidem.
53. Ibidem, f° 12v°.
54. Report by Adelina Mazmanian, doc. cit, f° 55.
55. Report by Shushanig M. Dikranian, doc. cit., f° 13.
56. Ibidem, f° 12v°–13. Others Armenian sources make brief reference to the fate of this convoy and
what happened to surviving members of it in Harput: APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Է 358–60, report in
English on the massacres in the region of Erzerum, Յ 723–6, Faits et documents, doc. no. 29, Les
déportations des Arméniens d’Erzerum; APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Թ 348–9, Sur le chemin du calvaire:
Erzerum; BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 59, Erzerum, f° 3, report by Alphonse Arakelian,
from Erzerum, Aleppo, 24 February 1919.
57. The author of the study of the Banque Ottomane notes that the total amount that could be paid
out to clients “presently voyaging” was limited to 1,500 pounds, because, “no doubt, the decision
to grant the advance was made late in the day” and because the accounts were frozen in February
1916: André Autheman, La Banque impériale ottomane, Paris 1996, p. 238.

58. Report by Shushanig M. Dikranian, doc. cit., f° 13. When she wrote this report, some of these
women were still being held in Harput.
59. Report by Adelina Mazmanian, doc. cit, f° 55.
60. Aguni, History of the Massacre of one Million Armenians, op. cit., p. 141; BNu/ Fonds Andonian,
P.J.1/3, file 59, Erzerum, ff. 3–4v°, report by Alphonse Arakelian, Aleppo, 24 February 1919; APC/
APJ, PCI Bureau, Է 358–60 and Յ 723–6, Faits et documents, doc. no. 29, Les déportations des
Arméniens d’Erzerum.
61. Ibidem. On the outskirts of Erzincan, on the road to Kemah, where the convoy came to a stand for
some time, the deportees also saw the valis of Erzerum and Trebizond, the kaymakam of Bayburt,
and later, the vali of Sıvas as well as various mutesarifs and kaymakams pass by. These officials
probably came to the area to coordinate their actions: BNu/Fonds Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 59,
Erzerum, f°–68v°, report by Boghos Vartanian, Erzerum, 5 August 1916.
62. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Է 358–60 and Յ 723–6, Faits et documents, doc. no. 29, Les déportations des
Arméniens d’Erzerum.
63. BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 59, Erzerum, f° 4v°, report by Alphonse Arakelian. The con-
voys of deportees from the regions of Erzerum, Sıvas, Bitlis, and Harput almost all passed by way
of the Kahta gorge, where they were decimated by the same squadrons.
64. Ibidem; APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Է 358–60 and Յ 723–26, Faits et documents, doc. no. 29, Les dépor-
tations des Arméniens d’Erzerum.
65. Kaiser, “A Scene from the Inferno,” art. cit., p. 157, n. 109, report from German consul in Aleppo,
Walter Rössler to Bethmann Holweg, 30 November 1915.
66. BNu/Fonds Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 59, Erzerum, f° 4v°, report by Alphonse Arakelian; The
encrypted telegram of 23 June 1915 [23 Haziran 1331] from the kaymakam of Bayburt to the vali of
Erzerum seems to have to do with this second convoy. It contains information about the monitor-
ing of the deportations by the local government: “I hereby inform your Excellency that the convoy
from Erzerum that was here until recently set out today under the supervision of the imperial
district attorney, accompanied by a sizeable escort”: APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Է 758, no. 49.
67. BNu/Fonds Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 59, Erzerum, ff. 84–5, report by Boghos Vartanian, Erzerum,
5 August 1916.
68. Ibidem, f° 85 r°–v°.
69. Ibidem, f° 86–7.
70. Ibidem, ff. 88v°–9.
71. Ibidem, f° 91.
72. Aguni, History of the Massacre of one Million Armenians, op. cit., p. 142; APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Թ
348–9, Sur le chemin du calvaire: Erzerum; BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 59, Erzerum, f° 4v°,
report by Alphonse Arakelian.
73. Aguni, History of the Massacre of one Million Armenians, op. cit., pp. 142–3; APC/APJ, PCI Bureau,
Թ 348–9, Sur le chemin du calvaire: Erzerum.
74. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Հ 107 APJ, doc. no. 56, The Murder of the Bishop Simpad Saadetian, prelate
of Erzerum, report by an escapee, Armenag Madatian.
75. Kaiser, “A Scene from the Inferno,” art. cit., p. 159.
76. Supra, p. 242. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Թ 321, provides a list of those who bore the main responsi-
bility for the deportations in late March 1915 in the district of Pasın: Kerim son of Mehmed Bey,
Behdi Bey, Ahmed Bey, Reşad son of Abdullah.
77. BNu/Fonds Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 59, Erzerum, f° 71, report by Nigoghayos Bazarian, 55 years old,
from the village of Khosroveran.
78. BNu/ Fonds Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 59, Erzerum, f° 72, report by Harutiun Minasian, 55 years old,
from the village of Ichkhu.
79. Supra, p. 296; Kévorkian & Paboudjian, Les Arméniens dans l’Empire ottoman, op. cit., p. 442.
80. Ibidem, pp. 442–3, 449.
81. Ibidem, pp. 429–33.
82. BNu/ Fonds Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 59, Erzerum, f° 64, report by Boghos Vartanian, Erzerum,
5 August 1916.
83. Ibidem, ff. 64–5.

Notes 879
85. BNu/Fonds Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 59, Erzerum, ff. 47–51, villages of the plain of Erzerum.
86. Kévorkian & Paboudjian, Les Arméniens dans l’Empire ottoman, op. cit., pp. 439–42.
87. In the first months of the war, İsmail Bey Arpaci and his son İbrahim organized the squadrons of
çetes in the region of Bayburt.
88. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Թ 322, 325, Թ 336–7 (report in French): Responsables des déportations et
des massacres dans la région de Bayburt.
89. The verdict of the court-martial, dated 20 July 1920, condemning to death “Mehmed Nusret Bey,
kaymakam of Bayburt and later mutesarif of Arğana Maden, and Lieutenant Necati Bey, the leader of
a squadron of çetes, both of whom bear responsibility for the massacres of Bayburt,” was published in
Tercüman-ı Hakikat no. 14,136, 5 August 1920. Distribution of this issue of the periodical was, how-
ever, blocked by the censorship office. Haigazn Kazarian, who was working for the British authorities
in Constantinople at the time, kept a copy of the issue and later published a facsimile reproduction
and an Armenian translation in his book on the genocide: Kazarian, op. cit., pp. 292–300.
90. Ibidem.
91. Ibidem.
92. Ibidem.
93. Ibidem. The witnesses were Shushanig, Aghavni, Varsenik, Armenuhi, Khachadur Seferian, and
an adolescent by the name of Hampartsum. Nusret was condemned to death and hanged at
5 a.m. in Bayazid square on 5 August 1920: La Renaissance, no. 522, 6 août 1920. The verdict of
the court-martial also notes that Nusret was promoted to the post of mutesarif of Arğana Maden
and, later, Urfa, where “he committed tragic crimes against fifteen thousand to twenty thousand
Armenian deportees from various regions; he received a promotion after the commission of each
crime, as is proven by irrefutable documents.”
94. SHAT, Service Historique de la Marine, Service de Renseignements de la Marine, Turquie, 1BB7
231, doc. no. 258, Constantinople, 7 February 1919, p. 1, report about Les Responsables des mas-
sacres de Bayburt.
95. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Թ 322, 325, Թ 336–7.
96. BNu/Fonds Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 11, Bayburt, f° 1, report by Mgrdich Muradian.
97. BNu/Fonds Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 11, Bayburt, ff. 1v°–3, report by Mgrdich Muradian.
98. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Թ 343–4 (in French), dos. no. 101, Le récit navrant d’une survivante à
Bayburt.
101. BNu/ Fonds Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 59, Erzerum, report by Vahan Mirakents, “Ինչպէս
ջարդուեցան Խնուսցիք [How the Inhabitants of Khnus Were Massacred],” Constantinople
1919, p. 1.
102. Ibidem, p. 2.
103. Kaiser, “A Scene from the Inferno,” art. cit., p. 138, cites German consular sources.
104. BNu/Fonds Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 59, Erzerum, report by Vahan Mirakents, p. 2.
105. Ibidem, p. 5.
106. BNu/Fonds Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 59, Erzerum, f° 74, report by Sharo Nazarian, and f° 75, report
by Simon Mekhitarian, f° 75v°, Harutiun Serovpian, from Gopal. A few inhabitants of Ashkhalu,
a primarily Turkish village, saved their lives by converting to Islam in Serıncek: BNu/Fonds A.
Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 59, Erzerum, f° 76, report by Arshag Derderian, from Ashkhalu.
107. Ibidem.
108. Ibidem, p. 6.
109. Kévorkian & Paboudjian, Les Arméniens dans l’Empire ottoman, op. cit., pp. 437–8. Some of the
men of these villages had immigrated to Romania and Bulgaria; a smaller number had settled in
the United States: BNu/Fonds Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 15, Tercan, ff. 1–3, reports on the situation
in the kaza after the Russians arrived.
110. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Կ 588 and Թ 327–8 (in French), Les exploits du député de Kemah Halet bey.
111. BNu/Fonds Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 15, Tercan, f° 2v°.
112. Ibidem; BNu/ Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 15, Tercan, f° 10v°, report by Father Hampartsum
Harutiunian, village priest in Vartig (Tercan).
113. Ibidem, f° 11.

114. Ibidem, f° 12v°, report by Vartan Avedisian, from Pakarij.

115. Ibidem, f° 13, report by Hovhannes Rasian, from Sargha.
116. Ibidem, f° 13, report by Hovhannes Gozeghian, from Piriz.
118. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Թ 334, dossier no. 35, Events in Kıği from the mobilization order to the
deportation; Zaven Der Yeghiayan, Memoirs, op. cit., p. 180, cited the report by Ms. Aghasser, the
wife of the director of the Armenian schools in the kaza.
119. Infra, p. 399, his activities in the Kahta gorge.
120. BNu/Fonds Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 61, Kıği, f° 16v°–17, report by Vahan Postoyan; APC/APJ, PCI
Bureau, Թ 321, those responsible for the region of Kıği.
121. BNu/Fonds Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 61, f° 16v°, Kıği, report by Vahan Postoyan; APC/APJ, PCI
Bureau, P 334, dossier no. 35, Events in Kıği from the mobilization order to the deportation;
Zaven Der Yeghiayan, Memoirs, op. cit., p. 180.
122. BNu/Fonds Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 61, ff. 2–4, Kıği, report by Vahan Postoyan.
123. Ibidem, f° 64 r°–v° and ff. 72v°–73v°, report by Sarkis Arsigian, who states that İsmail Ağa, a local
Kurdish beg, suggested that the villagers come to his village so that he could protect them, but
then handed them over to the çetes.
124. Ibidem, f° 65 r°–v°.
125. BNu/ Fonds Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 61, f° 16r°–v°; another report bears on the 12 June 1915
massacre of the village of Ljig, 12 June 1915: BNu/Fonds Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 61, Kıği, ff.
68v°–70v°.
126. BNu/Fonds Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 61, f° 66v°, Kıği, report by Vahan Postoyan
127. BNu/Fonds Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 61, ff. 2–4, Kıği, report by Vahan Postoyan.
128. Ibidem, f° 16 and 66v°; Zaven Der Yeghiayan, Memoirs, op. cit., p. 181.
129. Ibidem; APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Թ 334 (in French), no. 35, report on Les événements de Keghi
depuis la mobilisation jusqu’à la déportation.
130. Zaven Der Yeghiayan, Memoirs, op. cit., p. 181; APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Թ 334 (in French), no. 35,
the events in Kıği from the mobilization order to the deportation, puts the number of orphans at
400.
131. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Է 351–6, report in English on the massacres in the region of Erzerum.
132. Ibidem; BNu/ Fonds Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 61, ff. 2–4, Kıği, report by Vahan Postoyan.
133. Ibidem; APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Է 351–6, report in English on the massacres in the region of
Erzerum.
134. BNu/Fonds Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 61, ff. 2–4 and 16v°, Kıği, report by Vahan Postoyan; APC/PAJ,
PCI Bureau, Է 351–6, report in English on the massacres in the region of Erzerum: three men,
Mihran Vartanian, Sarkis Krikorian, and Abraham Simonian, succeeded in fleeing to the forest
of Darman, where they lived in a cavern for four months.
135. BNu/Fonds Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 61, Kıği, ff. 46–9, history of Hovhannes Sarksian, from
Temran; APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Է 351–6, report in English about the massacres in the region of
Erzerum.
136. BNu/Fonds Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 61, Kıği, ff. 46–9, history of Hovhannes Sarksian.
137. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Է 351–6, report in English on the massacres in the region of
Erzerum.
138. Ibidem.
139. Ibidem.
140. BNu/Fonds Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 61, Kıği, ff. 67v°–68, list of the villages, with the number of
survivors from each one.
141. Ibidem, f° 66v°.
143. BNu/Fonds Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 24, report drawn up by the Committee of deportees from the
Dayk district, Constantinople, August 1919, f° 11r°–v°.
144. Kaiser, “A Scene from the Inferno,” art. cit., pp. 145–6.
145. BNu/Fonds Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 24, Khodorchur, report drawn up by the Committee of depor-
tees from the Dayk district, Constantinople, August 1919, f° 12.
146. Ibidem, f° 12v°–13v°.

Notes 881
147. Ibidem, f° 15v°.

148. Ibidem.
149. Ibidem; see Raffaelle Gianighian, Khodorciur, Venedig 1992, pp. 51–69. The author, from the vil-
lage of Gisag/Kisak, was in this convoy.
150. Ibidem, f° 16. Among the survivors, there were also 1,540 people from Khodorchur who had
worked in the Caucasus before the war.
151. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Ի 221 and Թ 322, those responsible for the deportations and massacres in
the region of Erzincan.
152. Extract from the 5 December 1918 deposition of Vehib Pasha: Takvim-ı Vakayi, no. 3540, 5 May
1919, p. 7, col. 2 and the full deposition of handwritten pages: PAJ/APC, PCI Bureau, Հ 171–82.
153. BNu/Fonds Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 16, Erzincan, f° 83, report by Kevork Mardirosian, from
Meghutsig.
154. Ibidem, f° 83v°; BNu/ Fonds Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 16, Erzincan, ff. 19–20, report by Kurken
Keserian, Deportations and massacres in the region of Erzincan.
155. BNu/Fonds Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 16, Erzincan, ff. 85–6. The main witness stated that he later learned
that the authorities had purveyed this false information in order to reassure the local population. The
300 families who had agreed to convert should, in theory, have been exempt from deportation.
156. Ibidem, f° 88.
157. BNu/Fonds Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 16, Erzincan, f° 28, report by Kurken Keserian, those responsi-
ble for the deportations and massacres in the region of Erzincan.
158. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Կ 588 (in English) and Թ 327–8 (in French), The Exploits of an Deputy,
Halet bey.
159. BNu/Fonds Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 16, Erzincan, ff. 83–4, report by Kevork Mardirosian, from
Meghutsig, and 89v°–90.
160. Ibidem, f° 90v°.
161. Ibidem, ff. 31, 91–2.
162. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Կ 588.
163. BNu/Fonds Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 16, Erzincan, ff. 31, 92.
165. BNu/Fonds Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 16, Erzincan, ff. 32–4.
166. BNu/Fonds Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 16, Erzincan, ff. 93–4. The secretary of the health commission
of the central hospital of the Sixth Army Corps (Sıvas) related what he was told by Major Rifat
Bey, a physician who witnessed the crimes committed in Kemah: APC/ PAJ, PCI Bureau, Յ 732,
Faits et documents, no. 36, Les atrocités de Kemah.
167. BNu/ Fonds Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 16, Erzincan, ff. 34–5, report by Kurken Keserian, Deportations
and massacres in the region of Erzincan.
168. Ibidem, f° 37.
169. BNu/Fonds Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 16, Erzincan, ff. 38–9, report by Kurken Keserian, Deportations
170. BNu/Fonds Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 16, Erzincan, f° 95.
171. BNu/Fonds Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 16, Erzincan, ff. 38–9, report by Kurken Keserian, Deportations
172. Ibidem, ff. 39–40. There were 17 survivors.
173. BNu/Fonds Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 16, Erzincan, ff. 85–6, 91.
174. Ibidem, f° 68.
175. Ibidem, ff. 63, 69 and 94v°.
177. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Է 364–5, The Deporation in the Sancak of Erzincan; BNu/ Fonds A.
Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 25, Kemah/Gamakh, report by Harutiun Altiokganian.
179. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Է 364–5, The Deportation in the sancak of Erzincan.
181. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Է 364–5, The Deportation in the sancak of Erzincan.
183. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Թ 348–9, Sur le chemin du calvaire: Erzerum.

184. Ibidem.
185. BNu/Fonds Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 61, Kıği, ff. 46–9, history of Hovhannes Sarksian, from Temran
(in Armenian).
186. BNu/Fonds Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 15, Tercan, f° 8, report by Yeghia Torosian.
187. Ibidem, f° 9.
188. BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 59, Erzerum, f° 39, report by Rupen Toroyan, 5 February 1917.
189. Ibidem, f° 41.
190. Ibidem, f° 41v°.
191. Ibidem, f° 42r°–v°.
192. BNu/Fonds Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 15, Tercan, ff. 4–7, report by Krikor Keshishian who confesses
that he survived by plundering Turkish deserters and seizing their weapons until April 1916,
when the Russians arrived in the region.
193. La Renaissance, no. 144, 20 avril 1919.
194. BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 59, Erzerum, f° 20v°, report by Kh. Oskanian, Sarıkamiş, 3
November 1916; ff. 67–8, report by Boghos Vartanian, Erzerum, 5 August 1916.
195. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Հ 133 and 154, Direction of the National Security, Ministry of the
Interior, letter to the president of the court-martial of Constantinople, 23 February 1919, certified
to be a faithful copy: “Excellency: Enclosed please find, in accordance with your orders, a copy of
an encrypted telegram, written by the former commander of the Third Army, Kâmil Pasha, bear-
ing on the deportation of the Armenians. We found the telegram, which we think may prove
useful, among the documents transmitted by the prefecture of Dyarbekir.”APC/APJ, Հ 155, copy
of an encrypted telegram from Mahmud Kâmil, published in Takvim-ı Vakayi, no. 3540, Sublime
Porte, Direction of the National Security, Ministry of the Interior, to be a faithful copy of the
document sent him by the authorities in Sıvas on 23 February 1919 at the request of the Ministry
of the Interior, and forwarded to the court-martial.
196. Ibidem. The telegram also bears the words: “This document is certified to be a faithful copy, 23
February 1919,” as well as the stamp of the special bureau of the Chief of Security, charged with
assembling official documents.
197. Kaiser, “A Scene from the Inferno,” art. cit., pp. 146–9, cites notably the correspondence between
the vice-consul and the German ambassador in Istanbul.
198. Ibidem, p. 151, n. 84–5, cites the references of these two official documents.
199. BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 59, Erzerum, ff. 189–90, report by Hovhannes Khanzarlian,
Erzerum, 2 May 1917, “Why I was unable to remain a Muslim?”
200. Ibidem.
201. Supra, pp. 243–4.
202. Supra, pp. 203–4.
204. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Ի 218–19, those responsible for the deportations and massacres in the
region of Erzerum.
206. Ibidem, p. 152.
207. BOA, DH. şfr no. 53/303, telegram from minister of interior to Tahsin Bey, 9 June 1915: Armenians
in Ottoman Documents (1915–1920), no. 25, Ankara 1995, p. 40.
208. Kaiser, “A Scene from the Inferno,” art. cit., p. 153.
209. Autheman, La Banque impériale ottomane, op. cit., pp. 233–4.
210. Ibidem, p. 239.
211. Ibidem.
214. Ibidem, p. 238.
215. BNu/Fonds Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 59, Erzerum, report by Alphonse Arakelian, an Armenian
deported from Erzerum, Alep, 24 February 1919, f° 2.
217. Ibidem, f° 6.

Notes 883
4 Resistance and Massacres in the Vilayet of Van

1. Kévorkian & Paboudjian, Les Arméniens dans l’Empire ottoman, op. cit., pp. 507–13. The vilayet
also boasted 457 churches and 80 monasteries, some of which were very old.
2. The four Armenian towns and villages in the eastern kaza of Mahmudiye (pop. 826) were burned
down late in December 1914 and their inhabitants were massacred or displaced: supra, p. 220.
3. Supra, pp. 233–4.
5. Ibidem, pp. 371–2. Hamdi Bey, an educated native of Istanbul who had spent several years in
Europe, made a name for himself at the outbreak of the war by forming squadrons of çetes sent into
battle in Iranian Azerbaijan. He was assisted in his struggle against the Armenians of Shadakh
by the secretary general of the subprefecture, Şevket Bey, the judge Ahmed Tevfik and a mufti,
Hasan.
6. Ibidem, p. 372.
7. Ussher, An American Physician in Turkey, op. cit., p. 127. Ussher met with Cevdet on 18 April, after
news of the crime had reached people’s ears.
9. Ibidem, p. 381.
10. Ibidem, pp. 383–4.
11. Ibidem, pp. 382–3.
12. Ibidem, p. 389.
13. Ibidem, p. 382.
14. Ibidem, pp. 192–3.
15. Ibidem, p. 194.
16. Ibidem, p. 195.
17. Ibidem, p. 196.
18. Ibidem, p. 197.
19. Ibidem, pp. 210–11.
20. Ibidem, p. 212.
21. Ibidem, p. 213.
22. Ibidem, p. 214.
23. Ibidem, p. 215.
25. A-To, The Major Events in Vasburagan, 1914–1917, op. cit., pp. 169–73. An account of these events
was later provided by one of the few survivors from this group of men, Mgrdich Hovhannesian, a
native of the village of Panon (pop. 180). Hovhannesian would later manage to reach the Russian
lines near Dyadin, along with 23 other people from the village of Sosgun.
26. Ibidem, p. 175. 60 men from the village of Aragha were also detained in the prison in Agants.
27. Ibidem, pp. 176–7.
28. Ibidem, pp. 186–8.
30. A-To, The Major Events in Vasburagan, 1914–1917, op. cit., pp. 179 and 184. The administrative
seat of the kaza, Perkri, had 110 Kurdish and 25 Armenian households. The handful of survivors
managed to flee to Maku, on the Turkish-Persian border.
31. Ibidem, p. 181.
32. Ibidem, pp. 208–9.
33. Ibidem, pp. 209–10.
34. Ibidem, p. 216.
36. Cf. supra, p. 233; Rafaël de Nogales, Four Years Beneath the Crescent, op. cit., pp. 59–61.
39. Ibidem, pp. 197–9.
40. Ibidem, pp. 200–1.
41. Ibidem, p. 201.

42. Ibidem, pp. 202–3.

43. Ibidem, pp. 204–5.
44. Ibidem, pp. 205–6.
45. Ibidem, pp. 207–8.
46. Ibidem, pp. 216–17.
47. Ibidem, pp. 217–18.
48. Ibidem, p. 219, states that the Turkish offensive against Varak began on 8 May; Rafaël de Nogales,
Four Years Beneath the Crescent, op. cit., p. 92 dates the departure of the “battalion of Erzerum” for
Mt. Varak to 3 May; Ussher, An American Physician in Turkey, op. cit., pp. 143–4.
49. M. G., La défense héroïque de Van (Arménie), Genève 1916, p. 10; A-To, The Major Events in
Vasburagan, 1914–1917, op. cit., pp. 300–1, also believes that the vali thus hoped to starve Aykestan
into submission.
51. Ibidem, pp. 274–5.
53. Ibidem.
55. Rafaël de Nogales, Four Years Beneath the Crescent, op. cit., p. 63.
56. Ibidem, pp. 64–5.
57. Ibidem, pp. 66–7.
58. Ibidem, pp. 72–4. Several weeks later, Çerkez Ahmed would murder the parliamentary deputies
Zohrab, Vartkes, and Daghavarian (see infra, p. 534).
59. Supra, p. 21.
60. Dadrian, “Documentation of the Armenian Genocide in Turkish Sources,” in Genocide: A Critical
Bibliographic Review, art. cit., pp. 118–20, provides an annotated bibliography of Çerkez Ahmed’s
criminal activities, first in Van and then in the province of Dyarbekir. APC/APJ Յ 563, PCI
Bureau, Report about Cevdet Bey, it was the vali who asked that the major be released from his
usual obligations and sent on mission to Van.
61. Rafaël de Nogales, Four Years Beneath the Crescent, op. cit., p. 74. The only two Armenians he met
were a disarmed gendarme who served as the vali’s butler and the merchant Terzibashian, who
occasionally served as an interpreter (ibidem, p. 88).
62. Ibidem, pp. 75–6.
63. A-To, The Major Events in Vasburagan, 1914–1917, op. cit., pp. 250–3. Ussher, An American Physician
in Turkey, op. cit., p. 137, gives a convergent account of these events.
65. Ibidem, pp. 76, 81, desertions increased from 25 April on.
66. Ibidem, p. 78. On 17 April, as we have seen, Cevdet had asked the missionaries if he could station
50 gendarmes and a cannon in their building, which dominated Aykestan: see supra, p. 233.
67. Ibidem, p. 82.
68. Archives of the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, letter from the Italian consul in Van, G.
Sbordoni to Cevdet Bey, 11/24 April 1915.
69. Ibidem.
71. Rafaël de Nogales, Four Years Beneath the Crescent, op. cit., pp. 85–6.
72. Ibidem, p. 86.
73. Ibidem, p. 89.
75. Rafaël de Nogales, Four Years Beneath the Crescent, op. cit., p. 90; A-To, The Major Events in
Vasburagan, 1914–1917, op. cit., pp. 320–1.
76. Cf. supra, p. 325.
77. These were Krupp cannons, which were modern and of larger calibre than those already in place.
78. Rafaël de Nogales, Four Years Beneath the Crescent, op. cit., p. 93, notes that news of Halil’s defeat
in Dilman reached Van in early May. On the military campaign, see supra, p. 227.
79. A-To, The Major Events in Vasburagan, 1914–1917, op. cit., pp. 325–6, provides the full text of Vali
Cevdet’s letter to the bishop and prelate Eznik vartabed , 20 April/3 May 1915.

Notes 885
80. Eznik’s exact words were: “We are not insurgents. We have always obeyed the Ottoman state; we
have always respected its laws; our desire is to continue to do so, as in the past”: A-To, The Major
Events in Vasburagan, 1914–1917, op. cit., p. 324, states that no one put faith in Cevdet’s offer, but
that the old city hoped it could thus learn what was happening in Aykestan. It also hoped that
Cevdet’s emissaries would be Colonel Ahmed and Kalust Jidechian, an Armenian notable whom
the authorities had not molested.
82. A-To, The Major Events in Vasburagan, 1914–1917, op. cit., p. 327, notes that one of them, a native
of Hinis, managed to escape and flee to the Armenian lines.
83. Ibidem.
84. Archives of the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, letter from the Italian consul in Van, G.
Sbordoni, to Cevdet Bey, 20 April/3 May 1915.
86. Ibidem, p. 93.
88. Ibidem, letter from Cevdet to Eznik, 5 May 1915. The vali notes in his letter that de Sbordoni
has already transmitted his conditions to Aykestan. The negotiations were broken off on 6
May.
91. Rafaël de Nogales, Four Years Beneath the Crescent, op. cit., p. 96. Thanks to the indiscretion of
an officer, de Nogales learned that Cevdet had given orders to have him murdered en route.
92. Ibidem, p. 107; Ussher, An American Physician in Turkey, op. cit., p. 153, also notes that the Russian
and Armenian prisoners were executed the day preceding Cevdet’s departure.
94. Ibidem, p. 436.
95. Kévorkian & Paboudjian, Les Arméniens dans l’Empire ottoman..., op. cit., pp. 550–5.
97. See supra, pp. 232 and 319.
99. Ibidem, p. 390.
100. Ibidem, p. 391.
101. Ibidem, p. 378. Two more bridges, both of wood, were destroyed, so that it was impossible to cross
the river in the south.
102. Ibidem, p. 379.
103. Ibidem, p. 392.
104. Ibidem, p. 393.
105. Ibidem, p. 396. Hamdi Bey, in a 19 April letter to the vali of Van, pointed out that the tribes were
deserting their positions to go plunder the villages abandoned by the Armenians; he therefore
requested that regular forces and a mountain cannon be put at his disposal.
106. Ibidem, pp. 398–9, notes that the Kurds fighting in Tagh once again abandoned their positions to
go plunder these two villages.
107. Ibidem, p. 400.
108. Ibidem, pp. 402–7.
109. Ibidem, pp. 411–2.
110. Ibidem, p. 416.
111. Ibidem, p. 429.
112. Ibidem, pp. 432–3. This battalion made its entry into Tagh on 25 May.
113. Ibidem, p. 434. In Pshantashd, 7,000 refugees survived.
115. Ussher, An American Physician in Turkey, op. cit., p. 143; A-To, The Major Events in Vasburagan,
1914–1917, op. cit., p. 427.
116. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Յ 549–51, Les massacres d’Arméniens dans le vilayet de Van; Ussher, An
American Physician in Turkey, op. cit., p. 143, writes: “We have absolute proof that fifty-five thou-
sand people were killed” in Van vilayet.

117. Rafaël de Nogales, Four Years Beneath the Crescent, op. cit., p. 98. On his way down the road
leading to Halil’s headquarters, de Nogales crossed Hayots Tsor, where he saw the remains of the
Armenian villages that had been burned down. In Başkale, he witnessed the execution of 300 to
400 women and children, and also of a few craftsmen who had been left alive until then to help
meet the army’s needs (ibidem, p. 100).
118. Ibidem, p. 104.
119. Sebuh, Pages from my memoirs, I, op. cit., pp. 218–19, Sebuh, who participated in these combats,
states that the Russian forces let pass an occasion to destroy the Ottoman Expeditionary Corps
when they failed to cut off its retreat. He attributes this mistake to Antranig.
121. Ibidem, p. 104.
122. Ibidem, p. 109.
124. Sebuh, Pages from my memoirs, I, op. cit., pp. 230–3.
125. Ibidem, p. 236.
127. Ibidem, pp. 107–8.
128. Sébouh, Fragments de mes souvenirs, I, op. cit., p. 237.
130. Ibidem, p. 121. Nogales does not distinguish these Nestoriens from Armenians.
132. Ibidem, pp. 468–9.
133. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Յ 908–13, report from the American military attaché of the embassy of
Petrograd, Lieutenant E. F. Riggs, to the ambassador, Odessa, 26 April 1917, p. 4.
134. Ussher, An American Physician in Turkey, op. cit., pp. 167–8 puts the number of Armenians killed
during the Russian retreat at 7,000; A-To, The Major Events in Vasburagan, 1914–1917, op. cit.,
p. 480.
135. Ibidem, pp. 480–1. Ussher points out that a terrible typhus epidemic wrought havoc among the
Turkish refugees who had been given refuge in the American mission in Van in June. His wife,
who had been caring for them, died of typhus herself on 14 July (Ussher, An American Physician
in Turkey, op. cit., pp. 160–1).
136. Ibidem.
137. Ibidem, pp. 485–6.
5 Deportations and Massacres in the Vilayet of Bitlis

2. See supra, p. 238, n. 105.
5. Ibidem, p. 123.
6. Ibidem, p. 124.
7. Ibidem, p. 124. The author affirms it was the officers with whom he had been fighting side-by-side
in Van who warned him of Cevdet’s intentions.
8. Ibidem, p. 126. Nogales therefore decided to head in another direction and set out for Dyarbekir.
As he was passing through the kaza of Beşiri, he encountered a caravan of several hundred women
and children in desperate condition; a government official “told [him] confidentially that a number
of similar caravans had marched past toward Sinan during the week” (ibidem, pp. 130–1).
9. Ibidem, p. 125.
10. Ibidem, p. 132.
11. This name was used by a survivor to describe the Halil-Cevdet-Naci troika: “The story of the first
victims in Bitlis, by an eyewitness,” La Renaissance, no. 39, Saturday 18 January 1919.
12. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Յ 506–7, those responsible for the deportations and massacres in the
region of Bitlis.

Notes 887
13. BNu/ Fonds Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 43, Bitlis, f° 3v°; cf infra, pp. 343–4.
14. Rafaël de Nogales, Four Years Beneath the Crescent, op. cit., p. 134, 136.
15. Kévorkian & Paboudjian, Les Arméniens dans l’Empire ottoman..., op. cit., p. 463.
16. Ibidem, p. 502; BNu/Fonds Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 43, Bitlis, f° 8 v°.
region of Siirt.
18. BNu/Fonds Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 43, Bitlis, f° 7 v°.
19. Ibidem. Father Jacques Rhétoré (Les chrétiens aux bêtes ! Souvenirs de la guerre sainte proclamée par
les Turcs contre les chrétiens en 1915, pp. 295–9, ms. conserved in Bibliothèque du Saulchoir, Paris),
affirms that the sancak’s 15,000 Catholic Syriacs and 20,000 Orthodox Syriacs were meted out the
same fate as the Armenians. Y. Ternon, Mardin 1915, RHAC, V (2002), pp. 207–13 and annexe,
pp. 368–70, cites Syriac sources, both Catholic and Orthodox, which say that the Syriacs of Siirt
were deported in three caravans from 11 July on, in part along with convoys of Armenians that
had come from the north. Some of the people in these three caravans were killed en route. It
would seem, then, that there was no difference in the way the Armenians and the Syriac-speaking
population were treated in this sancak; there was, at most, a month’s difference between the dates
of departure of the convoys of deportees.
20. Kévorkian & Paboudjian, Les Arméniens dans l’Empire ottoman, op. cit., pp. 502–6. Villages of the
kaza of Siirt: Til, Dershimsh, Khushenan, Tihok/Dehok, Derghalib, Kochik, Bekend, Husenik.
Village of Shirvan: Kefra, Gunde-Deghan, Giurinan, Geli, Birke, Derik, Khandak, Smkhor,
Kikan, Baytarun, Gerian, Avin/Teravel, Nibin, Siserk, Jum, Pul, Derzin, Deraba, Mnar et Madar.
21. BNu/Fonds Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 43, Bitlis, f° 8.
23. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Յ 321–2. Hilmi was vali of Eskişehir when, in October 1919, Halil Pasha
and Küçük Talât, having fled Istanbul, joined the Kemalists who had just captured the city. But
Hilmi had told the court-martial of the crimes that Halil had committed. Halil ordered his men
to look for him and had him murdered three days later on the road to the konak.
24. Grace H. Knapp, The Tragedy of Bitlis, London 2002 (2nd ed.) Knapp, who was sent by boat to
Tatvan, the closest port to Bitlis, witnessed the killing of the monks of the island of Aghtamar
and the orphans who had been given shelter there (ibidem, p. 29).
25. Kévorkian & Paboudjian, Les Arméniens dans l’Empire ottoman, op. cit., pp. 469, 472–4.
26. Grace H. Knapp, The Tragedy of Bitlis, op. cit., p. 31.
27. Ibidem, p. 33.
28. Ibidem, pp. 34–5. The situation was, moreover, complicated by the typhus epidemic affecting the
city and, above all, the refugee–deportees, whose corpses were burned.
29. BNu/Fonds Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 43, Bitlis, f° 6; on the number of Armenians, see Kévorkian &
Paboudjian, Les Arméniens dans l’Empire ottoman, op. cit., p. 477.
31. Ibidem, pp. 36–7. in the course of this exchange, Abdülhalik is said to have warned Knapp: “Songez
à vous même, car le même sort vous attend” (La Renaissance, no. 39, 18 January 1919, “Récit d’un
témoin oculaire sur les premières victimes de Bitlis”).
32. Ibidem, pp. 36–7.
33. Rafaël de Nogales, Four Years Beneath the Crescent, op. cit., p. 133; APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Յ 524–7;
La Renaissance, no. 39, 18 January 1919, art. cit.; BNu/Fonds Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 43, Bitlis, f° 11,
report by Garabed Saroyan, from Bitlis.
34. Krieger, op. cit., footnote, p. 20.
35. BNu/Fonds Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 43, Bitlis, f° 11, report by Garabed Saroyan, from Bitlis.
According to the witness, the Russians had retreated north by this time.
36. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Յ 524–7; La Renaissance, no. 39, 18 January 1919, art. cit., states that their
bodies were left hanging for two weeks but does not give the name of the Dashnak leader; Rafaël
de Nogales, Four Years Beneath the Crescent, op. cit., p. 133, confirms these facts, but spells the
Dashnak leader’s name wrong (Kakighian); Arnold Toynbee, Le Traitement des Arméniens dans
l’Empire ottoman (1915–1916), Livre Bleu du gouvernement britannique, Laval [1917], p. 206, inter-
view with Ruben Ter Minasian by A. S. Safrastian, 6 November 1915, in Tiflis, we find the correct
spelling, Hokhigian.

37. Rafaël de Nogales, Four Years Beneath the Crescent, op. cit., p. 133: Cevdet shared the money with
Halil.
38. La Renaissance, no. 39, 18 January 1919, art. cit., states that the girls “whom Cevdet married” were
already with him.
40. BNu/Fonds Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 43, Bitlis, f° 10, report by Sophia Yeghiazarian, the wife of the
Russian [ex-]kavas, Alep, 13 December 1918.
41. BNu/Fonds Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 43, Bitlis, f° 5; APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Յ 524–7; La Renaissance,
no. 39, 18 January 1919, art. cit.; Grace H. Knapp, The Tragedy of Bitlis, op. cit., pp. 42–7.
43. BNu/Fonds Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 43, Bitlis, f° 6–7, lists the names of 78 abducted young women
and girls, and, in certain cases, the names of their proprietors as well.
44. La Renaissance, no. 39, 18 January 1919, art. cit.
45. Grace H. Knapp, The Tragedy of Bitlis, op. cit., pp. 42–4.
46. Ibidem, p. 44.
47. Ibidem, pp. 44–5.
48. Ibidem, pp. 45–7.
49. Ibidem, p. 89.
50. Ibidem, pp. 90–1. In January 1916, when the Russians were about to take Bitlis, Cevdet did not
omit to order Mustafa Bey to “be put to death “ this women (ibidem, pp. 95–6).
51. Ibidem, p. 87. George Knapp was wounded in the course of these events and sent to Dyarbekir by
the authorities for treatment. The official thesis is that he died of acute indigestion the day he
arrived: “a German, eyewitness to the events.” This German was in fact Alma “Johanson” (the
spelling used in the document held in the American National Archives): RG59/867. 4016/226),
Constantinople, 9 November 1915 (see V. Bryce [= A. Toynbee], The Treatment of Armenians in
the Ottoman Empire, 1915–1916, Uncensored Edition, ed. by A. Sarafian, Princeton 2000, p. 124,
and footnote; Toynbee, Le Traitement des Arméniens dans l’Empire ottoman, op. cit., p. 212. It seems
more likely that this embarrassing witness to the massacres in Mush was eliminated on orders
from Dr. Reşid, the vali of Dyarbekir, with the approval of Halil and Cevdet.
52. Ibidem, pp. 49–50.
53. Ibidem, p. 86.
55. BNu/Fonds Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 43, Bitlis, ff. 6, 13, report by Asbadour Prudian, from Ghultig,
40 years old.
56. Ibidem, f° 14.
58. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Յ 524–7; La Renaissance, no. 39, 18 January 1919, art. cit.
59. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Ի 224, Յ 506–7, those responsible for the deportations and massacres in
the region of Bitlis.
60. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Հ 107, Faits et documents, Les trois cents vierges.
61. Kévorkian & Paboudjian, Les Arméniens dans l’Empire ottoman, op. cit., pp. 475–7. These villages
were Jazhvan (pop. 300), Godents-Verin (pop. 350), Godznts-Nerkin (pop. 80), Pazents/Baghents
(pop. 120) Luar (pop. 45), Sevkar (pop. 120), Tagh (pop. 20), Geghis/Kervis (pop. 11), Dantsis/
Tanzik (pop. 35), Dosu/ Doru (pop. 120), Talars/Keparis (pop. 100), Harkin/Araken (pop. 32),
Hoghant/Okand (pop. 90), Hiuriuk-Verin/Ure (pop. 325), Hiuriuk-Nerkin/Ure (pop. 85), Usp/Esb
(pop. 80), Badranants/Bedran (pop. 100), Khoit (pop. 70), Suzants (pop. 75), Arnchig (pop. 90),
Tashd/Kish (pop. 90), Mad (pop. 80), Madatsmin/Tsmen (pop. 73), Dvaghus (pop. 75), Gran/
Keran (pop. 9), Nerpan (pop. 25).
62. BNu/Fonds Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 43, Bitlis, f° 15r°–v°, report by Toros Hovhannisian, writes
Suren Meloyan.
64. Ibidem, f° 16.
66. Ibidem, ff. 16v°–17; report by Mikayel Ghugasian, ff. 18–21.

Notes 889

69. Toynbee, Le Traitement des Arméniens dans l’Empire ottoman (1915–1916), op. cit., p. 207, interview
with Ruben Ter Minasian.
70. Ibidem.
72. Toynbee, Le Traitement des Arméniens dans l’Empire ottoman (1915–1916), op. cit., p. 207, interview
with Ruben Ter Minasian.
73. Ibidem, mentions only the Kâzim’s arrival, with “10,000 men”; Rafaël de Nogales, Four Years
Beneath the Crescent, op. cit., p. 134, states that Cevdet and Kâzim arrived together in Mush in
order to “chastise the rebels.” Cevdet later told him what he had done there.
74. BNu/Fonds Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 51, Les massacres du Daron, f° 5, report by Mushegh Turnian,
from Mush; Grace H. Knapp, The Tragedy of Bitlis, op. cit., p. 91.
76. Meclisi Mebusan Zabıt Ceridesi [Record of the Sessions of the Ottoman Parliament], vol. 1, 14th ses-
sion, 18 November 1334 [1918], pp. 143–61, 109, cited in V. Dadrian, op. cit., pp. 21–42, n. 17.
77. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Յ 561–2, The organizer of the massacres in Mush, the deputy Hoca Ilyas.
region of Muş; BNu/ Fonds Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 51, The massacres in Daron, f° 7.
79. Ibidem.
80. BNu/Fonds Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 51, The massacres in Daron, f° 4, report by Mushegh Turnian,
from Mouch.
81. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Յ 561–2, The organizer of the massacres in Mush, the deputy Hoca Ilyas.
82. Papazian, Memoirs, op. cit., II, p. 365; BNu/Fonds Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 51, The massacres in Daron, ff.
20–1, report by Serop Harutiunian, from the village of Mkrakom, was the only survivor of a family of
36. The çetes gouged out Father Kerovp’s eyes, cut off his nose and ear and pulled off his fingernails.
83. Manug Der Ananian, “Էջեր Հայաջինջ Սարսափներէն, 1914–1920 [A Partial Description of the
Horrors That Wiped out the Armenians, 1914–1920],” Haratch , 10 April 1934, no. 3.
84. Papazian, Memoirs, op. cit., II, p. 365; BNu/ Fonds Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 51, The massacres in Daron,
ff. 20–1, report by Serop Harutiunian, from Mkrakom; ff. 17–19, report by Smpat Khandilian, from
Ziarat (of more than 1,500 inhabitants, 12 men escaped with their lives; ff. 22–8, report by Father
Krikor Der Krikorian, 25 January 1917, in Tseti Hank.
85. La Renaissance, 31 January 1919, no. 52, reportage by Maurice Prax in Le Petit Parisien.
86. Papazian, Memoirs, op. cit., II, pp. 365–70; BNu/ Fonds Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 51, The massacres in
Daron, f° 17v°, report by Smpat Khandilian, from Ziarat, relates the attack on the Monastery of
St. Garabed, the murder of all the monks, the seminarians, the teachers, and his superior, Vartan
vartabed, who was burned alive with his fellow vartabed, Yeghishe.
87. Ibidem, p. 381.
88. Krieger, op. cit., footnote, p. 20.
89. BNu/Fonds Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 43, Bitlis, f° 6; BNu/Fonds Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 51, The mas-
sacres in Daron, f° 5, report by Mushegh Turnian, from Mush The witness’s father was executed
during this operation.
90. BNu/Fonds Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 43, Bitlis, f° 6v°; BNu/Fonds Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 51, The
massacres in Daron, f° 6, report by Mushegh Turnian, relates the same facts but speaks of men
between the ages of 15 and 70.
91. Ibidem, f° 6.
92. Aramaïs, Les massacres et la lutte de Mousch-Sassoun, 1915, trad. by Arev in Baku, Geneva 1916,
pp. 16–17.
93. BNu/ Fonds Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 51, The massacres in Daron, f° 7. The vicar was given special
treatment: he was burned alive in the bishopric, which was burned down.
94. Ibidem, f° 6v°; BNu/ Fonds Andonian,P.J.1/3, file 43, Bitlis, f° 6.
95. Aramaïs, Les massacres et la lutte de Mousch-Sassoun, op. cit., pp. 20–2.
96. Ibidem, pp. 25–6.
97. BNu/Fonds Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 51, The massacres in Daron, f° 6, report by Mushegh Turnian.
98. BNu/ Fonds Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 43, Bitlis, f° 6; Papazian, Memoirs, op. cit., II, p. 377; Aramais,
Les massacres et la lutte de Mousch-Sassoun, op. cit., pp. 27–9.

99. Ibidem, pp. 26–9; Alma Johannsen, Ett folk i Landsflykt [A People in Exile], Stockholm 1930,
pp. 28–9, trans. Bedros Zartarian, in Achkhar, from 29 March to 28 June 1980.
100. Toynbee, Le Traitement des Arméniens dans l’Empire ottoman, op. cit., pp. 216–18.
101. Johannsen, Ett folk i Landsflykt, op. cit., pp. 28–9.
102. Ibidem, p. 32.
103. Ibidem, p. 34; Alma Johannsen left behind another more general account, which was published
anonymously in Toynbee, Le Traitement des Arméniens dans l’Empire ottoman, op. cit., pp. 211–13,
“Report by a German, eyewitness to the events”: Alma “Johanson” [orthographe of the docu-
ment ]: American National Archives: RG59/867. 4016/226), Constantinople, 9 November 1915
(see V. Bryce [= A. Toynbee], op. cit. [n. 51 supra], p. 124, footnote).
104. Ibidem, p. 212.
105. Ibidem, p. 213.
106. BNu/Fonds Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 51, The massacres in Daron, ff. 6–7, report by Mushegh
Turnian, from Mush; APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Յ 561–2, The organizer of the massacres in Mush, the
deputy Hoca Ilyas.
107. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Յ 528, La Renaissance, “Bitlis-Mush, The camels laden with gold.”
109. BNu/Fonds Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 51, Les massacres du Daron, f° 43v°, reports of Garabed Saroyan
and Mkhitar Ohanian, elementary school teachers in Gop, 20 August 1916, in Karavansaray;
BNu/Fonds Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 51, The massacres in Daron, f° 9.
110. Nogales, Four Years Beneath the Crescent, op. cit., p. 135.
112. BNu/Fonds Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 32, Manazgerd, ff. 1v°–2v°, report by Mher Ayvazian, from
Noradin.
113. Ibidem, f° 2 r°–v°.
116. BNu/Fonds Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 32, Manazgerd, f° 1, report by Hagop Khochiants, from
Manazgerd.
118. BNu/Fonds Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 51, The massacres in Daron, f° 42v°, reports of Garabed
Saroyan and Mkhitar Ohanian, doc. Cit.
120. BNu/Fonds Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 51, The massacres in Daron, f° 43.
121. Ibidem, f° 42.
122. Ibidem, f° 44.
123. Ibidem.
124. Ibidem, f° 44v°.
125. Ibidem, f° 42.
126. Ibidem, f° 43v°. Among the victims were Hovhannes Boyajian and Saghatel, a schoolteacher.
127. Ibidem, f° 44v°.
128. See supra, pp. 352–3; Aguni, History of the Massacre of one Million Armenians, op. cit., p. 164.
Four thousand inhabitants of the district of Psank succeeded at this time in withdrawing to the
interior of the Sasun district, but half of them were then massacred by Kurdish çetes (Aramaïs,
Les massacres et la lutte de Mousch-Sassoun, op. cit., p. 35).
129. Johannsen, Ett folk i Landsflykt, op. cit., p. 35.
130. Raymond Kévorkian, “The Armenian Population of Sassoun and the Demographic Consequences
of the 1894 Massacres,” Armenian Review vol. 47/1–2, Spring-Summer 2001, pp. 41–53. Let us
note that of the 209 villages mentioned in the census of 1894, 53 no longer existed in 1914 (ibi-
dem, pp. 42–3).
131. Aguni, History of the Massacre of one Million Armenians, op. cit., p. 164; Aramaïs, Les massacres
et la lutte de Mousch-Sassoun, op. cit., p. 33.
132. Rafaël de Nogales, Four Years Beneath the Crescent, op. cit., p. 134; Toynbee, Le Traitement des
Arméniens, op. cit., p. 207, interview with Ruben Ter Minasian by A. S. Safrastian, 6 November
1915, in Tiflis. These two kazas boasted 13,824 and 5,038 Armenians, respectively.

Notes 891
133. Ibidem, p. 209.

134. See supra, p. 337.
135. See supra, p. 346.
136. Aramaïs, Les massacres et la lutte de Mousch-Sassoun, op. cit., p. 39.
137. Toynbee, Le Traitement des Arméniens, op. cit., p. 210, interview with Ruben Ter Minasian.
139. Aramaïs, Les massacres et la lutte de Mousch-Sassoun, op. cit., pp. 57–63; BNu/ Fonds Andonian,
P.J.1/3, file 47, Sasun, ff. 1–9, reports of Father Mgrditch Muradian, Dikran Eretsian, Manuel
Mardirosian, and Movses Stepanian, Aleppo, 24 February 1919; Toynbee, Le Traitement des
Arméniens, op. cit., p. 210.
141. Ibidem, pp. 397–9.
143. BNu/Fonds Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 43, Bitlis, f° 8; Nazareth Piranian, Խարբերդի Եղեռնը
[Kharpert’s Holocaust], Boston 1937, pp. 168–9. The author was a prisoner in the “Red Konak” of
Mezreh/Mamuret ul-Aziz when two men from Jabaghchur arrived in chains and under guard on
21 or 22 June. They told the author how the army had rounded up the local population, which
was deported and massacred for the most part on Palu Bridge (on the massacres carried out on
this bridge or in the area around it, see infra, p. 371).
144. BNu/ Fonds Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 43, Bitlis, f° 8.
146. Andonian, Notes chronologiques, 1914–1916, ms. cité, f° 56.
6 Deportations and Massacres in the Vilayet of Dyarbekir

1. Kévorkian & Paboudjian, Les Arméniens dans l’Empire ottoman, op. cit., pp. 392–416, coted 148
churches, 10 monasteries, and 122 schools (9,660 students), not counting Islamicized Armenians and
other Armenians not included in a parish. Attached to the indictment of the Young Turk leaders, in
an appendix, is a 15 September 1915 telegram from Dr. Reşid informs the minister of the interior that
the 120,000 Armenians of the vilayet have been deported: Takvim-ı Vakayi, no. 3540, daté du 5 mai
1919, p. 7, col. 1, this figure is higher than the Armenian census figures, a fact that shows, at the very
least, how unreliable the official statistics published by certain authors such as Justin McCarty are
(Muslim and Minorities. The Population of Ottoman Anatolia and the End of Empire, op. cit., pp. 69–70).
McCarty assigns these figures an extremely implausible margin of error (from 73,000 to 89,000).
2. AMAE, Correspondance politique, Turquie, n. s. vol. 87, pp. 31, 69.
3. Thomas Mgrdichian, Տիգրանակերտի Նահանգին Ջարդերը [The Massacres in the Province
of Dyarbekir], Cairo 1919, pp. 20–1. At the time, the author was British vice-consul in
Dyarbekir.
5. BNu/Fonds Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 54, Dyarbekir, f° 7, report by N. Shaporlamajian and Z.
Basmajian.
6. Ibidem, pp. 18–19.
7. Ibidem, p. 19.
8. Zaven Der Yeghiayan, Memoirs, op. cit., pp. 54–5, letter from vicaire of Dyarbekir, Mgrdich
Chlghadian, 27 September 1914.
9. Ibidem, p. 57.
10. Thomas Mgrdichian, The Massacres in the Province of Dyarbekir, op. cit., pp. 21–2; Faits et docu-
ments. épisodes des massacres arméniens de Dyarbékir, Constantinople 1919, pp. 6–7; Aguni,
History of the Massacre of one Million Armenians, op. cit., pp. 60–1.
11. See supra, p. 196. Arif, Feyzi’s father, was himself one of the main organizers of the massacres of
1895 in Dyarbekir; he was elected as a Young Turk deputy to parliament in 1908, leaving his seat
to his son in the spring 1914 elections (Faits et documents. épisodes des massacres arméniens de
Dyarbékir, op. cit., p. 8).

12. Ibidem, p. 6.
13. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Յ 786–7, Massacres in Dyarbekir: Feyzi Bey Pirinji Zade, 18 February 1920
testimony by the former civilian inspector of the vilayets of Bitlis and Mosul.
14. Thomas Mgrdichian, The Massacres in the Province of Dyarbekir, op. cit., pp. 22–3.
15. Ibidem, p. 24.
16. Ibidem, p. 26.
17. Ibidem, pp. 26–7.
19. Thomas Mgrdichian, The Massacres in the Province of Dyarbekir, op. cit., p. 27.
20. Kieser, “Dr Mehmed Reshid (1873–1919),” art. cit., p. 261; See supra, p. 238.
21. Ibidem, p. 257, citing a wide variety of sources. On the persecutions the aim of which was to
expel the Greeks from the region, see Taner Akçam, İnsan Hakları ve Ermeni Sorunu. İttihat ve
Terakki’den Kurtuluş savaşı’na, op. cit., pp. 178–9.
22. Kieser, “Dr Mehmed Reshid (1873–1919),” art. cit., pp. 260–1.
23. Thomas Mgrdichian, The Massacres in the Province of Dyarbekir, op. cit., p. 36, states that they were
wearing policemen’s uniforms.
24. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Հ 113, 119, report by the commission of inquiry in Mamuret ul-Aziz,
Ottoman original and transcription in Latin scripts, signed Mazhar, 20 December 1915, propos-
ing that Reşid Bey, the vali of Dyarbekir, be brought before the court-martial.
25. First session of the trial of Unionists, 27 April 1919: Takvim-ı Vakayi, no. 3540, 5 May 1919, p. 6,
col. 1, telegram from the mutesarif of Zor, Ali Suat, to the minister of interior.
26. Faits et documents. épisodes des massacres arméniens de Dyarbékir, op. cit., p. 13.
27. Mehmed Reşid, Hayatı ve Hâtıraları, ed. Necet Bilgi, Izmir 1997, p. 89, in Mülâhazât: Ermeni
Meselesi ve Dyarbekir Hatıraları, cited in Kieser, “Dr Mehmed Reshid (1873–1919),” art. cit., p. 264;
Faits et documents. épisodes des massacres arméniens de Dyarbékir, op. cit., p. 13.
28. Aguni, History of the Massacre of one Million Armenians, op. cit., pp. 61–2; Reşid, Mülâhazât ..., op.
cit., pp. 103, 107, gives only Cemilpaşazâde Mustafa’s name; Thomas Mgrdichian, The Massacres
in the Province of Dyarbekir, op. cit., pp. 37–8.
30. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Յ 537–41, 544, List of those responsible in the vilayet of Dyarbekir, file 29;
Aguni, History of the Massacre of one Million Armenians, op. cit., p. 62.
31. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Յ 542–3, 546, Les terreurs de Dyarbekir, file 8.
33. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Յ 537–41, 544, List of those responsible in the vilayet of Dyarbekir, file
29; Faits et documents. épisodes des massacres arméniens de Dyarbékir, op. cit., pp. 14–15; Thomas
Mgrdichian, The Massacres in the Province of Dyarbekir, op. cit., pp. 40–2.
34. Ibidem, pp. 46–7; Aguni, History of the Massacre of one Million Armenians, op. cit., p. 62.
35. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Յ 786–7, Massacres in Dyarbekir, Feyzi Bey Pirinji Zade, 18 February 1920
36. Thomas Mgrdichian, The Massacres in the Province of Dyarbekir, op. cit., p. 48; Aguni, History of the
Massacre of one Million Armenians, op. cit., p. 62. Dr. Floyd Smith, who was in the employ of the
American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Mission (ABCFM), witnessed these early opera-
tions; he affirms that the “false accusation of desertion” was used to justify the arrest of the nota-
bles: archives of ABCFM, letter to James Barton, 18 September 1915, cited in Kieser, “Dr Mehmed
Reshid (1873–1919),” art. cit., pp. 264–5.
37. Thomas Mgrdichian, The Massacres in the Province of Dyarbekir, op. cit., pp. 49–53; Aguni, History
of the Massacre of one Million Armenians, op. cit., p. 64.
39. Archives of ABCFM, letter to James Barton, 18 September 1915, cited in Kieser, “Dr Mehmed
Reshid (1873–1919),” art. cit., p. 265, n. 61; “Rapport de Rifaat effendi, ‘defterdar hakani
Mémouri’ ... sur les massacres ... à Diarbékir et Mardine”: SHAT, Service Historique de la Marine,
Service de Renseignements de la Marine, Turquie, 1BB7 231, doc. no. 65, Constantinople, 2

Notes 893
January 1919, notes “every night, they were stripped, left naked, sprinkled with cold water and
covered with blows.”
of the Massacre of one Million Armenians, op. cit., p. 63; Faits et documents. épisodes des massacres
arméniens de Dyarbékir, op. cit., pp. 21–3. The main Armenian leaders tortured in the central
prison were: Mihran Basmajian, Giragos Ohannesian, Dikran Chakejian, the deputy of Dyarbekir
Stepan Chrajian, Hagop Oghasapian, Dikran Ilvanian, and municipal councilor Stepan Matosian:
the heads of others were crushed in vices, some were crucified, still others had their arms and legs
amputed.
41. Archives of ABCFM, letter to James Barton, 18 September 1915, cited in Kieser, “Dr Mehmed
Reshid (1873–1919),” art. cit., p. 265, n. 62.
42. Ibidem.
43. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Հ 253, encrypted telegram, 17 May 1915, no. 38, from the muteşar of the
Ministry of the Interior, to the president of the court-martial, signed by the vali of Dyarbekir Reşid
and addressed to the vali of Adana İsmail Hakkı.
45. Thomas Mgrdichian, The Massacres in the Province of Dyarbekir, op. cit., p. 59; Aguni, History of
the Massacre of one Million Armenians, op. cit., p. 66; APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Յ 542–3, 546, “Les
terreurs de Dyarbekir (dépositions des témoins turcs et arméniens),” file 8.
46. Ibidem. Dr. Smith was expelled a few days later, on the vali’s orders: Faits et documents. épisodes
des massacres arméniens de Dyarbékir, op. cit., p. 27. The author of this booklet affirms that the
American physician also signed the attestation in order to escape the vali’s clutches.
47. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Յ 542–3, 546, “Les terreurs de Dyarbekir (dépositions des témoins turcs et
arméniens),” file 8; Thomas Mgrdichian, The Massacres in the Province of Dyarbekir, op. cit., p. 58,
states that Amero was received with honors by the vali, who presented him with gifts and asked
him to give these men “a reception” in his region; APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Յ 786–7, Massacres in
Dyarbekir: Feyzi Bey Pirinji Zade, 18 February 1920 testimony by the former civilian inspector of
the vilayets of Bitlis and Mosul, confirms Ferihanoğlu’s role in these massacres; Aguni, History of
the Massacre of one Million Armenians, op. cit., p. 66.
48. Telegram from W. Holstein, to Istanbul embassy, 10 June 1915: J. Lepsius (ed.), Archives du génocide
des Arméniens, Paris 1986, doc. 78, p. 93. Holstein says that 614 people were killed and that he saw
the “empty” keleks arrive in Mosul.
49. Aguni, History of the Massacre of one Million Armenians, op. cit., p. 67; Thomas Mgrdichian, The
Massacres in the Province of Dyarbekir, op. cit., p. 61.
50. Ibidem, pp. 61–3; Aguni, History of the Massacre of one Million Armenians, op. cit., p. 68.
51. Ishaq Armalto, Al-Gosara fi nakabat annasara [The Calamites of the Christians], Beirut 1970
(reprint of the anonymous 1919 edition), p. 145; Ara Sarafian, “The Disasters of Mardin during the
Persecutions of the Christians, Especially the Armenians, 1915,” Haigazian Armenological Review
XVIII (1998), cites a Catholic Syriac witness who stated that Dr. Reşid asked one of his colleagues
from Mesopotamia to have Hilmi murdered on his way to Mosul.
52. Rhétoré, Les chrétiens aux bêtes, ms. cit., pp. 200–1.
53. Bedreddin was confirmed in his functions on 12 September 1915 and held his post until 11 January
1916.
55. Armalto, The Calamites of the Christians, op. cit., p. 149. Let us note that the man who
replaced him, Hamid Bey, was not appointed until 30 June 1915 (he remained in his post
until 2 May 1916) – that is, the day on which the liquidation of the Christians of Derik was
terminated.
56. The murder of the two kaymakams was mentioned at the first session of the trial of the Unionists,
27 April 1919: Takvim-ı Vakayi, no. 3540, 5 May 1919, p. 8, col. 1, lines 15–20; we also have on this
subject the report by a committee of inquiry led by Mazhar Bey on the exactions perpetrated by
Dr. Reşid: APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Հ 119 (Ottoman original) and Յ 465 (transcription).
57. Mehmed Reşid, Hayatı ve Hâtıraları, cited in Necet Bilgi (ed.), Izmir 1997, pp. 79–91, in Mülâhazât:
Ermeni Meselesi ve Dyarbekir Hatıraları, cited in Kieser, “Dr Mehmed Reshid (1873–1919),” art. cit.,
p. 265; n. 66.

58. Mehmed Reşid, Hayatı ve Hâtıraları, op. cit., pp. 87–9.

59. Faits et documents. épisodes des massacres arméniens de Dyarbékir, op. cit., p. 38.
61. Hyacinthe Simon, Mardine, la ville héroïque. Autel et tombeau de l’Arménie durant les massacres de
1915, Jounieh, s. d., pp. 137–8.
62. Aguni, History of the Massacre of one Million Armenians, op. cit., p. 69; Thomas Mgrdichian, The
Massacres in the Province of Dyarbekir, op. cit., pp. 74–5.
63. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Յ 542–3, 546, “Les terreurs de Dyarbekir (dépositions des témoins turcs et
arméniens),” file 8; Aguni, History of the Massacre of one Million Armenians, op. cit., p. 67; Thomas
Mgrdichian, The Massacres in the Province of Dyarbekir, op. cit., pp. 74–5.
64. Semi-official Young Turk publications and the Istanbul press seized on these photographs to
launch a campaign depicting the Armenians as criminals, see La vérité sur le mouvement révolu-
tionnaire arménien et les mesures gouvernementales, Constantinople 1916.
65. “Les terreurs de Diarbékir (dépositions des témoins turcs et arméniens)”: SHAT, Service
Historique de la Marine, Service de Renseignements de la Marine, Turquie, 1BB7 231, doc. no.
279, Constantinople 1919, f° 2.
67. Thomas Mgrdichian, The Massacres in the Province of Dyarbekir, op. cit., p. 75; Aguni, History of
the Massacre of one Million Armenians, op. cit., p. 69.
68. BNu/Fonds Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 58, Rakka, ff. 1–15, report by Krikor Ankut; Raymond
Kévorkian, L’Extermination des déportés arméniens ottomans dans les camps de concentration de
Syrie-Mésopotamie (1915–1916), la Deuxième phase du génocide, RHAC II (1998), p. 165.
69. BNu/Fonds Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 52, Der Zor, ff. 108–10, report by Aram Andonian; R. H.
Kévorkian, L’Extermination des déportés arméniens ottomans dans les camps de concentration de
Syrie-Mésopotamie (1915–1916), la Deuxième phase du génocide, op. cit., p. 215.
70. Ibidem, p. 220.
71. Ibidem, p. 224.
73. Rhétoré, Les chrétiens aux bêtes, ms. cit., pp. 35–6; Faits et documents. épisodes des massacres
arméniens de Dyarbékir, op. cit., pp. 40–1.
75. Faits et documents. épisodes des massacres arméniens de Dyarbékir, op. cit., pp. 51–2.
77. Faits et documents. épisodes des massacres arméniens de Dyarbékir, op. cit., pp. 45–8.
78. “Rapport de Rifaat effendi, defterdar hakani mémouri à Mardin, démissionnaire, sur les massacres
d’Arméniens, de Grecs et de Syriens à Diarbékir et Mardine”: SHAT, Service Historique de la
Marine, Service de Renseignements de la Marine, Turquie, 1BB7 231, doc. no. 279, Constantinople,
2 January 1919.
79. Kieser, “Dr Mehmed Reshid (1873–1919),” art. cit., pp. 268–9.
80. Telegram from Dr. Reşid, 15/28 September 1915, to the minister of interior: Takvim-ı Vakayi, no.
3540, 5 May 1919, p. 7, col. 1.
81. J. Naayeim, Les Assyro-Chaldéens et les Arméniens massacrés par les Turcs, Paris 1920, p. 138.
82. Telegram from Halil Edip to Dr. Reşid, 17 October 1915, cited in Necet Bilgi (ed.), Reşid, Hayatı
ve Hâtıraları, op. cit., p. 29.
83. Telegram from Wangenheim to chancelier Bethmann Hollweg, Pera, 9 July 1915: Lepsius (ed.),
Archives du génocide des Arméniens, op. cit., doc. 108, pp. 102–3.
84. Telegram from Holstein to Constantinople embassy, Mosul, 14 August 1915: Lepsius (ed.), Archives
du génocide des Arméniens, op. cit., doc. 139, p. 134.
86. Kévorkian & Paboudjian, Les Arméniens dans l’Empire ottoman, op. cit., p. 400; Karpat, op. cit., p.
176, gives the official figure of 1,128 Armenians in 1914.
87. Armalto, The Calamites of the Christians, op. cit., pp. 350–9; Rhétoré, Les chrétiens aux bêtes, ms.
cit., pp. 39–42; Simon, op. cit., pp. 82–3; Ternon, Mardin 1915, op. cit., pp. 98–100.
88. Armalto, The Calamites of the Christians, op. cit., p. 94.

Notes 895
89. Kévorkian & Paboudjian, Les Arméniens dans l’Empire ottoman, op. cit., p. 400; Karpat, op. cit.,
p. 176, gives the official figure of 2,853 Armenians in 1914.
90. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Յ 537–41, 544, List of those responsible in the vilayet of Dyarbekir,
Severek. Haci Tellal Hakimoğlu, nicknamed Haci Onbaşi, murdered the six leading political
prisoners held in Ayaş: Rupen Zartarian, Dr. Nazareth Daghavarian, Karekin Khazhag, Aknuni,
Harutiun Jangiulian, and Sarkis Minasian. They were killed in a place known as Karacur, half-
way between Urfa and Severek: BNu/Fonds Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 3, prisoners of Ayaş, ff. 48–52
(see infra, p. 524).
91. Ternon, Mardin 1915, op. cit., pp. 101–2.
92. Faiez el-Ghocein, Les Massacres en Arménie, traduit de l’arabe par A. El-G, second ed., Beirut
1965, pp. 16–18; Fa’iz el-Ghusein, Martyred Armenia, Bombay 1916, pp. 22–7, reprinted by Richard
Kloian, The Armenian Genocide. News Accounts from the American Press (1915–1922), Berkeley
1985.
93. On the way from Severek and Dyarbekir, the witness encountered a caravan of women and chil-
dren from this city, from which most of the Armenians were deported in July.
95. See supra, p. 363, n. 55.
96. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Յ 537–41, 544, List of those responsible in the vilayet of Dyarbekir, file
29.
98. Armalto, The Calamites of the Christians, op. cit., p. 345; Rhétoré, Les chrétiens aux bêtes, ms. cit.,
p. 43; Ternon, Mardin 1915, op. cit., pp. 100–1.
100. Toynbee, Le Traitement des Arméniens dans l’Empire ottoman (1915–1916), op. cit., p. 207, inter-
view with Ruben Ter Minasian.
101. Rafaël de Nogales, Four Years Beneath the Crescent, op. cit., p. 134; Toynbee, Le Traitement des
Arméniens dans l’Empire ottoman (1915–1916), op. cit., p. 207.
102. See supra, p. 363, n. 56.
104. See supra, p. 363, n. 56.
105. J. Naayeim, Les Assyro-Chaldéens et les Arméniens massacrés par les Turcs, op. cit., pp. 169–76;
Rhétoré, Les chrétiens aux bêtes, ms. cit., p. 49; Ternon, Mardin 1915, op. cit., pp. 102–3.
106. Kévorkian & Paboudjian, Les Arméniens dans l’Empire ottoman, op. cit., pp. 403–6. The villages
were Göljük, Topelan, Pirnushan, Payam, Eğil/Ankgh, Aypega/Hiredan, Tilbaghdad, Piran, and
Gaplan.
107. Karnig Kévorkian, Չնքուշապատում [History of Chnkush], Jerusalem 1970, pp. 92–101.
108. Guregh Khrayian, Ծովք եւ Կէօլճիւք [Dzovk-Göljük], Marseille 1927.
109. Ibidem, pp. 145–58.
110. Ibidem, pp. 159–62.
111. Ibidem, p. 165. He was accused notably by the Kurds in the area of possessing a cannon. What
was involved was in fact a still used to make rakı; these uneducated men seem to have mistaken
it for a weapon.
112. Ibidem, pp. 165–6.
113. Ibidem, pp. 167–70.
114. Ibidem, pp. 171–9.
115. Ibidem, pp. 180–4.
116. Ibidem, pp. 184–7.
117. Ibidem, pp. 204–27.
118. Ibidem, pp. 229–51.
119. Kévorkian & Paboudjian, Les Arméniens dans l’Empire ottoman, op. cit., pp. 400–2, a total of
12,418 Armenians, counting the 280 inhabitants of the neighboring village of Chnkush,
Adish.
120. Kévorkian, History of Chnkush, op. cit., pp. 92–101.
121. Ibidem, pp. 94–5; Jean Naslian, Les Mémoires de Mgr Jean Naslian, I, Vienna 1951, pp. 302–4.
122. K. Minaguian “Չընքուշի Կոտորածը [The Massacre in Chnkush],” Bahag, 29 August 1919, p. 1.

123. Kévorkian, History of Chnkush, op. cit., pp. 95–6.

124. Naslian, Memoirs, I, op. cit., pp. 344–5, report by an escape; Kévorkian, History of Chnkush, op.
cit., pp. 94–9.
125. Ibidem, pp. 100–1.
127. Mesrob Grayian, Բալու [Palu], Antelias 1965, p. 495.
128. Ibidem, p. 502.
129. Ibidem, p. 505.
130. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Յ 537–41, 544, List of those responsible in the vilayet of Dyarbekir,
Palu.
131. Misak Khralian, Բալահովիտ [Palahovid], Sofia 1938, pp. 71–2.
132. BNu/Fonds Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 12, Palu, f° 2v°, report by Kevork M. Garabedian; Grayian,
Palu, op. cit., pp. 508–9.
133. Ibidem, pp. 77–8; BNu/ Fonds Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 12, Palu, f° 2, report by Kevork M. Garabedian.
The village of Nirkhi was encircled on 21 May by a captain in the gendarmerie and 12 men who
tortured the village priest and leading men and then got drunk: BNu/ Fonds Andonian, P.J.1/3,
file 12, Palu, ff. 4–7, report by Zakar P. Fndkhian, from Nirkhi.
134. Ibidem, f° 2 v°; Simon, op. cit., p. 82; Grayian, Palu, op. cit., p. 509.
135. BNu/Fonds Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 12, Palu, f° 7, report by Zakar P. Fndkhian. It would even seem
that this all-powerful official had a pronounced taste for young boys; he came to the bridge to
pick them out.
136. BNu/Fonds Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 12, Palu, f° 11.
137. BNu/Fonds Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 61, Kıği, ff. 66v°.
138. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Է 351–6, report in English on the massacres in the region of Erzerum;
APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Թ 334 (in French), no. 35, report on Les événements de Keghi depuis la
mobilisation jusqu’à la déportation.
139. Grayian, Palu, op. cit., pp. 514–15.
140. BNu/Fonds Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 12, Palu, f° 3, report by Kevork M. Garabedian.
141. Grayian, Palu, op. cit., p. 519.
142. Ibidem, pp. 515–16.
144. Congregatio de causis sanctorum. P.N. 1 704. Ciliciae Armenorum seu Mardinen. Beatificationis
seu Canonizationis servi Dei Ignatii Choukrallah Maloyan, archiepiscopi mardinensis in opium fidei,
uti fertur, interfecti (1915); Positio super vita, martyrio eiusque causa necnon super fama martyrii ex
testibus et documentis historicis, I, Roma 1998, pp. 98–100.
145. For a full review of the sources on these events as well as Archbishop Maloyan’s testament in
Arabic, see Yves Ternon, Mardin 1915, RHAC, V (2002), pp. 110–1.
146. See supra, p. 363, n. 51–4.
147. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Յ 539, List of those responsible in the vilayet of Dyarbekir, Mardin. Halil
Edip would later order that Tell Armen and El Kusru be burned down.
148. Ibidem.
149. The officers and leading members of the Special Organization were: Haydar Şeyheffendioğlu,
Mehmed Kabulo, Mehmet el Mully, Şevket Bey Mehmet Ağaoğlu, Mehmet Bey, brother of
Şevket Bey Mehmet Ağaoğlu, Beşo Sarac, the sons of Şeyh Hattap, Sadık Ali Terzioğlu, Hac
Celdo, Kadi Amşaki, Hamdi el-Şarabi, Halil Halafo, Faris Paşa Fameyoğlu, Ömer, uncle of Faris
Paşa Fameyoğlu, Vasi Muhar Saïdağa, Ali Bayrakdar, Osman, Mustafa, Aziz Ayo, Dervis Hamo,
Yusuf Çavuş, Hüseyin Belalo, Hüseyin Belalo Halil, Hüseyin Belalo Osman, the sons of Ali
Memo, Mehmet Şerif, Faranioğlu, Kade Bakır family, Aziz Bero Hüseyinbeyoğlu, Halil, “Hallo,”
and Haci Abdelkadir: APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Յ 539, List of those responsible in the vilayet of
Dyarbekir, Mardin.
150. Ibidem.
151. Sarafian, “The Disasters of Mardin,” art. cit., cites a Catholic Syriac who witnessed this fraud;
Ternon, Mardin 1915, op. cit., p. 117.
152. Ibidem.
153. Positio super vita, op. cit., I, p. 353, report by Ibrahim Kaspo.

Notes 897
154. See the many sources on these events listed in Ternon, Mardin 1915, op. cit., pp. 118–19, n. 3
to 6.
155. Positio super vita, op. cit., I, p. 133, translation of Ishaq Armalto’s narrative, The Calamites of the
Christians.
156. Ibidem, I, p. 389; Rhétoré, ms. cit., p. 68; Sarafian, “The Disasters of Mardin,” art. cit., p. 263,
declaration of Chaldean witness; Ternon, Mardin 1915, op. cit., p. 120.
157. Ibidem.
158. Ibidem.
159. Ibidem, p. 123, n. 20. The author catalogues various sources, which speak of 404 (Simon) to
480 men (the testimony of the “Chaldean”), of whom 35 were Catholic Syriacs and 20 were
Protestants; the others were Armenians. There were also 11 clergymen in the convoy.
160. Ibidem, pp. 124–5, n. 22 à 27 for the sources.
161. Ibidem, pp. 126–7.
162. Ibidem, pp. 134–5.
163. Ternon cites the text of the telegram as given in S. Aydın, Mardin, op. cit. For the original,
see: BOA, DH. şfr no. 54/406, encrypted telegram from the Ministry of Interior to the vilayet of
Dyarbekir, 12 July 1915: Armenians in Ottoman Documents (1915–1920), op. cit., p. 75.
164. Ternon, Mardin 1915, op. cit., p. 136.
165. Ibidem, p. 139.
166. Ibidem, pp. 140–1.
167. Ibidem, pp. 142–3.
168. See supra, pp. 368–9.
169. Ternon, Mardin 1915, op. cit., p. 143–4.
170. Ibidem, pp. 145–6; Simon, op. cit., pp. 89–90.
171. Ibidem, pp. 146–7; Rethore and Simon are our main sources for these events.
172. Sarafian, “The Disasters of Mardin,” art. cit., p. 266, declaration of Chaldean witness.
173. Simon, op. cit., p. 55.
174. Ibidem, pp. 56, 85.
175. Ibidem, p. 90.
176. Simon, op. cit., p. 78.
177. Ternon, Mardin 1915, op. cit., p. 158–61, cites numerous accounts, notably that of Father Simon,
49–50, which indicates that 1,500 Catholic Armenians were executed beginning on 1 July.
178. Telegram from Wangenheim to chancelier Bethmann Hollweg, Pera, 9 July 1915: Lepsius (ed.),
179. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Յ 539, List of those responsible in the vilayet of Dyarbekir, Mardin.
180. Ternon, Mardin 1915, op. cit., p. 161–6.
182. Simon, op. cit., p. 87.
183. Ternon, Mardin 1915, op. cit., pp. 167–70.
184. Ibidem, pp. 170–3.
185. Telegram from colonel Ömer Naci, 12 October 1915, to the General Commandment, with the
encrypted telegram from Haydar Bey, vali of Mosul, to General Staff, 12 October 1915: Ataşe
Arşivi, KOL: BDH, KLS: 17, dos.: 81/FIH: 27, cited in Israfil Kurtcephe, “Birinci dünya savaşinda
bir süryani ayaslanmasi,” Osmanlı Tarihi Arastirma ve Uygulama Merkezi Dergisi 1993/4, pp.
291–6.
186. Report from Scheubner Richter to Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg, Munich, 4 December
1916: Lepsius (ed.), Archives du génocide des Arméniens, op. cit., doc. 309, pp. 234–40, especially
p. 236.
187. Ibidem, p. 236.
188. Ibidem, p. 236. The encrypted telegram from the minister of war, Enver, to the commandant of
the Third Army, Mahmud Kâmil, 28 October 1915, does indeed mention Syriac rebels fighting
side-by-side with Armenians: Ataşe Arşivi, KOL: BDH, KLS: 17, dos.: 81/Fhr. 32, cited in Israfil
Kurtcephe, “Birinci dünya savaşinda,” art. cit., p. 293.
190. Ternon, Mardin 1915, op. cit., pp. 175–6, cites Armalto, op. cit., p. 413.

191. Kévorkian & Paboudjian, Les Arméniens dans l’Empire ottoman, op. cit., p. 415. These villages
were: Arnabad, Mezer, Giundekşeyh, Tıldar, Perek, Berebt, Cerahi, Hntuk, Ceder, Keoçer and,
Zakho.
192. Simon, op. cit., p. 88.
193. Report from Hohenlohe to Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg, Istanbul, 11 September 1915: Lepsius
(ed.), Archives du génocide des Arméniens, op. cit., doc. 167, pp. 146–7; Ternon, Mardin 1915, op. cit.,
pp. 179–80.
194. Ibidem, p. 180–2.
195. Simon, op. cit., p. 91.
197. Ternon, Mardin 1915, op. cit., pp. 182–4; Simon, op. cit., p. 12.
198. Ibidem, p. 86.
199. Public Record Office, FO 371/6503, no. 264, the file of prisoner no. 2,667, Ali Ihsan, interned in
Malta, accused of committing massacres in the regions of Van, Nisibin, and Urmia, where he
personally murdered an American patient in the hospital, John Nooshy.
200. APC/APJ, Յ 158, the file of Ziya [Gökalp], born in Dyarbekir, a member of the Ittihadist Central
Committee.
1919, p. 7, col. 2 and the full deposition of handwritten pages: APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Հ 171–82.
202. Kieser, “Dr Mehmed Reshid (1873–1919),” art. cit., p. 268.
203. BOA, DH. şfr no. 54/406, encrypted telegram from the Ministry of Interior to the vilayet of
Dyarbekir, 12 July 1915: Armenians in Ottoman Documents (1915–1920), op. cit., p. 75.
204. See in particular the many exchanges between the diplomats posted in Constantinople and
Berlin, especially the 4 September 1915 letter from Hohenlohe to Chancellor Bethmann
Hollweg, in which Hohenlohe informs the chancellor that he has received the German transla-
tion of “various telegraphic orders” issued by Talât: “he thereby sought to prove that the central
government was making a serious attempt to put an end to the excesses.” Yet only a few days
earlier, Hohenlohe adds, the minister declared in his presence: “the Armenian Question no
longer exists.”: Lepsius (ed.), Deutschland und Armenien, Berlin–Potsdam 1919, doc. 160, p. 147;
also Weber, Eagles on the Crescent: Germany, Austria and the Diplomacy of the Turkish Alliance,
1914–1918, op. cit., pp. 150–2.
7 Deportations and Massacres in the Vilayet

of Mamuret ul-Aziz
1. Nazareth Piranian, Խարբերդի Եղեռնը [The Holocaust of Kharpert], Boston 1937, 541 pp., writ-
ten by a former Euphrates College teacher, is the most comprehensive and reliable source. The
70 ff. reports in BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 23, Harput, are also uniquely illuminating
sources on the events that occurred in the towns and villages of the plain of Harput and the mas-
sacres perpetrated around Lake Göljük. Levon Gjigian, Մօրենիկ եւ իր Սեւ Տարին [Morenig
and Its Black Year], Antelias 1969 and Anna Mirakian, Վերքեր եւ Ցաւեր [Wounds and Griefs],
Antelias 1960, are also essential.
2. Takvim-ı Vakayi no. 3540 (at the session of trial of 12 April 1919), 5 May 1919, pp. 4–6 especially,
in annexe of the Young Turk trial act of accusation, Takvim-ı Vakayi no. 3771, 13 January 1920,
pp. 48–9 especially, indictment of the trial of Harput, again Bahaeddin Şakir.
3. Osmanli Belgelerinde Ermeniler (1915–1920), T. C. Başbakanlik Devlet Arşivleri Genel Müdürlüğü,
Osmanli Arşivi Daire Başbakanliği, Armenians in Ottoman Documents (1915–1920), op. cit.
4. Leslie A. Davis, The Slaughterhouse Province, An American Diplomat’s Report on the Armenian
Genocide, 1915–1917), ed. By Susan K. Blair, New Rochelle, New York 1989; Ara Sarafian (ed.), United
States Official Documents on the Armenian Genocide, III, The Central Lands, Watertown 1995.
5. Henry H. Riggs, Days of Tragedy in Armenia, Personal Experiences in Harpoot, 1915–1917, Ann
Arbor 1997; Maria Jacobsen, Diary of a Danish Missionary, Harpoot, 1907–1919, Ara Sarafian
(ed.), Princeton-London 2001.
6. The expression often recurs in the reports of Davis, The Slaughterhouse Province, op. cit.

Notes 899
7. Kévorkian & Paboudjian, Les Arméniens dans l’Empire ottoman, op. cit., pp. 353–91. Karpat, op. cit.,
p. 182, puts the number of Armenians at 87,864 in 1914.
8. Ibidem, p. 358.
9. Ibidem, p. 360.
10. Riggs, Days of Tragedy in Armenia, op. cit., pp. 3–4.
12. Ibidem, p. 7.
13. Ibidem, p. 15, mentions, notably, the case of a Turkish soldier from Egin whom an Armenian
companion-in-arms saved “like a brother.”
14. Vahé Hayg, Խարբերդը եւ անոր Ոսկեղէն Դաշտը [Kharpert and Its Golden Plain], New York
1959, p. 1415.
15. Piranian, The Holocaust of Kharpert, op. cit., pp. 73–4.
16. Ibidem, p. 78.
17. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Յ 430, 467, 474, those responsible for the deportations and massacres in
the region of Harput.
18. Also known as Sağirzâde, Sabit was born in Kemah (in the sancak of Erzincan) in 1881. Under
the Kemalist regime, he served as the vali of Erzerum and was the founder and director of the
Ziraat Bankası. He served several terms as a parliamentary deputy from Erzincan and, later, Elazığ.
He died in Istanbul in 1960: Adnan Işik, Malatia, Adıyaman, Akçadaği, Arabkir, Besni, Darende,
1830–1919, Istanbul 1998, p. 761, n.
19. Davis, The Slaughterhouse Province, op. cit., pp. 107–8: report to State Department, 9 February
1918.
20. Ibidem.
21. Işik, Malatia, op. cit., p. 761, note.
22. Riggs, Days of Tragedy in Armenia, op. cit., pp. 32–3; Davis, The Slaughterhouse Province, op. cit., p.
107; Jacobsen, Diary of a Danish Missionary, op. cit., p. 36, gives the date of the interview, in which
M. Pierce also participated.
23. Riggs, Days of Tragedy in Armenia, op. cit., p. 33.
24. Ibidem, pp. 34–5. However, the authorities ultimately ceded one floor to the school for girls; Davis,
The Slaughterhouse Province, op. cit., p. 117.
25. Ibidem, p. 117. During the winter of 1915, typhus wrought havoc among the soldiers and, later, the
population of Mezreh in particular. The situation was so serious that the authorities appointed
the general practitioner Artin Helvajian, a native of Dyarbekir trained in the Military Medical
School of Constantinople, to the post of chief physician of the vilayet’s hospitals, requesting that
he take the necessary measures to stop the spread of the epidemic: Piranian, The Holocaust of
Kharpert, op. cit., pp. 73–4, 77–8, 84.
26. Piranian, The Holocaust of Kharpert, op. cit., pp. 36–43, 43–58.
27. Ibidem, p. 79.
28. Ibidem, pp. 82–3.
30. Ibidem, p. 47.
31. Hayg, Kharpert and its golden plain, op. cit., p. 1417, cites the account of one of the participants in
the meeting, Harutiun Pekmezian.
32. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, file XXIX, Մ 579/4, copy of encrypted telegram from vali, Sabit Bey, to
mutesarif of Malatia, 15 February 1915 (2 Şubat): “How is the training of the squadron proceed-
ing? Is it about to bear fruit? I would ask you to devote all your energy and to concentrate all your
efforts [on training it] and also to send men to the capital of the vilayet in, at the latest, three
days.”
33. Report by Miss Hansina Marcher, a Danish missionary working for the German Red Cross in
Harput, in which she repeats remarks made by the German vice-consul as he was dining with
the missionaries shortly after holding a conversation with Sabit Bey on the evening of 16 March
1915: Bryce [= Toynbee], The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, Uncensored ed.,
op. cit., doc. 64, pp. 286–7; the French translation, Toynbee, Le Traitement des Arméniens dans
l’Empire ottoman, op. cit., doc. 22, p. 261, is imprecise; Aguni, History of the Massacre of one Million
Armenians, op. cit., p. 152.

34. Piranian, The Holocaust of Kharpert, op. cit., pp. 99–100; Davis, The Slaughterhouse Province, op.
cit., p. 118: report to State Department, 9 February 1918. The chronological detail is provided by
Maritza Kejejian: Toynbee, The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, op. cit., doc. 68,
p. 299.
35. Davis, The Slaughterhouse Province, op. cit., p. 118: report to State Department, 9 February 1918.
36. Piranian, The Holocaust of Kharpert, op. cit., p. 100: many even burned their bibles so as not to give
the authorities a pretext for violence; Riggs, Days of Tragedy in Armenia, op. cit., p. 47.
37. Letter from the director of Mezreh’s German orphanage, Johannes Ehmann, to Wangenheim,
Mamuret ul-Aziz, 5 May 1915: Lepsius (ed.), Archives du génocide des Arméniens, op. cit., doc. 42,
pp. 86–7.
38. Piranian, The Holocaust of Kharpert, op. cit., p. 231.
39. Toynbee, The Treatment of Armenians, op. cit., doc. 64, p. 287.
40. Piranian, The Holocaust of Kharpert, op. cit., pp. 187–8, states that the village was attacked as soon
as the population surrendered its arms.
41. Ibidem, pp. 219–20.
42. Ibidem, pp. 229–33; BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 23, Harput, ff. 49–50. Hagopian, a mem-
ber of the German mission in Harput, affirms that the Armenians were convinced that the meas-
ures taken by the authorities were directed only at political activists and that the Armenian
population had nothing to fear. B. Hagopian likewise had the feeling that Ehmann was, at the
time, unaware of the Turks’ criminal intentions (ibidem, f° 49 v°).
43. Riggs, Days of Tragedy in Armenia, op. cit., p. 47; Jacobsen, Diary of a Danish Missionary, Harpoot,
1907–1919, op. cit., p. 61, affirms that the arrests were made by soldiers who escorted them directly
to the governor’s palace, adding that in the evening these men were taken back to their places of
residence so that they would be present when the police searched them.
44. Ibidem.
45. Piranian, The Holocaust of Kharpert, op. cit., pp. 43–4: teacher in Euphrates College, born in 1856,
executed on 20 June 1915 on the northern shore of Lake Göljük, near Kezinhan.
46. Ibidem, pp. 46–7: born in 1864, leader of the Protestant community since 1895, teacher at Euphrates
College, executed on 20 June 1915 on the northern shore of Lake Göljük, near Kezinhan.
47. Ibidem, pp. 48–9: born in 1868, teacher at Euphrates College, died on 25 January 1916, after one
year in prison.
48. Ibidem, pp. 52–3: born in 1868 in Malatia, teacher at Euphrates College, killed in the second con-
voy from Mezreh, in early July.
49. Ibidem, pp. 54–5: born in 1873 in Chnkush, teacher at Euphrates College, executed on 20 June
1915 on the northern shore of Lake Göljük near Kezinhan.
50. Ibidem, pp. 57–8: born in 1875 in Harput, educated at Yale and Cornell, arrested on 1 May, a refu-
gee in the American consulate until February 1916, thereafter a refugee in Erzerum, where he was
the director of an orphanage; died on 22 March 1917.
53. Ibidem, pp. 47–8.
54. Ibidem, p. 48.
55. Ibidem, p. 49.
56. Report by Miss Hansina Marcher: Toynbee, The Treatment of Armenians, op. cit., doc. 64, p. 287;
Toynbee, Le Traitement des Arméniens, op. cit., doc. 22, p. 262.
57. Ibidem. Jacobsen, Diary of a Danish Missionary, Harpoot, 1907–1919, op. cit., p. 67, mentions a proc-
lamation of the vali’s that was read out in the churches on 6 June to encourage the population to
turn in its arms.
58. Davis, The Slaughterhouse Province, op. cit., p. 53: letter from Davis to Morgenthau, Harput, 24 July
1915.
60. Ibidem, p. 77.
61. Davis, The Slaughterhouse Province, op. cit., p. 157: letter from Davis to Morgenthau, Harput, 24
July 1915.
62. Jacobsen, Diary of a Danish Missionary, Harpoot, 1907–1919, op. cit., p. 67.

Notes 901

64. Jacobsen, Diary of a Danish Missionary, Harpoot, 1907–1919, op. cit., pp. 68–70; Piranian, The
Holocaust of Kharpert, op. cit., p. 104, points notably to the arrest Hovhannes Harputlian, intel-
lectuals and businessmen, and all the other men who had paid the bedel to avoid conscription.
66. Piranian, The Holocaust of Kharpert, op. cit., pp. 117–18 and 133–7.
67. Ibidem, pp. 137–8. The author’s sister, Sara, a schoolteacher in Mezreh’s German school, appealed
to Reverend Ehmann to intercede on behalf of those imprisoned in the konak, so that they might
at least be allowed to drink; Ehemann denied that the authorities could be so brutal as to deny the
men water (ibidem, p. 139); Tracy Atkinson, “The German, the Turk and the Devil Made a Triple
alliance”: Harpoot Diaries, 1908–1917, Princeton 2000, p. 38.
68. Ibidem, pp. 141–6.
69. Ibidem, pp. 98–9, 151–7.
71. Piranian, The Holocaust of Kharpert, op. cit., pp. 156–8, 167–8, 170.
72. Ibidem, pp. 171–6. On the night of 22 June, 75 men who had paid the bedel were taken out of
Mezreh’s central prison and liquidated shortly thereafter (ibidem, p. 177).
73. Takvim-ı Vakayi no. 3771, 13 January 1920, p. 48–9 especially, indictment of the trial of Mamuret
ul-Aziz; Davis, The Slaughterhouse Province, op. cit., p. 79: report to State Department, 9 February
1918, confirms the destruction of this convoy, in which most of the notables of Harput and Mezreh
were to be found, along with the Armenian Apostolic primate, Bsag Der Khorenian, whom Davis
does not name, like Atkinson, “The German, the Turk and the Devil Made a Triple alliance,” op.
cit., p. 38.
75. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Ժ 99, Յ 229, Յ 243–5 (in French), dossier des Turcs inculpés dans le procès
des massacres de Mamuret ul-Aziz, 13 September 1920, file 2.
77. Ibidem, pp. 185, 206–7; BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 23, Harput, f° 53, report by Araks
Mgrdichian, points out as well that in the same period boys between 13 and 15 were rounded up,
imprisoned, and deported.
79. Riggs, Days of Tragedy in Armenia, op. cit., p. 119. Although the Orthodox Syriacs were officially
exempt from deportation, Piranian notes that they were nevertheless stripped of all their pos-
sessions and that some of them were killed: Piranian, The Holocaust of Kharpert, op. cit., p. 203;
APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Ժ 99, Յ 229, Յ 243–4–5 (in French), dossier des Turcs inculpés dans le
procès des massacres de Mamuret ul-Aziz, 13 September 1920, file 2, states that the brigadier
general Süleyman Faik Pasha demanded that Harput’s Catholic Syriacs who were not deported
provide him with a written declaration to the effect that he had treated them “with kindness.”
80. Davis, in a 6 September 1915 dispatch to Morgenthau sent from Mamuret ul-Aziz, notes that the
dispatches he sent after 29 June had obviously not arrived at their destination and that even the
“sealed” letters that he had sent after that date had passed through the vali’s hands and had not all
arrived: Davis, The Slaughterhouse Province, op. cit., pp. 67–9. Riggs also notes that the American
mission’s telephone had been cut off early in June: Riggs, Days of Tragedy in Armenia, op. cit., p. 64.
81. Ibidem, p. 80.
82. Ibidem, p. 81; Davis, The Slaughterhouse Province, op. cit., pp. 126–7, confirms that, in addition
to the American missionaries, Reverand Ehmann, the director of the German mission, and the
Austrian Charles Picciotto, assistant director of the local branch of the Banque Ottomane, took
part in this conversation.
83. Letter from Davis to Morgenthau, Mamuret ul-Aziz, 30 June 1915: ibidem, p. 33; Ara Sarafian (ed.),
United States Official Documents on the Armenian Genocide, III, The Central Lands, Watertown
1995, p. 3.
84. Report to State Department, 9 February 1918: Davis, The Slaughterhouse Province, op. cit., p. 54.
86. Ibidem, p. 103; report from Davis to Morgenthau, Mamuret ul-Aziz, 7 September 1915: Davis, The
Slaughterhouse Province, op. cit., p. 73.

87. BOA, DH., şfr. no. 54/163, encrypted telegram from the minister of interior, Talât, to the vali
of Mamuret ul-Aziz, Sabit, Istanbul, 26 June 1915: Osmanli Belgelerinde Ermeniler (1915–1920),
T.C. Başbakanlik Devlet Arşivleri Genel Müdürlüğü, Osmanli Arşivi Daire Başkanliği, Armenians
in Ottoman Documents (1915–1920), op. cit., no. 47, p. 56. Jacobsen, Diary of a Danish Missionary,
Harpoot, 1907–1919, op. cit., p. 73, indicates for his part that at the “rencontre memorable” of
29 June, the vali promised Ehmann that old people and “women without husbands” would
be exempt from deportation; Piranian, The Holocaust of Kharpert, op. cit., who worked at the
American hospital in the following weeks, often mentions these two categories; some of the
people in them were still living in Mezreh and Harput.
88. Riggs, Days of Tragedy in Armenia, op. cit., p. 103; report from Davis to Morgenthau, Mamuret
ul-Aziz, 7 September 1915: Davis, The Slaughterhouse Province, op. cit., p. 73. Davis, for his part,
notes that the orders did not arrive in time.
89. BOA, DH., şfr. no. 54/189, encrypted telegram from the vice-minister of the interior, Ali Münîf, to
the vali of Mamuret ul-Aziz, Sabit, Istanbul, 27 June 1915: Osmanli Belgelerinde Ermeniler (1915–
1920), T.C. Başbakanlik Devlet Arşivleri Genel Müdürlüğü, Osmanli Arşivi Daire Başkanliği,
Armenians in Ottoman Documents (1915–1920), op. cit., no. 51, pp. 58–9. The document does
not state where these emigrants came from. It is likely that they were inhabitants of provinces
further to the east who were fleeing the advancing Russian army.
91. Ibidem, pp. 85–6; report to State Department, 9 February 1918: Davis, The Slaughterhouse
Province, op. cit., pp. 54–5, uses the expression “the vultures swooping down on their prey.”
93. Ibidem, p. 89.
94. Ibidem, p. 89.
95. Riggs employs the term “remittances,” although the operations described here are rather more
like transfers: ibidem, p. 89; in his report to State Department, 9 February 1918: Davis, The
Slaughterhouse Province, op. cit., p. 54, confirms what the missionary says, adding that some
Armenians left carrying large sums of money and “were robbed, almost without exception, soon
after they left.”
96. Letter from Davis to Morgenthau, Mamuret ul-Aziz, 30 June 1915: Davis, The Slaughterhouse
Province, op. cit., pp. 36–7. The whole second part of Davis’s 9 February 1918 report is about the
difficulty of “managing” these sums of money and responding to the demands of deportees who
had arrived in Syria or Mesopotamia.
97. Report to State Department, 9 February 1918: Davis, The Slaughterhouse Province, op. cit.,
pp. 128–9, cites the case of an American murdered in Çarsancak, Garabed Urfalian, whose wife,
accompanied by the consul, had noticed that the 150 Turkish pounds deposited in her husband’s
bank account were paid out to the commission responsible for abandoned property. No doubt in
order to evaluate the way this commission worked, the consul went to see its president and also
the vali, as the representative of the interests of an American citizen, and demanded that the
sum be paid to the widow and her children, who had taken refuge in Harput. “Inquiries” were
undertaken “to verify” that the deceased had not left debts; it was promised that, if he had not,
his widow would receive five to ten Turkish pounds. However, notes the consul, after six months
of efforts, the commission had still not paid the widow anything.
99. Ibidem, p. 57, states that he had as much as 200,000 dollars in deposits.
100. Riggs, Days of Tragedy in Armenia, op. cit., pp. 66–7, 90
101. Ibidem, pp. 91–2. Riggs states the bank’s Armenian teller, to whom he entrusted these sums,
respected the clients’ right to secrecy and “have any reason” to reveal the amount of the deposits
in question.
102. Ibidem, pp. 92–3. Reverand Ehmann was also asked to accept deposits: ibidem, p. 94.
103. Piranian, The Holocaust of Kharpert, op. cit., p. 203; see supra, p. 388, n. 71.
104. Piranian, The Holocaust of Kharpert, op. cit., pp. 208–10. The minister was erudite; he knew
Greek, Latin, Italian, French, English, Turkish, Farsi, and Arabic. He was highly respected in
Mezreh.
105. Ibidem, p. 211.

Notes 903
106. Letter from Davis to Morgenthau, Mamuret ul-Aziz, 30 June 1915: Davis, The Slaughterhouse
Province, op. cit., p. 148.
108. Letter from Davis to Morgenthau, Mamuret ul-Aziz, 11 July 1915: Davis, The Slaughterhouse
Province, op. cit., pp. 41–3; Piranian, The Holocaust of Kharpert, op. cit., pp. 212–14, report by
Aghavni Boyajian.
109. Piranian, The Holocaust of Kharpert, op. cit., pp. 215–19; BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 23,
Harput, ff. 13–15, report by Kohar Halajian.
110. Ibidem, pp. 222–5.
111. Ibidem, pp. 226–7.
112. Ibidem, pp. 219–20; Atkinson, “The German, the Turk and the Devil Made a Triple alliance,” op.
cit., p. 40.
113. Jacobsen, Diary of a Danish Missionary, Harpoot, 1907–1919, op. cit., p. 73, was informed of the
fate of these men by the pharmacist at the hospital, “baron Melcon” [Liulejian, one of the survi-
vors of this convoy]; Atkinson, “The German, the Turk and the Devil Made a Triple alliance,”
op. cit., p. 40; Riggs, Days of Tragedy in Armenia, op. cit., p. 103.
115. Ibidem, pp. 76–7.
116. Atkinson, “The German, the Turk and the Devil Made a Triple alliance,” op. cit., p. 46.
117. Ibidem. Letter from Davis to Morgenthau, Mamuret ul-Aziz, 11 July 1915: Davis, The Slaughterhouse
Province, op. cit., p. 46, Davis notes that the day before he had met with the vali and tried to
persuade him to authorize opening an orphanage for all the children who were roaming through
the region or had ended up in Harput.
118. Letter from Davis to Morgenthau, Mezreh, 11 July 1915, p. 7, included in the report from
Morgenthau to Secretary of State, 10 August 1915: National Archives (Washington), RG 59,
867. 4016/122 (microfilm 353, bobine 43). They were deported in early September (ibidem, p. 73,
Davis to Morgenthau, 6 September 1915). In a report by 9 February 1918, Davis noted that these
boys were sent to the slaughterhouse at Lake Göljük: ibidem, p. 142.
119. Jacobsen, Diary of a Danish Missionary, Harpoot, 1907–1919, op. cit., pp. 76–7; The missionaries
observed with relief that not many people converted.
120. Ibidem, p. 78; Atkinson, “The German, the Turk and the Devil Made a Triple alliance,” op. cit., p. 46.
121. Ibidem, pp. 46–7; Piranian, The Holocaust of Kharpert, op. cit., pp. 236–8; Davis to Morgenthau,
Harput, 24 July 1915: Davis, The Slaughterhouse Province, op. cit., pp. 55–6: a Frenchwoman,
Marguerite Gamat, who had been unable to leave Harput since the outbreak of the war, was
among the victims.
122. BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 23, Harpout, f° 47, report by Mushegh Vorperian.
123. Jacobsen, Diary of a Danish Missionary, Harpoot, 1907–1919, op. cit., pp. 78–9; Riggs, Days of
Tragedy in Armenia, op. cit., p. 103.
124. BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 23, Harpout, f° 48, report by Mushegh Vorperian.
125. Davis to Morgenthau, Harput, 24 July 1915: Davis, The Slaughterhouse Province, op. cit., p. 157.
126. Jacobsen, Diary of a Danish Missionary, Harpoot, 1907–1919, op. cit., pp. 82–3. 869. Davis to
Morgenthau, Harput, 24 July 1915: Davis, The Slaughterhouse Province, op. cit., p. 157.
127. Ibidem, p. 157. Davis states that the vali asked Ehmann and Picciotto to do the same thing.
128. Ibidem, p. 161.
129. Ibidem, p. 73. Davis notes that the head of the police was “sitting in my office that night ... until
nearly two o’clock in the Morning ... He wanted me to speak in the letter about the bombs and
weapons”; if he did not, the thousand or so Armenians still present in the city would face “more
severe measures than ever” beginning the following day.
130. Ibidem, p. 162.
131. Jacobsen, Diary of a Danish Missionary, Harpoot, 1907–1919, op. cit., p. 84; Piranian, The
Holocaust of Kharpert, op. cit., pp. 296–300. The prisoners who died in this fire included:
Father Vartan Arslanian, Hagop Fermanian, Hagop Najarian, Mardiros Muradian, Harutiun
Der Kaprielian, Dikran Asdigian, Dr. Nshan Nahigian, Hayrabed Hovsepian, Melkon
Frengian, Shahpaz Bedrosian, Toros Tanielian, Levon Totovents, Edvart Tachjian, Garabed
Geogiushian, Garabed Demirjian, Dr. S. Jelalian, Asadur Darakjian, Jean Parakian, Jean

Shirvanian, Nigoghos Kalenderian, Hagop agha, Pilibbos Nalbandian, Hovhannes Tanielian,

Garabed Boyajian, etc.
132. BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 23, Harput, f° 50v°, the account by Reverand Bedros
Hagopian, a member of the German mission of Harput, has rather severe words for Davis, who
closed his doors to several naturalized Americans. One, Simon Sargavakian, tore up his U.S.
passport and threw it in the consul’s face.
133. BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 23, Harput, ff. 51v°–6, Araks Mgrdichian, the consul’s
daughter, depicts Davis as someone who was unwilling to take risks and who therefore refused
to take in his colleague’s family at the crucial moment. The family was saved in the end by
Dr. Atkinson at the American hospital.
135. Piranian, The Holocaust of Kharpert, op. cit., pp. 247–8; Jacobsen, Diary of a Danish Missionary,
Harpoot, 1907–1919, op. cit., p. 99.
138. BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 23, Harput, f° 42, report by Mihran Zakarian; Levon
Gjigian, Morenig and his Black Year, op. cit.
139. BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 23, Harput, ff. 65–6, report by Krikor Yeghoyan, a native of
the village of Khuylu, returned there from the United States on 25 December 1913.
140. Ibidem, f° 69v°; Davis to Morgenthau, 30 December 1915: Davis, The Slaughterhouse Province, op.
cit., pp. 178–83, confirms that this was the fate of these drivers.
141. Ibidem, ff. 67–8v°.
142. Piranian, The Holocaust of Kharpert, op. cit., pp. 256–9. Piranian notes that the inhabitants of
Khuylu were being deported when he passed through the vicinity on 16 July (ibidem, p. 259).
Consul Davis later visited several villages on the plain and observed that they were in ruins
and that the churches had been systematically demolished, as if to “remove all traces” of an
Armenian presence: report from Davis to the State Department, 9 February 1918: Davis, The
143. BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 23, Harput, f° 39, report by Mihran Zakarian, a theology
student at Euphrates College.
144. Ibidem, f° 49v°. Consul Davis notes that several of the battalions of worker-soldiers who arrived
from Erzrrum in November and December were put to death: Davis to Morgenthau, 30 December
1915: Davis, The Slaughterhouse Province, op. cit., pp. 178–83.
145. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Ժ 99, Յ 229, Յ 243–5 (in French), dossiers des personnes inculpées dans
le procès des massacres de Mamuret ul-Aziz, 13 September 1920, no. 2, file I and II.
146. Ibidem.
148. Manug Jizmejian, Խարբերդը եւ իր Զաւակները [Kharpert and Its Children], Fresno 1955, pp.
434–5.
150. Ibidem, pp. 120–2.
151. Ibidem, pp. 127–8.
152. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Ժ 99, Յ 229 and Յ 243–5 (in French), dossiers des personnes inculpées
dans le procès des massacres de Mamuret ul-Aziz, 13 September 1920, no. 2, file II.
154. See supra, pp. 387–8.
le procès des massacres de Mamuret ul-Aziz, 13 September 1920, no. 2, file I.
156. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Կ 360, encrypted telegram no. 33 (original Կ 361) sent by Süleyman
Faik Pasha, the military commander of Harput, to the commander-in-chief of the Third
Army in Tortum on 16/29 August 1915; James L. Barton, “Turkish Atrocities.” Statements
of American Missionaries on the Destruction of Christian Communities in Ottoman Turkey,
1915–1917, Ann Arbor 1998, pp. 33, testimony of Mary Riggs, who speaks of the cadav-
ers of people who had been shot to death just before she passed through the area in early
November 1915.

Notes 905
le procès des massacres de Mamuret ul-Aziz, 13 September 1920, no. 2, file I. The president
announced that he had further information indicating that not just one convoy, but, rather, all
of them had been liquidated under conditions like those described by Süleyman Faik. He there-
fore decided to arrest Faik immediately.
158. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Յ 465, doc. no. 3, a passage of Fazıl’s report about Sabit Bey. Lazare, 22, a
native of Arapkir, escaped execution and succeeded in reaching Malatia, where he testified about
these events.
159. Aguni, History of the Massacre of One Million Armenians, op. cit., pp. 158–9.
160. Atkinson, “The German, the Turk and the Devil Made a Triple alliance,” op. cit., pp. 40–2; this
convoy was put back on the road on 9 July; Barton, “Turkish Atrocities,” op. cit., p. 42, report by
Dr. Tracy Atkinson.
163. Davis to Morgenthau, Mamuret ul-Aziz, 11 July 1915: Davis, The Slaughterhouse Province, op. cit.,
p. 150.
164. Ibidem, p. 151. The convoys that arrived in August were initially stationed near the village of
Hulakiugh/Hulaköy, one hour west of Harput, to be moved late in September to the walled cem-
etery of Mezreh’s Armenian Church: Barton, “Turkish Atrocities,” op. cit., p. 57, report by Ruth A.
Parmelee.
165. Ibidem, p. 160.
166. See supra, p. 297.
168. Atkinson give the exact date of this trip (“The German, the Turk and the Devil Made a Triple
alliance,” op. cit., p. 55); report from Davis to state Department, 9 February 1918: Davis, The
169. Ibidem, p. 80. Davis indicates that he initially believed that this was a “sanitary measure,” but
soon learned the truth about the murderers’ methods.
170. Ibidem, pp. 81–2.
171. Ibidem, pp. 82–3. Davis’ observations seem to indicate that these people had been on the road for
several weeks and were therefore not Armenians from the region of Harput.
172. Ibidem, p. 84.
173. Ibidem, pp. 86–7; the exact date of the two men’s departure is given in Atkinson, “The German,
the Turk and the Devil Made a Triple alliance,” op. cit., p. 58.
174. La Renaissance, no. 43, 22 January 1919, article of S. Padova, “Le lac ensanglanté,” reprinted from
La Liberté de Smyrne; BNu/ Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 23, Harput, ff. 23–6, doc. 45, “Le lac
ensanglanté.”
175. BOA, DH. EUM, 2 şb. no. 68/70, telegram from the vali of Mamuret ul-Aziz, Sabit, to the minister
of the interior, Talât, Mamuret ul-Aziz, 18 September 1915: Osmanli Belgelerinde Ermeniler (1915–
1920), T.C. Başbakanlik Devlet Arşivleri Genel Müdürlüğü, Osmanli Arşivi Daire Başkanliği,
Armenians in Ottoman Documents (1915–1920), op. cit., no. 114, p. 106. This estimate is plausi-
ble if one adds to it the worker-soldiers, who were dealt with separately, the men killed before
the official deportations began, and the populations massacred where they were found and the
Armenians who managed to flee to the Dersim district. Another document, emanating from
APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, file 57, report to the minister of the interior, mentions 50,024 Armenian
deportees in the sancak of Harput and 74,206 in the whole of the vilayet.
177. Davis to Morgenthau, Mamuret ul-Aziz, 30 December 1915: Davis, The Slaughterhouse Province,
op. cit., pp. 178–83.
178. Jacobsen, Diary of a Danish Missionary, Harpoot, 1907–1919, op. cit., pp. 91–2, Diary of 25
September.
179. Ibidem, p. 100; report from Davis to state Department, 9 February 1918: Davis, The Slaughterhouse
Province, op. cit., pp. 85–6.
180. Barton, “Turkish Atrocities,” op. cit., p. 57, report by Ruth A. Parmelee and, p. 70, report by Isabelle
Harley; Davis to Morgenthau, Mamuret ul-Aziz, 30 December 1915: Davis, The Slaughterhouse

Province, op. cit., pp. 178–83. The inhabitants of Harput were finally freed on condition that “se
faire turc.”
181. Jacobsen, Diary of a Danish Missionary, Harpoot, 1907–1919, op. cit., pp. 105–6.
182. Ibidem, p. 108, The 35 men in the convoy had become Muslims several weeks earlier.
183. Davis to Morgenthau, Mamuret ul-Aziz, 30 December 1915: Davis, The Slaughterhouse Province,
op. cit., pp. 180–3.
185. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Ժ 99, Յ 229, Յ 243–5 (in French), dossiers des Turcs inculpés dans le
procès des massacres de Mamuret ul-Aziz, 13 September 1920, no. 2, file II. The general was
accused, notably, of entering the American hospital, arresting the Armenians on the staff and
having them killed.
186. BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 23, Harput, f° 42 v°, report by Mihran Zakarian, theology
student at Euphrates College.
187. See supra, p. 314.
188. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, file XXIX, Մ 578, certified copy of decoted telegram, and Մ 577, copy of
encrypted telegram from the vali of Mamuret ul-Aziz, Sabit Bey, to the vilayet of Mamuret ul-Aziz, 3
November 1915, in Erzincan. in view of the date of the telegram, it is possible that Sabit took advan-
tage of the meeting to visit his family in Kemah, near Erzincan, after finishing his work. He did not
return to Mezreh until 16 November, with 200 young Armenians whom he ordered imprisoned in
the Red Konak: Jacobsen, Diary of a Danish Missionary, Harpoot, 1907–1919, op. cit., p. 110.
189. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, file XXIX, Մ 578, certified copy of decoded telegram, Մ 577/2, copy of
encrypted telegram from the temporary vali of Mamuret ul-Aziz, Süleyman Faik, to Sabit bey,
Erzincan, 3 November 1915.
190. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, file XXIX, Մ 579/3, copy of the encrypted telegram from the kaimakam
of Kahta to the mutesarif of Malatia, 12 December 1915.
191. Report from Davis to state Department, 9 February 1918: Davis, The Slaughterhouse Province, op.
cit., pp. 79–80.
192. Ibidem, p. 94.
193. Jacobsen, Diary of a Danish Missionary, Harpoot, 1907–1919, op. cit., p. 99, 112; cf. supra, p. 395.
194. Ibidem, p. 110.
195. BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 23, Harput, doc. 19, f° 27, “An Autodafé.”
196. Ibidem.
198. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, file 57, report to the Ministry of the Interior.
182, gives the official figure of 679 Armenians.
201. Kévorkian & Paboudjian, Les Arméniens dans l’Empire ottoman, op. cit., pp. 375–6 – that is,
10,880 Armenians; Karpat, op. cit., p. 182, gives the official figure of 10,091 in the kaza.
202. BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 10, Arapkir, f° 5, report by Kalust Kaloyan, Papert, 17 June
1917.
204. Ibidem.
205. BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 10, Arapkir, f° 17, report by Khachig Kardashian, born in
Arapkir, educated at Euphrates College, a cadet at the Officer’s Training School in Erzincan from
September 1914 to February 1915, was recovering from typhus in Arapkir.
206. BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 10, Arapkir, report by Kalust Kaloyan, ff. 6v°–7.
207. BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 10, Arapkir, report by Khachig Kardashian, f° 17v°.
208. BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 10, Arapkir, report by Kalust Kaloyan, f° 7v°, and report by
Khachig Kardashian, f° 19, gives the date of departure.
209. Ibidem, f° 8.
210. Ibidem, f° 8 and 19 and 20v°. These events were related by the gendarmes in the escort shortly
after they occurred.
211. BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 10, Arapkir, report by Khachig Kardashian, f° 19v°–20.
Jacobsen, Diary of a Danish Missionary, Harpoot, 1907–1919, op. cit., p. 65, reports that on 3 June,

Notes 907
the missionaries received a message informant them of the arrest of the Armenian ministers in
Peri and Arapkir.
212. BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 10, Arapkir, report by Khachig Kardashian, ff. 20v°–1.
213. Ibidem, f° 21
214. Ibidem, f° 21v°.
215. Ibidem, ff. 21v°–2; Atkinson, “The German, the Turk and the Devil Made a Triple alliance,” op.
cit., p. 39, notes that the missionaries learned of the massacre of the men of Arapkir on 26 June.
216. BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 10, Arapkir, report by Khachig Kardashian, f° 22.
217. Ibidem, f° 22v°.
218. BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 10, Arapkir, f° 9, report by Kalust Kaloyan.
219. Ibidem, ff. 9r°–v° and 22v°.
221. Ibidem, f° 10.
222. Ibidem, f° 11r°–v°.
223. Ibidem, f° 12.
224. Ibidem, f° 12v°.
225. Ibidem. Their escort headed back to Arapkir.
226. Ibidem, f° 13. At this point, the witness’ sister was turned over to a young captain who agreed to
take Kaloust with him as well. The Malatia Armenian population had not yet been deported.
227. See supra, p. 297, for an account of the destruction of a convoy from Erzerum in this gorge. BNu/
Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 10, Arapkir, ff. 1–4, reports by three survivors from the convoy
from Arapkir who reached Urfa and then Aleppo after crossing the Kahta gorge.
228. BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 10, Arapkir, report by Khachig Kardashian, f° 23–r°–v°.
The handful of artisans who were allowed to remain behind after converting to Islam, most of
whom were masons, were ultimately deported in their turn.
229. Ibidem, f° 23v°.
230. Ibidem, ff. 23v°–24. In view of the route they took, this must have been the “second convoy” from
Erzerum. It was later decimated in the Kahta gorge, although it had paid Haci Bedri Ağa 30,000
Turkish pounds gold in protection money (ibidem, f° 25): see supra, p. 294.
231. Ibidem, f° 25.
232. Ibidem, f° 26.
233. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Ի 215 and Յ 469–70, 473 (in Arm.), list of those responsible for the mas-
sacres and deportations in Arapkir.
234. Ibidem.
235. Ibidem.
237. Kévorkian & Paboudjian, Les Arméniens dans l’Empire ottoman, op. cit., pp. 377–81; Karpat, op.
cit., p. 182, gives the official figure of 9,888 Armenians and 676 “Greeks” for the whole of the kaza.
The Armenian villages were Abusher/Apchaka (Armenian pop. 1,920), Gamaragab (pop. 1,260),
Gurshla (pop. 256), Lijk (pop. 526), Perga/Pekir (pop. 1,170), Narvid/Navril (pop. 207), Vank
(pop. 150), Tsorag (pop. 70), Shrzu (pop. 320 Arm. orthodoxes), Mushaghga/Mechenkana (164
Arm. orthodoxes), Aghn/Aghin (pop. 319), Vaghshen/Vakshen (pop. 276), Kushna/Sowuk (pop.
397), Dzablvar/Zabiliar (pop. 16), Grani/Kir Ali (pop. 92), Hasgni/Haskini (pop. 70), Ehnetsig/
Ihnesik (pop. 231), Khoroch/ Khoruch (pop. 115), Dzak/Eyin (pop. 687), Mashgerd/Mashgir (pop.
496), and Saghmga/Samuku (pop. 279).
238. Aguni, History of the Massacre of One Million Armenians, op. cit., p. 174.
239. BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 2, Agn, report by Levon Boghosian, f° 1.
240. Aguni, History of the Massacre of One Million Armenians, op. cit., p. 175.
241. Ibidem.
242. Ibidem.
243. Ibidem.
244. Ibidem; Atkinson, “The German, the Turk and the Devil Made a Triple alliance,” op. cit., p. 38.
Atkinson notes that the missionaries in Harput learned on 26 June that massacres had taken
place in the region of Agn: she is probably referring to the murders of the men in the city as well
as in the villages. BNu/Fonds Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 2, Agn, report by Levon Boghosian, ff. 2–5.

245. Ibidem, f° 6.
246. Ibidem, f° 5r°–v°.
247. Ibidem, f° 6.
248. Ibidem, f° 6v°. Levon Boghosian succeeding in fleeing to Malatia at this time. There he gathered,
as we shall see, valuable information about the central prison and state “orphanage.”
249. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Ի 215 and Յ 468–9 (in French), list of those responsible for the massacres
and deportations in Eğin/Agn.
250. Ibidem. Most of these criminals were Turkish notables from Agn and the environs; there were
also a few Kurdish chieftains among them.
252. Hans Bauernfeind, Journal de Malatia 1915, edited by Méliné Pehlivanian & Tessa Hofmann,
in Raymond Kévorkian, L’Extermination des déportés arméniens ottomans dans les camps de con-
centration de Syrie-Mésopotamie (1915–1916), la Deuxième phase du génocide, RHAC II (1998),
pp. 245–325.
253. Kévorkian & Paboudjian, Les Arméniens dans l’Empire ottoman, op. cit., pp. 387–91. That is,
17,017 in 1914.
254. BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 31, Malatia, report by Hovhannes Khanghlarian, f° 2v°.
256. BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, doc. cit., file 31, report by H. Khanghlarian, f° 2, indicates that the
auxiliary primate protested these requisitions, only to be reprimanded by Captain Cavid, who
described the Armenians as “traitors.”
257. Ibidem, f° 3.
258. Ibidem; Bauernfeind, Journal de Malatia 1915, op. cit., p. 270, notes this fact in his Diary of 19
April 1915.
259. Ibidem, pp. 259 and 272, speaks of the mission’s domestic, the 17-year-old Krikor; his “mobiliza-
tion” took the form of imprisonment in the barracks in Malatia; BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, doc.
cit., file 31, report by H. Khanghlarian, f° 6v°, confirms that the second age group was drafted.
260. BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, doc. cit., file 31, report by H. Khanghlarian, f° 3v°.
261. Ibidem, ff. 3v°–4.
262. Bauernfeind, Journal de Malatia 1915, op. cit., p. 271.
263. BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, doc. cit., file 31, report by H. Khanghlarian, f° 4.
264. Bauernfeind, Journal de Malatia 1915, op. cit., p. 271, Diary of 16 May.
265. BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, doc. cit., file 31, report by H. Khanghlarian, f° 4.
266. Ibidem, f° 4.
267. Bauernfeind, Journal de Malatia 1915, op. cit., p. 272, Diary of 26 May. The minister does not
name Nâzım; he describes him as a “Müfetisch [representative] delegated by Constantinople.”
268. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, files XIX, XX/3 and XXIII, Յ 432–66 (transcript from modern Turk and
English translation), report, completed on 30 November 1918, of Captain Fazıl, a retired notable
from Malatia and former member of the town’s court, addressed to the grand vizier, the interior
and justice ministries, and the president of the Senate. [The report was later sent by courier to
the addresses just mentioned and to various other interested parties, such as the Patriarchate
Armenian and the Catholic Patriarchate], no. 45 from the list of 567 criminals recensed by
Captain Fazıl, which states that Nâzım took 20,000 Turkish pounds gold for his own personal
use.
269. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, file XXIII, Յ 470–1, responsible for the sancak of Malatia.
270. Bauernfeind, Journal de Malatia 1915, op. cit., p. 272, Diary du 26 mai.
271. Ibidem, pp. 261–2, does not know the name of the interim mutesarif, describing him as the kay-
makam of “Arrha” [that is, Agha, the administrative seat of the kaza of Akçadağ].
272. Aguni, History of the Massacre of one Million Armenians, op. cit., pp. 158–9, confirms that the
prefect was replaced.
273. Bauernfeind, Journal de Malatia 1915, op. cit., p. 279, Diary of 25 June.
274. BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, doc. cit., file 31, f° 6.
275. Bauernfeind, Journal de Malatia 1915, op. cit., p. 274, Diary of 9 June.
276. Bauernfeind, Journal de Malatia 1915, op. cit., pp. 257, 272, Diary of 26 May, indicates that
Keshishian was arrested on 25 May and then freed; it is Khanghlarian who reports that the four

Notes 909
men decided on a common course of action in prison: BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, doc. cit., file 31,
f° 4v°.
278. Ibidem, p. 273, Diary of 27 May.
279. BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, doc. cit., file 31, f° 4v°.
282. Ibidem, ff. 4v°–5.
283. Bauernfeind, Journal de Malatia 1915, op. cit., p. 287, Diary of 10 July.
285. Ibidem, ff. 5v°–6.
286. Ibidem, f° 6, estimates the number of worker-soldiers from Malatia assigned to this labor battalion
at 1,200, adding that most of them were “between 20 and 35.”
287. Ibidem, p. 277, Diary of 16 June.
288. Ibidem, p. 278, Diary of 24 June. “When I stubbornly insisted,” Bauernfeind writes, “that the
men’s poor wives be informed, at the very least, exactly where their husbands were, he gave me
to understand that he could not, because this was a rotten business.”
289. Ibidem, p. 278, Diary of 25 June; this massacre was brought up before the court-martial, in 1919;
APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Յ 465, doc no. 3, report by Captain Fazıl on Sabit bey; BNu/Fonds A.
Andonian, doc. cit., file 31, f° 6; Մալաթիոյ Իթթիհատական Ջոլիրի Սարքած Դիւային
Ահռելի Ջարդը [The Appalling Massacre Organized by the Ittihadist Band in Malatia],”
Tashink, 31 May 1919. Tied together in groups of ten, these men were led a short distance to the
banks of the Euphrates; there the çetes cut their throats and threw them into the river.
290. Ibidem; BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, doc. cit., file 31, f° 7r°–v°.
291. Ibidem, ff. 8–9. The author says that the volunteers had to pay a bribe of ten Turkish pounds in
order to enlist in the labor battalions.
292. Ibidem, f° 10.
294. Ibidem.
295. Ibidem.
296. Ibidem, p. 282, Diary of 5 July.
298. Ibidem. He also reports that “Mehmed Beg made a gift of the horse that belonged to the mur-
dered municipal physician to someone from Mezreh; the horse that had belong to the Catholic
bishop who was killed at night was given to Mustafa Ağa: he was already riding it today.”
299. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, file XXIX, Հ 138 and 139 (file XXIII), encrypted telegram from presi-
dent of the enquiry commission, H. Mazhar, to the Sublime Porte, Ministry of the Interior,
9 December 1915, in Mamuret ul-Aziz.
301. Ibidem, p. 292, Diary of 18 July. The minister states that the squadron of çetes (he uses the term
“baschi bosuk”) followed the convoy, “probably because the escort of gendarmes had not man-
aged to massacre so large a group of people unaided.”
303. Ibidem, p. 295, Diary du 22 July. The minister says that the group was headed for “Frudschir.”
“Miss Graffen,” an American missionary from Sıvas, whose real name was Mary L. Graffam, was
traveling with this group.
305. Ibidem, p. 307, Diary of 1 August.
306. Ibidem, p. 307, Diary of 5 August.
307. Ibidem, p. 300, Diary of 22 July. Bauernfeind also observes that Mustafa Ağa “is in any case
hated because he is a gâvur [unbeliever] and is in constant danger” (ibidem, p. 283, Diary of 7
July).
308. Ibidem, p. 285, Diary of 2 July. The allusion is obviously to the atrocities inflicted on Belgium’s
civilian population by the German troops.

310. BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, doc. cit., file 31, f° 10. These men, divided into three groups, were
killed in Taş Tepe in the Kızıl Göl basin and at the huge well in Kündebeg (ibidem).
311. BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, doc. cit., file 31, f° 10v°. The soldiers in the escort demanded five küruş
per head for allowing the men to enter a khan.
312. Ibidem. The author confirms the reports of others survivors to the effect that the last surviving
men and adolescents were killed there and thrown into the Tohma Çay (see supra, pp. 404–5).
The property taken from the deportees was brought to the state warehouse near Malatia.
313. See supra, p. 405; Bauernfeind, Journal de Malatia 1915, op. cit., p. 291. On 16 July, Bauernfeind
witnessed the arrival of “nine carts full of children from the region of Sıvas. The children con-
firmed that they were separated from their parents on the way so that they could go to school
here; they don’t know what became of their parents.”
317. BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 2, Agn, report by Levon Boghosian, ff. 8v°–9. His young
brother and his sister starved to death there. He himself converted to Islam to obtain this post as
a driver.
318. Ibidem, f° 9r°–v°. Bauernfeind also remarks that some eight hundred orphans were roaming the
city around 29 July: Bauernfeind, Journal de Malatia 1915, op. cit., p. 306, Diary of 29 July.
319. BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 2, Agn, report by Levon Boghosian, f° 8r°–v°.
321. Ibidem.
323. Bauernfeind, Journal de Malatia 1915, op. cit., pp. 290 and 294, Diary of 8 and 20 July.
326. Ibidem, p. 283, Diary of 7 July, does not give his name, which may be found in list of those respon-
sible for the massacres and deportations in Malatia: APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, file XXIII, Յ 470–1.
327. Bauernfeind, Journal de Malatia 1915, op. cit., p. 281, Diary of 4 July, note: “According to Habeş [a
Turk employed in the mission], only 80% of the Turks approve of the measures taken against the
Armenians.”
330. BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, doc. cit., file 31, f° 13v°, states that the families of the young men
serving in the labor battalions formed late in June were spared, as were a few households that
managed to bribe local officials, adding that the doors of the Armenians’ homes were sealed and
that guards were posted around them.
331. Ibidem, f° 14.
332. Ibidem, f° 14r°–v°.
333. Ibidem, ff. 15–16v°.
334. Ibidem, f° 16v°.
335. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, file XXIX, Մ 578, certified copy of the decoded telegram, Մ 577, copy of
encrypted telegram from the mutesarif of Malatia, Hüseyin Serri Bey, to the vilayet of Mamuret
ul-Aziz, 31 October/13 November 1915 (trad. in French: ibidem, Զ 150).
336. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, file XXIX, Մ 579/2, copy of encrypted telegram from the vali of Mamuret
ul–Aziz, Sabit Bey, to the mutesarif of Malatia, 12/25 November 1915 (trad. In French: ibidem, Զ
152).
337. Kévorkian & Paboudjian, Les Arméniens dans l’Empire ottoman, op. cit., p. 391; the Armenian
villages are: Vartan, Kevik/Gevrig, Samosat/Samsat, Kantara, Khrafi, Shabi, Kilisan, Dardghan,
Gozan, Marmara, Gölbunar, Hayg, Zurna, Beshrin, Tavdir, Uremn, Zarkov, Ishek, Terpetil and
Bozuk; Karpat, op. cit., p. 182, says that there were 3,384 Armenians in the kaza.
338. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Յ 432–66, doc. cit., report by Captain Fazıl.
339. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, file XXIII, Յ 470–1, list of those responsible for the massacres and depor-
tations in the sancak of Malatia, list of murderers in Adiyaman.
340. Ibidem.

Notes 911
341. APC/APJ, file XXX, Յ 432–66, doc. cit., report by Captain Fazıl; Garabed Kapigian,
Եղեռնապատում Փոքուն Հայոց եւ Նորին Մեծի Մայրաքաղաքին Սեբաստիոյ [History of
the Holocaust of Armenia Minor and Its Grand Capital, Sıvas], Boston 1924, pp. 258–60.
342. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, file XXIX, Մ 577, certified copy of the decoded telegram, Մ 577/1, copy
of the encrypted telegram from the kaymakam of Hüsni Mansur to the mutesarif of Malatia,
Hüseyin Serri Bey, 3 November 1915 (supplement to the telegram of 31 October).
343. Ibidem.
of the encrypted telegram from the mutesarif of Malatia, Hüseyin Serri Bey, to the vilayet of
Mamuret ul-Aziz, 5 November 1915 (supplement to the telegram of 31 October), confirms this
information.
345. Kévorkian & Paboudjian, Les Arméniens dans l’Empire ottoman, op. cit., pp. 390–1; Nahie of
Şiro: Keferdiz (400 Arm.), Aghvan (400), Umrun (350), Damlu (30), Mamaş (40), Tepehan
(100), Kraj (130), Kiavuz, Deretepe, Çamçik, Arguçay; Nahie of Gerger: Gargar (450) and
2,400 Armenians in Komik, Karun, Kardigi, Bayiki, Bizman, Tillo/Daro, Terkidin, Mişrakli,
Pütürge, Temşias, Vank, Kheçdur, Koragli, Cermekan, Çapan, Pirakhi, Şafkan, Arkavuni,
Azmay and Halur; Nahie of Merdesi: there were 2,425 Armenians (312 households) in Böyuk
Bağ, Hasandigin, Hores, Helim, Karatülbe, Teltela/Til, Salmadin, Narnka, Perag/Piris, Ulbiş,
Kulbuc, Kekerdiş, Hut, Kordiye; Nahie of Zeravikan: 100 households, soit 820 Armenians, in
Bervedol/Bawdol, Geyikan, Kolik, Karaçor, Havank, Blika, Meşrag, Karatur, Gudiş, Perdeso/
Berbender, Seyd Mahmud; Karpat, op. cit., p. 182, puts the number of the Armenians in the kaza
at 750.
of the encrypted telegram from the kaymakam by interim of Kahta to the mutesarif of Malatia, 15
September 1915.
347. See supra, pp. 297 and 405.
348. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, file XXIX, Հ 138, 139 (file XXIII), encrypted telegram from the presi-
dent of the enquiry commission, H. Mazhar, to the Sublime Porte, Ministry of the Interior, 9
December 1915, in Mamuret ul-Aziz.
349. APC/APJ, files XIX, XX/3 and XXIII, Յ 432–66, doc. cit., report by Captain Fazıl, accused
no. 475.
350. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, file XXIX, Մ 578, certified copy of the decoded telegram, Մ 579/3, copy of
encrypted telegram from the kaymakam of Kahta to the mutesarif of Malatia, 12 December 1915
(trad. In French: ibidem, Զ 153).
p. 182, gives the official figure of 1,970 Armenians in the kaza.
352. Avédis Tékéian, Պէհէսնի Հայութեան Գողգոթան [The Calvary of the Armenians from Behesni],
Beirut 1956.
353. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, file XXIII, Հ 156, telegram no. 545, from the president of the enquiry
commission, H. Mazhar, to the Sublime Porte, Ministry of the Interior, 30 December 1915, in
Dyarbekir, report on the kaymakam of Behesni, Edhem Kadri Bey, and his illicit gains at the
expense of the commission responsible for abandoned property.
354. Ibidem.
355. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, file XXIX, Մ 578, certified copy of the decoded telegram, Մ 579/1, copy of
encrypted telegram from the mutesarif of Malatia, Hüseyin Serri Bey, to the vilayet of Mamuret
ul-Aziz, 5 November 1915 (trad. in French: ibidem, Զ 152).
p. 182, gives the official figure of 466 Armenians in the kaza.
357. APC/APJ, file XIX, XX/3 and XXIII, Յ 432–66, doc. cit., report by Captain Fazıl, accused no. 102.
358. Ibidem, accused no. 406.
360. See supra, p. 404.
361. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, file XIX, XX/3 and XXIII, Յ 432–66, The long report by Captain Fazıl,
a judge at the court-martial of Malatia during the war and a local notable, as well as that of
General Vehib Pasha, comprise two of the main Turkish accounts. Fazıl’s report was completed

on 30 November 1918 and later sent by courier to the grand vizier, the interior and justice min-
istries, the president of the Senate and “to various interested parties.” It clearly indicates how
orders were transmitted: from Constantinople.
368. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, file XXIII, Յ 470–1, list of those responsible in the sancak of Malatia.
The numbers refer to parts of Captain Fazıl’s report: APC/APJ, file XIX, XX/3 and XXIII, Յ
432–66.
369. Ibidem. The numbers in parentheses correspondent to those in the lists of the guilty provided by
Fazıl; the names without numbers are given in the Patriarchate’s report.
371. Riggs, Days of Tragedy in Armenia, op. cit., pp. 108–17; Piranian, The Holocaust of Kharpert, op.
cit., pp. 516, 522.
372. Kévorkian & Paboudjian, Les Arméniens dans l’Empire ottoman, op. cit., pp. 382, 387.
373. Jacobsen, Diary of a Danish Missionary, Harpoot, 1907–1919, op. cit., p. 83, gives the date of depar-
ture and states that “no one knew the real reasons” for this voyage.
374. Kévorkian & Paboudjian, Les Arméniens dans l’Empire ottoman, op. cit., p. 382. The villages are:
Enjeghag (240 Armenians), Ergan (30), Aghzunig/Arsunik (65), Havshakar (260), Peyig (35),
Sigedig (66), Sorpian (130), Zembegh (81), Tashdag (135), Sin (55), Halvori (32), Halvorivank
(78), Haghtug (297), Akrag (42), Dekke (42); Karpat, op. cit., p. 182, gives the official figure of
1,151 Armenians in the kaza.
375. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, file 57, report to the Ministry of Interior.
182, gives the official figure of 1,483 Armenians in the kaza.
182, gives the official figure of 7,105 Armenians in the kaza.
cit., p. 182, gives the official figure of 3,772 Armenians and 215 “Greeks” in the kaza.
382. BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 39, Chemshgadzak, f° 14, report by Shavarsh
Sgheribarmalian.
383. BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 39, Chemshgadzak, f° 1, report by V. Papazian.
384. Ibidem, f° 2. D’après BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 39, Chemshgadzak, f° 17, report by
Shavarsh Sgheribarmalian, these men were murdered on the banks of the Euphrates the day after
their departure, around 20 June.
385. BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 39, Chemshgadzak, ff. 2–3.
386. Ibidem, ff. 4–5.
387. BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 39, Chemshgadzak, ff. 6–8, report by Azniv, Annig, and
Marta Mardikian.
388. Ibidem, f° 6.
389. Ibidem, f° 7.
390. Ibidem, f° 7.
391. BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 39, Chemshgadzak, ff. 18–22, report by Shavarsh
Sgheribarmalian.
of encrypted telegram from the vali of Mamuret ul-Aziz, Sabit Bey, to the mutesarif of Malatia, 21
August 1915, in Mezreh.
393. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, file XXIX, Մ 579/3: copy of encrypted telegram from the vali of Mamuret
ul-Aziz, Sabit Bey, to the mutesarif of Malatia, 10/23 September 1915, in Mezreh.

Notes 913
394. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Մ 578, certified copy of the decoded telegram, Մ 578/4, copy of encrypted
telegram from the minister of the interior, Talât, to the vali of Mamuret ul-Aziz, Sabit Bey, 19
December 1915.
395. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, file XXIX, Մ 578, certified copy of the decoded telegram, Մ 578/2: copy
of the 20 December 1915 encrypted telegram from the mutesarif of Malatia to the commanders
of the gendarmerie in the districts subordinate to Malatia, as well as to the müdir.
396. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Մ 578/5, copy of encrypted telegram from the vali of Mamuret ul-Aziz,
Sabit Bey, to mutesarif of Malatia, 20 December 1915, in Mezreh.
397. P.R.O., FO 371/6500, Turkish War Criminals, the file of no. 2686, Sabit Bey, interned in Malta: Vartkes
Yeghiayan, British Foreign Office dossiers on Turkish War Criminals, La Verne 1991, pp. 20–38.
398. Ibidem, no. 2807, pp. 358–70.
399. See supra, pp. 383, 405; Ibidem, no. 2816, Mehmet Nuri bey, interned in Malta, pp. 413–28.
231, doc. no. 314, Constantinople, 14 February 1919, report by Dr. Zaven Vahram, physician in
Mezreh’s military hospital (“Harputh” in the text), which confirms Bedri role in the massacres in
Malatia.
401. See supra, pp. 398, 409, 411, 414, 420.
402. See supra, p. 419.
403. See supra, pp. 409–10: Let us note that Bauernfeind, although he mistakenly believed that Resneli
Nâzım was a government official, provides crucial details about his activity in Malatia; APC/APJ,
file XIX, XX/3 and XXIII, Յ 432–66, copy of the report by the Captain Fazıl, retired and notable
from Malatia: Nâzım bey, no. 45 robbed 20 000 Turkish Lira.
404. P.R.O., FO 371/6500, Turkish War Criminals, no. 2686, Sabit Bey, interned in Malta, annex C,
letter from Faik to Sabit, in Dersim [thus probably datable to the first days of August]: Vartkes
Yeghiayan, British Foreign Office dossiers on Turkish War Criminals, La Verne 1991, pp. 31–2.
405. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, file XXIX, Մ 576, encrypted telegram no. 5, from Erzerum headquar-
ter, from the head of the Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa, Bahaeddin Şakir, to the vali of Mamuret ul-Aziz,
Sabit Bey, for transmission to the delegate of the CUP, Resneli Nâzım Bey, encrypted, with the
decoded version, 21 Haziran 1331 (4 juillet 1915), in Takvim-ı Vakayi no. 3540 (at the session of
the trial of 12 April 1919), 5 May 1919, p. 6, col. 1–2, and in annex of the verdict of the trial of
Mamuret ul-Aziz, Takvim-ı Vakayi no. 3771, 13 January 1920, p. 48, col. 1. After the verdict of the
trial of Mamuret ul-Aziz was published, the Istanbul press mistakenly dated this document to 21
April; the mistake has been perpetuated to the present day, making the content of the document
seem improbable.
406. BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 23, Harput, f° 54, report by Araks Mgrdichian, 21, edu-
cated at Euphrates College, was the daughter of the British vice-consul in Dyarbekir, Thomas
Mgrdichian.
407. Ibidem.
408. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Յ 430, 467, 474, list of responsible in the vilayet of Harput.
409. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Յ 465, doc no. 3, report by Captain Fazıl on Sabit Bey.
410. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Ժ 99, Յ 229, Յ 243–5 (in French), dossier des Turcs inculpés dans le procès
des massacres de Mamuret ul-Aziz, 13 September 1920, no. 2, file 2.
1919, p. 7, col. 2 and the full deposition of handwritten pages: APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Հ 171–82.
412. Le Spectateur d’Orient, 13 June 1919: that “the preliminary investigation” – in other words, the
pretrial investigation of the case – was terminated in June, and that, in this period, Resneli
Nâzım, Bahaeddin Şakir, and Mehmed Nuri were “fugitives from justice,” whereas Sabit Bey had
been transferred to Malta by the British.
413. La Renaissance, no. 302, 21 November 1919, “Procès de Mamuret ul-Aziz,” announces that, on
20 November, the ex-deputy from Dersim, Nuri Bey, and head of the public educational system,
Ferid Bey, were to go on trial for perpetrating “massacres and deportations.”
414. Verdict of the trial of Mamuret ul-Aziz, 13 January 1920: Takvim-ı Vakayi, no. 3771, 9 February
1920, pp. 48–9.
415. Davis, The Slaughterhouse Province, op. cit., pp. 223–4.
416. Ibidem, pp. 229–31.

8 Deportations and Massacres in the Vilayet of Sıvas

2. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Դ 370. Also found here were Kyzilbaş and a Kurdish minority.
3. P.R.O., FO 371/6500, Turkish War Criminals, the file of prisoner no. 2719, Muammer Bey, interned
in Malta: edited by Vartkes Yeghiayan, British Foreign Office dossiers on Turkish War Criminals, La
Verne 1991, p. 89.
4. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, doc. n° 23, Les signes prédisant les horreurs futures à Sıvas; BNu/Fonds
A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 49, Sebaste, ff. 1–103, [Report] by Garabed Kapigian (1919), reprinted
in Եղե ռնապատում փոքուն Հայոց եւ նորին ﬔծի մայրաքաղաքի Սեբաստիոյ [History
of the Holocaust of Armenia Minor and His Great Capital, Sebastia], Boston 1924, pp. 17 et 24;
Kapigian adds that Muammer had earlier served as an assistant prefect and a prefect in Kangal,
Aziziye, and Kayseri, as governor of Adana, and, later, of Konya.
5. Kapigian, op. cit., pp. 18–19.
6. Ibidem, p. 21. Muammer created, notable, co-operatives in Aziziye.
7. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, doc. n° 23, doc. cit.
8. Kapigian, op. cit., p. 21.
9. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, doc. n° 23, doc. cit.; Kapigian, op. cit., p. 27.
10. Puzantion, n° 5340, 2 May 1914; Kapigian, op. cit., p. 23; Arakel Patrik (ed.), Պատմագիրք-
Յուշամատեան Սեբաստիոյ [History of Armenians of Sebaste and Its Provinces], I, Beirut 1974,
pp. 717–18.
12. Ibidem, p. 30; APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, doc. n° 23, doc. cit.
13. Kapigian, op. cit., pp. 31–3. Kapigian says that the Armenian merchants’ stocks were unsparingly
plundered.
14. Ibidem, p. 42.
15. Ibidem, pp. 34–5. A few weeks later, news of the virtually complete destruction of this army corps
arrived.
16. Ibidem, pp. 44–5.
17. Ibidem, pp. 43–4.
18. Ibidem, pp. 39–40. Their real estate was immediately confiscated and the Jesuit chapel was trans-
formed into a mosque. The interim vice-consul of France, Manug Ansurian, was forced by the vali
to hand over the keys of the vice-consulate to the authorities (ibidem, pp. 40–1).
19. Ibidem, pp. 42–4.
20. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Թ 716, , encrypted telegram n° 47, from the minister of the interior, Talât,
to the vali of Sıvas, Muhammer, 8/21 December 1914 (8 Kanuni Evvel 1330). French translation:
ibidem, Զ 32).
21. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, doc. n° 23, doc. cit., reveals that the Armenian priest of Suşehir informed
those concerned of the circumstances surrounding the murder. The prelate of Sıvas, Bishop
Kalemkiarian, promptly went to see the vali, who told him: “We have no official information; I
will, however, place a call immediately, and communicate the answer to you.”; Kapigian, op. cit.,
pp. 46–7; Zaven Der Yeghiayan, Memoirs, op. cit., p. 66; APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Մ 720, encrypted
telegram from the judge Hüseyin Zehni, to the kaza of Suşehir, 20 December 1914/ 2 January 1915
(20 Kanuni Evvel 1330). French translation: ibidem, Զ 36–7.
22. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Մ 718 (Ottoman original, n° 230), encrypted telegram from the kaymakam
of Suşehir, Ahmed, to the mutesarifat of Karahisar, n° 230, 2 January 1915 (20 Kanuni Evvel 1330).
French translation: ibidem, Զ 34).
23. Ibidem.
24. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Մ 719, encrypted telegram from the mutesarif of Karahisar, Hilmi, to the
vilayet of Sıvas, 20 December 1914/2 January 1915 (20 Kanuni Evvel 1330). French translation:
ibidem, Զ 35).
25. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Մ 720, encrypted telegram from the judge Hüseyin Zehni, to the kaza of
Suşehir, 20 December/2 January 1915 (20 Kanuni Evvel 1330).
26. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Մ 728, encrypted telegram from the kaymakam of Suşehir, Ahmed, to the
mutesarif of Karahisar, 25 December/7 January 1915 (20 Kanuni Evvel 1330); Մ 729, encrypted

Notes 915
telegram from the kaymakam of Suşehir, Ahmed, to the mutesarif of Karahisar, 26 December
1914/8 January 1915.
28. Zaven Der Yéghiayan, Memoirs, op. cit., p. 66.
29. Kapigian, op. cit., pp. 49–50; Aguni, op. cit., pp. 77–8.
31. Ibidem, from the newspaper Kızıl Irmak; Aguni, op. cit., p. 25.
32. Ibidem, p. 30; APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, doc. n° 23, doc. cit.
33. Born in Govdun, Murad Khrimian (1874–1918) had since 1907 been one of the leaders of the
ARF in the eastern provinces. At the time, he was living in Govdun, an Armenian village
near Hafik, some 40 kilometers east of Sıvas. It was probably here that Murad went out to meet
Enver.
34. BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 49, Sebaste, Սեբաստիա եւ իր գիւղերը [Sebaste and His
Villages ], f° 10v°.
35. Cf. supra, p. 221, n. 44; Kapigian, op. cit., pp. 52–3; BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 49, doc.
cit., f° 10v°.
36. Ibidem, ff. 5v°-6.
37. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Մ 497, document transmitted by the vilayet of Sıvas to the Administrative
Enquiry Commission directed by Hasan Mazhar.
38. BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 49, Sebaste, doc. cit., f° 9.
40. BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 49, Sebaste, doc. cit., f° 11. Among the officers commanding
these men were Muavinli Sıdkı Bey and Muheddin Bey, as well as Dr. Rüşdi Bey, who “spoke in
French.”
42. Ibidem, f° 12. This means that the squadron was under the orders of the Special Organization.
43. Ibidem, f° 12v°. This meeting must have taken place in early February.
45. BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 49, Sebaste, doc. cit., ff. 12v°-13; Aguni, op. cit., p. 79.
46. Ibidem, p. 80.
47. Rohrbach was a staunch advocate of German penetration of Asia Minor and headed an asso-
ciation that promoted it; Hayranian belonged to this association: cf. Vahakn Dadrian, German
Responsibility in the Armenian Genocide, Watertown 1996, p. 114.
48. BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 49, Sebaste, f° 13.
49. Ibidem; Kapigian, op. cit., p. 55, points out that 300 of these prisoners survived and were interned
in the Sanasarian lycée or in the monastery of St. Nshan; the monastery had been confiscated by
the military authorities and converted into a prison.
50. Ibidem, p. 53; Aguni, op. cit., p. 79.
51. Ibidem; Kapigian, op. cit., p. 53; P.R.O., FO 371/ 6501, Turkish War Criminals, the file of prisoner
no. n° 2719, Muammer Bey, interned in Malta: Vartkes Yeghiayan, British Foreign Office dossiers on
Turkish War Criminals, op. cit., p. 92.
52. Cf. supra, p. 191.
54. APC/PCI Bureau, those responsible for the deportations and massacres: BNu, ms. 289, ff. 27–3,
those responsible in Sıvas.
55. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Յ 168, file of Gani Bey must not be confused with Abdül Gani, the respon-
sible secretary in Edirne who was brought to trial in 1919; the verdict in the trial of the CUP
responsible secretaries and delegates, handed down on 8 January 1920: Takvim-ı Vakayi, n° 3772,
February 1920, pp. 1–5, mentions Abdül Gani Bey, whose trial was adjourned.
57. P.R.O., FO 371/6500, Turkish War Criminals, the file of prisoner no. 2726, Gani Bey, interned
in Malta: Vartkes Yeghiayan, British Foreign Office dossiers on Turkish War Criminals, op. cit.,
p. 105; BNu, ms. 289, ff. 27–33, those responsible in Sıvas.

60. BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 6, Amasia, f° 2, testimony of Heghine Begian; Aguni, op.
cit., p. 81; Kapigian, op. cit., p. 58. These men were put to death in early April, in a place known as
Çerçi Deresi, two hours from Sıvas on the road to Kayseri (ibidem).
61. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, doc. n° 23, doc. cit.; Aguni, op. cit., pp. 81–2; Kapigian, op. cit., pp. 59–60.
The city learned of these murders from Greek woodcutters who had been working near the place
where the massacre took place. According to an account by Lusaper Boghosian, the wife of the
municipal physician, it was Gani who ordered the 12 notables from Sıvas arrested and organized
their execution: P.R.O., FO 371/6500, Turkish War Criminals, the file of prisoner no. 2726, Gani
Bey, interned in Malta: Vartkes Yeghiayan, British Foreign Office dossiers on Turkish War Criminals,
op. cit., pp. 104–5.
63. BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 49, Sebaste, f° 13v°, “Sebaste and his villages”; Aguni, op.
cit., pp. 82–3; Kapigian, op. cit., pp. 62–3.
p. 178, gives the official figure of 82,915 Armenians in the sancak.
66. Kévorkian & Paboudjian, Les Arméniens dans l’Empire ottoman, op. cit., p. 235; Kapigian, op. cit.,
p. 64.
68. Supra, p. 431.
69. BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 49, Sebaste, f° 14, “Sebaste and his villages”; Kapigian, op.
cit., p. 67.
70. Ibidem.
71. Ibidem, p. 68.
72. Ibidem.
73. Ibidem.
74. Ibidem, p. 70.
75. Ibidem, pp. 70–1.
78. Ibidem, pp. 77–8.
79. BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 49, Sebaste, f° 14, “Sebaste and his villages.” Several
encrypted telegrams dated 2, 3, and 4 May 1915 stating the number of Armenians arrested in
the Sıvas region are now held in Jerusalem: APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Մ 457; there also exists a list,
prepared in advance by a commission, approved by the vali [of Sıvas], and signed by Captain Fazıl,
of 160 Armenians who were deported at night to the place where they were massacred: APC/APJ,
PCI Bureau, Յ 440.
80. P.R.O., FO 371/6500, Turkish War Criminals, the file of prisoner no. 2719, Muammer Bey, interned
pp. 93–5, testimony of Arusiag Iskian.
81. “Ինչ՞պէս նահատակուեցաւ Թոգատի Առաջնորդը, Շաւարշ Ծ. Վրդ. Սահակեանը [How
the Primate of Tokat, Father Shavarsh Sahagian, Was Martyred ?],” Zhoghovurt, no. 41, 13 December
1918, p. 1.
82. Liliane Sewny, an American who was married to an Armenian doctor, wrote about this to James
Barton, 10 March 1916: Toynbee, The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, 1915–1916,
op. cit., p. 336
84. Ibidem, p. 87; Kapigian, op. cit., p. 79; BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 49, Sebaste, f° 179,
“Ամբաստանագիր-Տեղեկագիր Սեբաստիոյ Կուսակալութեան [Accusation Report about
the Vilayet of Sıvas]”; “Sebaste and his villages.” According to Reverend Ernest C. Partridge, the
head of the American mission in Sıvas, between 1,500 and 2,000 men were imprisoned; the vali
promise to Partridge “de bien traiter” these prisoners: letter from Ernest C. Partridge, 13 July 1915,
in Toynbee, The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, 1915–1916, op. cit., p. 326, did not,
however, have the inventory of the archbishopric at his disposal.
85. Ibidem, p. 87; Kapigian, op. cit., pp. 79–81.

Notes 917
86. Letter from Ernest C. Partridge, 13 July 1915, in Toynbee, The Treatment of Armenians in the
Ottoman Empire, 1915–1916, op. cit., p. 326
87. Kapigian, op. cit., p. 82, notes that most of the policemen came from Rumelia.
88. Ibidem, p. 85.
89. Ibidem, p. 86.
90. Ibidem, p. 89.
91. P.R.O., FO 371/ 6500, Turkish War Criminals, the file of prisoner no. 2726, Gani bey, interned
p. 103.
92. BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 49, Sebaste, f° 179, “Ամբաստանագիր-Տեղեկագիր
Սեբաստիոյ Կուսակալութեան [Accusation Report about the Vilayet of Sıvas],” Aleppo, 27
February 1919; Kapigian, op. cit., pp. 90–1.
93. BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 49, Sebaste, f° 179, doc. cit.
94. Kapigian, op. cit., pp. 91–2. Also convoked by the vali and present at this scene were Khachadur
Tanderjian, Garabed Shahinian, and Mirijan Odabashian, as well as the parliamentary deputies
Hoca Emindedip and Rasim, the commander of the gendarmerie Halil Rifat, and the police
chief, Rifat: Memory of Mgr Knel Kalemkiarian, edited by Arakel Patrik, II, op. cit., pp. 11–12.
95. Ibidem, pp. 95–6.
96. Ibidem, p. 98.
97. Ibidem, pp. 100–1.
98. Ibidem, pp. 103–4: on 5 July, 400 households from Küçük Bengiler; on 6 July, 500 households from
Böyük Bengiler; on 7 July, 550 households from the lower quarter of Böyük Bengiler, as well as
the Protestant community and the male and female boarding students at the American middle
school; on 8 July, 450 households from Böyük Bengiler as well as the Catholic community; on 9
July, 400 households from the Hoğtarı and Ard neighborhoods; on 11 July, 350 households from
Köse Dere and Davşan Bayir; on 12 July, 400 families from Pekmez Sokak and Blejents; on 13
July, 400 households from Kayseri Kapı, Ace Mahale, and Çavuş Paşa; on 14 July, 350 households
from the parish of St. Sarkis; on 15 July, 400 households from Karod Sokak, Dzadzug Aghpiur,
Holy Savior, Ğanlı Bağçe, Hasanlı, Taykesens, and Hin Paşi; on 16 July, 500 households from
the quarter around the cathedral, Hendek Kenar, Ğurşunlu, and Jivani Dzag; on 17 July, 250
households from Ermeni Mahale; on 18 July, 400 households from Sarı Şeyh, Baldır Pazar, and
Sev Hogh.
99. Ibidem, pp. 104–5.
100. Ibidem, pp. 106–8. They would be killed after bringing in the harvest.
101. Ibidem, pp. 108–10.
102. BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 49, Sebaste, f° 179r°-v°, “Accusation report about the vilayet
of Sıvas,” doc. cit.
103. Ibidem, ff. 179v°-180v°; Kapigian, op. cit., pp. 115–420.
104. Ibidem, pp. 115–27.
105. Ibidem, pp. 129–33.
106. Ibidem, pp. 139–41.
107. Ibidem, pp. 142–9. Kapigian observes that the president of the commission granted his convoy
“an exceptional amnesty”; he did not have any of the men in it killed (ibidem, p. 149).
108. Ibidem, pp. 163–6.
109. Ibidem, pp. 173–8.
110. Ibidem, pp. 179–201, lists the names of hundreds of people from Sıvas who were put to death in
Hasançelebi.
111. Bauernfeind, Journal de Malatia 1915, op. cit., p. 308, Diary of 11 August 1915.
112. Ibidem, pp. 309–10.
114. Cf. supra, p. 420.
115. Cf. supra, p. 404.
116. Cf. supra, pp. 399, 405, 423
117. Cf. supra, pp. 405, 413; Kapigian, op. cit., p. 243, notes that it’s the boys under 8.

119. Ibidem, p. 237.

120. Ibidem, pp. 236, 238.
121. Cf. supra.
123. Ibidem, pp. 263–4.
124. The survivors from these convoys took two distinct routes: one led from Birecik through Nissbin,
Rumkale, Ayntab, Bab, Mumbuc, Aleppo, and Rakka to Der Zor, the other from Urfa to Ras ul-
Ayn by way of Viranşehir.
125. Kévorkian & Paboudjian, Les Arméniens dans l’Empire ottoman, op. cit., pp. 247–8; Karpat, op. cit.,
p. 178, states that there were a total of 11,376 Armenians in the kaza. The Armenian villages were
Govdun (pop. 1,901), Tavshanlu (114), Tuzhisar/Aghdk (2,077), Akpunar (853), Kotni (770), Torosi
(202), Khorsana (1,335), Gavdara (600), Khandzar (790), Gavra (783), Yenije (226), Yarhisar/Chejghenig
(1,250), Prapert (622), Voghnovid (130), Baghchejik (600), Horohon (458), Todorag (720), Shahin/
Jenjin (278), Kemeris (673) Borazur (34), Stanoz (710), Ttmaj (780), and Sarıhasan (151).
126. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Յ 168, file 37, the criminals of Koçhisar.
127. Cf. supra, p. 437.
129. Ibidem, f° 124.
130. Ibidem, ff. 124–5.
131. Ibidem, f° 125.
p. 178, states that there were a total of 6,056 Armenians in the kaza. The Armenian villages were
Alakilise (pop. 1,146), Karhad (718), Tekeli (168), Karaboğaz (462), Keçeyurd (1 100), çayköy (95),
Emin çiftlik (60), and Miadun.
133. Cf. supra, p. 437.
135. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Ի 168, those responsible in Zara.
136. Account by Sahag Hovhannesian, the blacksmith’s nephew, given to his grandson in August
1973.
p. 178, states that there were a total of 1,379 Armenians.
138. Kévorkian & Paboudjian, Les Arméniens dans l’Empire ottoman, op. cit., pp. 240–1: the princi-
pal villages were Şarkışla (pop. 257), Temejik (227), Yapaltun (1,386), Karapunar (690), çisanlu
(1,516), Karagöl (2,040), Alakilise (275), Shepni (1 350), Dendel (1 989), Burhan (1016), Tekmen
(819), Paşa (383), Topadj (656), Kurtlukaya (316), Kantaroz (463), Patrenos (845) and Ğazımağara
(790); Karpat, op. cit., p. 178, states that there were a total of 13,694 Armenians in the kaza.
140. Ibidem, f° 129.
141. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, file 33, pp. 1–25, report on the massacres and deportations in the vilayet
of Sıvas, Aleppo, 27 February 1919, p. 1 (in arm.). Those known to have carried out the massacres
were Hacibeyoğlu Arslan bey, Hacibeyoğlu Adil bey, Hacibeyoğlu Şevki bey, Cadıbeyoğlu Yahya
bey, Cadıbeyoğlu Mahil bey, Cadıbeyoğlu Osman bey, Mahmudoğlu Fazla, Mahmudoğlu Mehmed
bey, Mahmudoğlu Hafi, Mulazım Bahri, Deli Beşiroğlu Ömer, Deli Beşiroğlu Seyfi, Deli Beşiroğlu
Fikri, Deli Beşiroğlu Mükhtar, Köse Ahmedoğlu Sarı Mehmed, Sarnınoğlu Emir, Sarınınoğlu
Hasan, Kayserlı Cemaloğlu Kenan, Cabaroğlu Yusuf, Cabaroğlu Haci Nezir, Seyidağaoğlu Seyfi,
Seyidağaoğlu Husni, Tütüncioğlu Şehir Ali, Beyleroğlu Ömer, Cücükci İsmail and his sons,
Cücükci Şaban (brother of İsmail), Hoca Ahmedoğlu Fayk, Şabanınoğlu Bahri, Cafaroğlu Seydi
Halil, Isamoğlan Haci Mustafa, Kör Velioğlu Beşir çavuş, Hoca Mehmed, Biraderi Haci Kürd,
Kalfa Ahmedoğlu Behran, Cırıkhoğlu Mustafa, Azkaglaoğlu, Bekir and Keltesal, Kazıkcıoğlu
Mehmed and his sons, Kazıkcıoğlu Halil, Abdioğlu Ali, Tütüncioğlu Arif and his brothers,
Tütüncioğlu Kadir Osman, Bostancıoğlu Sansar, Bostancıoğlu Bahar, çopüroğlu Ömer, Mustafa,
Kuyucı İbrahim and Hamid, Sıvaslı jandarma Ladiker, Şarkışlayi Hüseyin Çavuş, Eyercilı Adıl
Çavuş, Kareozlı Mahmud and Kenan Pehlivan, Kör Muzayiroğlu Ömer Osman, Kör Muzayiroğlu
Kara Fazlı, and Ekizcelı Veli and his sons, Terkianlıoğlu Veli Mehmed.
142. Patrik (ed.), op. cit., II, pp. 434–6.

Notes 919
p. 178, states that there were a total of 1,102 Armenians in Bünyan.
144. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Ի 4, list of responsibles in the vilayet of Sıvas.
146. Ibidem, p. 244.
147. BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 33, Mancılık, ff. 1–6; for Ulaş, cf. supra, p. 460.
p. 178, states that there were a total of 8,354 Armenians in the same area.
150. BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 55, Divrig, f° 23, report by Hmayag Zartarian, Constantinople,
10 September 1919.
151. Ibidem, ff. 24–5; BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 55, Divrig, ff. 2v°-3, report by Vartan
Shahbaz, 11 January 1917. These men were put to death later, in August, along with all the pris-
oners from the city.
152. Ibidem, ff. 6–7; BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 55, Divrig, ff. 25–6, report by Hmayag
Zartarian.
153. Ibidem, ff. 4v°-5, report by Vartan Shahbaz.
154. Ibidem, ff. 26–7, report by Hmayag Zartarian.
155. Ibidem, ff. 30–1.
156. BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 13, Pingian, ff. 2–8, report by L. Goshgarian, Erzincan, 16
January 1917.
p. 178,puts the number of Armenians in the kaza at 2,862.
p. 178, puts the number of Armenians in the kaza at 8,905.
159. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, file 59, list of the responsible in Gürün.
161. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, file 59, list of the responsible in Gürün.
162. Two survivors later gave accounts of this massacre: Anania Mavisakalian and Nahabed
Nahabedian (ibidem).
163. Ibidem.
164. Ibidem.
165. Ibidem.
166. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, file 33, doc. cit., pp. 20–1.
168. Ibidem, pp. 251–4; Karpat, op. cit., p. 178, puts the number of Armenians in the kaza at 12,925.
169. Cf. supra, p. 431; Puzantion, n° 5340, 2 May 1914; Kapigian, op. cit., p. 23; Arakel Patrik (ed.), op.
cit., I, pp. 717–18. The editor of this volume was a schoolteacher in Tokat at the time and wit-
nessed the fire.
170. Arshag Alboyajian, Պատմութիւն Եւդոկիոյ Հայոց [History of Armenians of Tokat], Cairo 1952,
pp. 1224–5.
171. Ibidem, p. 1228.
172. Ibidem, pp. 1230–3.
173. He replaced Cemal Bey, who had been named to his post on 24 October 1914.
174. Alboyadjian, History of Armenians of Tokat, op. cit., pp. 1233–4.
175. Ibidem, pp. 1234–5; “Ինչ՞պէս նահատակուեցաւ Թոգատի առաջնորդը, Սահակ Ծ. Վրդ.
Սահակեանը [How the Primat of Tokat, Father Shavarsh Sahaguian, Was Martyrised],”
Zhoghovurt, no. 41, 13 December 1918, p. 1.
176. Ibidem.
177. Ibidem, pp. 1240–2.
178. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, file 33, doc. cit., p. 19.
179. Ibidem.
181. Alboyadjian, op. cit., p. 1249.

cit., p. 178, puts the number of Armenians in the kaza at 3,704.
183. Alboyadjian, op. cit., p. 1249.
cit., p. 178, puts the number of Armenians in the kaza at 9,979.
187. Cf. supra, pp. 436–8; BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 6, Amasia, f° 1, report by Heghine
Begian, Aleppo, 24 January 1919.
188. Ibidem, ff. 14–15, report by Dikran and Kerope Tellalian.
189. Ibidem, ff. 2v°-3, report by Heghine Begian; f° 14, report by Dikran and Kerope Tellalian.
190. Ibidem, ff. 3v°-4 et 15.
191. Ibidem, ff. 4v°-5 et 15.
192. Ibidem, ff. 7–9; cf. supra, p. 443.
193. BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 6, Amasia, ff. 10–12, report by Heghine Begian, and ff.
15–16, report by Dikran and Kerope Tellalian.
194. Ibidem. The witnesses saved their lives by paying 300 Turkish pounds gold each to the two
Kurdish çete leaders.
195. Ibidem, ff. 18–19.
196. BNu, ms. 289, ff 27–33, list of the murderers in Sıvas.
197. Ibidem; BNu/ Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 6, Amasia, f° 15, report by Dikran and Kerope
Tellalian, which states that these were the men who killed the men from Amasia at Saz Dağ.
199. SHAT, Service Historique de la Marine (Château de Vincennes), Service de Renseignements
de la Marine, Turquie, 1BB7 231, doc. no. 326, Constantinople, 15 February 1919, written by
Colonel Foulon, naval attaché, pp. 1–2.
200. Ibidem, p. 2; P.R.O., FO 371/ 6500, Turkish War Criminals, the file of prisoner no. 2719, Muammer
bey, interned in Malta: Vartkès Yeghiayan, British Foreign Office dossiers on Turkish War Criminals,
op. cit., annexe A, pp. 93–5, report by Arusiag Iskian, from Merzifun.
231, doc. no. 326, p. 3; Barton, “Turkish Atrocities,” op. cit., pp. 75–86, notably p. 78, statement by
Dr George E. White, headmaster of the Anatolia College of Merzifun, doc. 818.
202. It’s in function from 29 April 1913 to 2 August 1916.
231, doc. no. 326, p. 3; P.R.O., FO 371/6500, Turkish War Criminals, the file of prisoner no. 2719,
Muammer bey, interned in Malta: Vartkès Yeghiayan, British Foreign Office dossiers on Turkish
War Criminals, op. cit., annexe A, pp. 94–5.
231, doc. no. 326, p. 4.
205. Ibidem, p. 4. Salih Bey, a lieutenant in the police, took an especially active part in these
operations.
206. We have his correspondence with the American Ambassador in Constantinople, available under
the shelf mark Record Group 84 at the National Archives (Washington D.C.), Record of Foreign
Service Posts of the Department of State, Consular Posts, Samsun, Turkey, Miscellaneous
Documents, c49, c8. 1, box 5, 6 and 7 for the years that interest us (US NArch., RG 84, Samsun,
c49, c8. 1).
207. US NArch., RG 84, Samsun, c49, c8. 1, box 5.
208. US NArch., RG 84, Samsun, c49, c8. 1, box 5, English translation (at the time, dispatches could
only be sent in Turkish) of the telegram from Drs Marden and White to the vali, 14 July 1915.
209. US NArch., RG 84, Samsun, c49, c8. 1, box 5, English translation of the telegram to Morgenthau,
4 July 1915, whose the “transmission [was] refused by the kaimakam.”
210. In his Diaries, held in “The Papers of Henry Morgenthau, Sr.” (reel number 5–6), in the
Library of Congress, Manuscripts Division, Washington D.C., the American Ambassador

Notes 921
devotes considerable space to the affair of the American College. He reveals, notably, that he
ordered Peter to go to Merzifun on 29 July and that he carried out personally negotiated the
fate of these young women with the war minister, Enver Pasha. Some of them were saved as a
result.
211. US NArch., RG 84, Samsun, c49, c8. 1, box 5, from W. Peter to H. Morgenthau, Samsun, 12
August 1915, “ Concerne Hôpital-Collège Merzifoun.”
212. Ibidem. Peter also notes that “These people were not to receive anything in the way of food and
diseases broke out. Dr. Marden wanted to dispatch a nurse, but that was not allowed.”: ibidem;
Barton, “Turkish Atrocities,” op. cit., p. 79, report by the Dr. George E. White.
213. US NArch., RG 84, Samsun, c49, c8. 1, box 5, from W. Peter to H. Morgenthau, Samsun, 12
August 1915.
214. Barton, “Turkish Atrocities,” op. cit., pp. 80–1, report by the Dr. George E. White; US NArch.,
RG 84, Samsun, c49, c8. 1, box 5, report from W. Peter to H. Morgenthau, Samsun, 13 August
1915, notes that “the kaymakam must have indicated, in his report to the vali, that there were
six hundred Armenians in the college, but this is not true, because there are only two hundred
twenty in all” (ibidem, Peter to Morgenthau, 12 August 1915).
215. US NArch., RG 84, Samsun, c49, c8. 1, box 5, report from W. Peter to H. Morgenthau, Samsun,
13 August 1915.
26 August 1915; Barton, “Turkish Atrocities,” op. cit., pp. 82–3, the report of Dr. White states that
72 people were deported
26 August 1915; Barton, “Turkish Atrocities,” op. cit., p. 83, report by the Dr. White, notes:
“I thought of the difference between an American high school girl, safe and comfortable and
happy, and an Armenian girl of some education, character and family standing in the hands of
officials of the Turkish government.”
26 August 1915. Peter lists the teachers who took part in the “collection” for the benefit of the
“trio” of Merzifun: Mihran Daderian, Boghos Piranian, Misak Ispirian (still in the hospital)
and the professors Mannisejian, Dahlian, Mixarlian, Hagopian, Arosian, Mirakian, Kostschyan,
Nerso and Gurekian, “sent to the interior.”
219. Ibidem.
220. Ibidem; Barton, “Turkish Atrocities,” op. cit., p. 81, report by the Dr. White.
178, puts the number of Armenians at 1,632.
178, puts the number of Armenians at 3,722.
224. Ibidem, p. 248.
225. Ibidem, pp. 248–9; Karpat, op. cit., p. 178, puts the number of Armenians at 8, 494; APC/APJ, PCI
Bureau, Կ 564, no. 123, “ Şabinkarahisar or Karahisar Şarki.”
226. Aram Haygaz, Շապին Գարահիսար ու իր Հերոսամարտը [Şabinkarahisar and His Heroic
Fight], New York 1957, pp. 138–41.
228. Cf. supra, p. 215.
229. Haygaz, Şabinkarahisar, op. cit., p. 143.
230. Cf. supra, p. 433.
231. Haygaz, Şabinkarahisar, op. cit., p. 145.
232. Ibidem, pp. 146, 361.
233. Ibidem, pp. 146–7.
234. Ibidem, p. 148.
235. Ibidem.
236. Ibidem, p. 149.
237. Ibidem, p. 150.
238. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Ի 234, list of the murderers, vilayet of Sıvas, Şabinkarahisar.

239. S. Ozanian, Շապին Գարահիսարի առաջնորդին նահատակումը [The Martyrdom of the

Primat of Şabinkarahisar]: BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 36, Şabinkarahisar, ff. 1–2.
240. Ibidem, p. 2.
241. Haygaz, Şabinkarahisar, op. cit., p. 150. The author, who was in a labor battalion, states that the
murderer personally boasted to him about what he had done.
242. Ozanian, doc. cit.: BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 36, Şabinkarahisar, f. 3.
243. Haygaz, Şabinkarahisar, op. cit., pp. 151–3.
244. Ibidem, p. 167.
245. Ibidem, pp. 171–4.
246. Ibidem, p. 184.
247. Ibidem, pp. 176–8, 180, 191; Aguni, op. cit., p. 216. The villagers of Ziber, a village lying below
the citadel to the south, also managed to join the inhabitants of the city in the refuge (Haygaz,
Şabinkarahisar, op. cit., p. 191).
248. Ibidem, p. 178. The buildings that were spared by the fire were the mosque, the cathedral, two
commercial buildings, and a few dozen homes built of stone (ibidem, p. 187).
249. Ibidem, p. 183.
250. Ibidem, p. 192.
251. Ibidem, pp. 208–9.
252. Ibidem, pp. 206–7.
253. Ibidem, pp. 216–17.
254. Ibidem, p. 222.
255. Ibidem, p. 226.
256. Ibidem, pp. 228, 232; Aguni, op. cit., p. 216.
257. Cf. supra, p. 440.
258. Haygaz, Şabinkarahisar, op. cit., pp. 232–4.
259. Ibidem, p. 243.
260. Ibidem, pp. 256–8. A few dozen men succeeded in fleeing to the mountains, “where the Greek
villages were located.” Some were killed in skirmishes with the gendarmes; others survived in the
Pontic Mountains until the arrival of the Russians in spring 1916.
261. Ibidem, pp. 260–3.
262. Ibidem, pp. 264–2.
263. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, file 33, doc. cit., pp. 22–3.
265. Ibidem, p. 250.
266. Ibidem.
268. Cf. supra, p. 438.
270. It is symptomatic that the Ittihad’s representative, Gani Bey, was one of the first to benefit from
the elimination of the Armenians. In 1919, Lusaper Boghosian testified before a commission of
inquiry that Gani and his wife often visited her house, which seems to have been to their taste
since they moved in after Dr. Boghosian was executed and his wife was deported:: P.R.O., FO
371/ 6500, Turkish War Criminals, the file of prisoner no. 2726, Gani bey, interned in Malta:
Vartkès Yeghiayan, British Foreign Office dossiers on Turkish War Criminals, op. cit., pp. 104–5.
271. “Ինչպէս տեղահան ըրին Սեբաստիան [How They Deported Sebaste],” Zhoghovurt, no. 41, 13
December 1918, p. 2.
273. Cf. supra, p. 314.
274. Bauernfeind, Journal de Malatia 1915, op. cit., p. 311, Diary of the 16 August.
275. Ibidem.
276. Report by Liliane Sewny, an American married to an Armenian doctor, to James Barton, 10
March 1916: Toynbee, The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, 1915–1916, op. cit.,
p. 337. Sewny states that the Armenian orphans in the American orphanage were deported or
forced to marry Turks; officers even took some of them in order to dispatch them to Istanbul.

Notes 923
278. BOA. DH. EUM, 2.Şb. 68/84, in The Armenians in Ottoman Documents (1915–1920), op. cit., doc.
no. 122, p. 111. This was a response to a telegram that he had received on 24 June 1915 from
Ali Münîf, nâzır at the Interior Ministry, requesting information about the number of localities
and people in the vilayet to be deported [sevk]:: BOA. DH. Şfr. nr.54/136, in The Armenians in
Ottoman Documents (1915–1920), op. cit., doc. no. 44, p. 54.
1919, p. 7, col. 2 and the full deposition of handwritten pages: APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Հ 171–Հ
182, 5 December 1918, in French.
280. Ibidem.
281. Modenizâde Fuad, “Les vols de Muammer,” in Söuz, 19 January 1919.
282. Ibidem. The president of the governmental commission of inquiry set up on November 1918,
Mazhar Bey, requested some additional information about the events from Sıvas’s police chief.
Mazhan mentioned, notably, Hulusi Bey’s squadron, made up of 500 çetes, which harassed a con-
voy of women all the way to Kangal and laid hands on enough jewels and other precious objects
to fill three wagons. Part of this booty was delivered to the local prefecture. Mazhar asked for
more exact information on the quantity of objects deposited with the authorities: APC/APJ, PCI
Bureau, Մ 317.
283. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Մ 465, doc. no. 2, report by Captain Fazıl, a judge at the court-martial of
Malatia during the War, about Ahmed Muammer.
284. Cf. note 1440.
286. “Ինչպէս տեղահան ըրին Սեբաստիան [How They Deported Sebaste],” Zhoghovurt, no. 41, 13
1919, p. 7, col. 2 and the full deposition of handwritten pages: APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Հ 171–Հ 182.
289. Ibidem, p. 571.
290. Letter from the president of the enquiry commission, H. Mazhar, to the general Vehib pasha,
22 December 1918, include in the investigative file of those responsible for the massacres in
Erzincan: APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Մ 372–4, 376–401, 555–70, file XXIII, no. 151.
1919, p. 7, col. 2 and the full deposition of handwritten pages: APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Հ 171–Հ 182.
292. Ibidem.
293. The investigative file of those responsible for the massacres in Erzincan: APC/APJ, PCI Bureau,
Մ 372–4, 376–401, 555–70, file XXIII, no. 151. According to Vehib Pasha’s report, the documents
bearing on this trial were held in the archives of the president of the recruitment office for the
Ninth Army Corps, Alaheddin Bey, who was also president of the war council. These documents
were later remitted to the judicial department of the Third Army, but since this unit was abol-
ished, the minister of war took them in hand.
294. “Le martyrologe des Arméniens de Sébaste,” from the primate of Sebaste, Knel Kalemkiarian,
1919, 51 pp., chapitre XV: “Recueil de témoignages sur l’extermination des amele taburi,” ed.
by Raymond Kévorkian, Revue d’Histoire arménienne contemporaine, I (1995), pp. 299–300.
Another extract, about his interview with Talât, has been published by Patrik, Sebaste, II, op. cit.,
pp. 16–18.
295. “Le martyrologe des Arméniens de Sébaste,” art. cit., pp. 299–300.
296. Letter from the general Vehib pasha to the president of the enquiry commision, H. Mazhar,
24 December 1918, include in the investigative file of those responsible for the massacres in
Erzincan: APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Մ 372–4, 376–401, 555–70, file XXIII, no. 151.
297. Ibidem.
299. BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 49, Sebaste, f° 14v°, Sebaste and his villages, doc. cit.
300. “Le martyrologe des Arméniens de Sébaste,” art. cit., pp. 299–300.
301. P.R.O., FO 371/6500, Turkish War Criminals, the file of prisoner no. 2726, Gani bey, interned
in Malta: Vartkès Yeghiayan, British Foreign Office dossiers on Turkish War Criminals, op. cit.,
pp. 100–6.

302. Cf. supra, p. 462; Kapigian, op. cit., p. 571.

303. Ibidem, p. 772; cf. supra, p. 461.
304. Kapigian, op. cit., p. 465; in a 10 March 1916 letter to James Barton, Liliane Sewny, an American
married to an Armenian doctor, confirms that these three doctors were Muammer’s last victims:
Toynbee, The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, 1915–1916, op. cit., p. 336; BNu/
Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 49, Sebaste, f° 136.
305. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Մ 317, “Questions addressed to the police prefect of the vilayet of Sıvas
by the commission of inquiry, December 1918.”
306. BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 49, Sebaste, f° 135v°.
307. Ibidem.
308. BNu, ms. 289, ff. 27–33, list of the murderers in Sıvas.
309. Cf. supra, p. 434.
310. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Մ 317, “Questions addressed to the police prefect of the vilayet of Sıvas
by the commission of inquiry, December 1918.”
311. BNu, ms. 289, ff. 27–33, list of the murderers in Sıvas.
312. Ibidem.
9 Deportations and Massacres in the Vilayet of Trebizond

cit., pp. 180, 184, puts the number of Armenians in the vilayet at 68,813 in 1914.
3. Hovagim Hovagimian, Պատմութիւն Հայկական Պոնտոսի [History of Armenian Pontus],
Beirut 1967, pp. 205–6.
4. Ibidem, p. 208.
5. Ibidem.
6. AMAE, Turquie, Politique intérieure, n. s., vol. 9, f° 257, report from the French consul in Trebizond
7. Ibidem, f° 261, letter from the chargé d’affaire in Constantinople, Boppe, to the president of
Conseil and minister of Foreign Affairs, Doumergue, 14 February 1914.
8. Cf. supra, p. 202; Hovagimian, op. cit., pp. 214–15.
9. Cf. supra, pp. 219.
10. Cf. supra, p. 214.
11. Cf. supra, p. 218.
12. Cf. supra, p. 218.
13. Mehmed Cemal Azmi (born in Dyarbekir and executed in Berlin in April 1922), was a graduate
of the Mülkiye (1891), the head of the Salonika Law School before 1908 and a member of the
CUP, parliamentary deputy from Preveze (1908–1909), vali of Bursa, parliamentary deputy from
Çorum in 1914, vali of Konya (1914): Feroz Ahmad, The Young Turks, op. cit., p. 167; police pre-
fect in Istanbul in 1908: Zürcher, The Unionist, op. cit., p. 107; when he was assassinated, it was
learned that he had been vali of Bolu before taking up residence in Berlin early in 1918 (it is not
stated in what capacity he went there); most of the Istanbul newspapers affirmed that he and Dr.
Şakir had been the real leaders of the CUP and that Talât and Enver treated them with respect
because “they were afraid of them”: Vakıt, 20 April 1922.
14. Hovagimian, op. cit., pp. 215–17.
15. Ibidem, p. 218.
16. Ibidem, p. 218. A few people were arrested and the ARF’s reading room was thoroughly
searched.
17. Ibidem, p. 219.
18. Ibidem, pp. 219–20.
19. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Թ 363–4, no. 3, “Comment les Arméniens de Trébizonde furent anéantis?”
20. Born in Rodosto in 1872, this prelate studied theology at the University of Rochester in the
United States and participated in a number of archeological digs before being elected primate of
Trebizond: Hovagimian, op. cit., pp. 220–1.

Notes 925
21. Ibidem, p. 220; APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Կ 618, no. 69, Bloody pages of Trébizonde.
22. Report by the Dr. Avni, a health inspector in Trebizond, at the fourth session of the trial of
Trebizond, 3 April 1919: La Renaissance, no. 104, 4 April 1919.
23. Report by Philomene Nurian, Constantinople, 1 May 1919, at the fourth session of the trial of
Trebizond, 3 April 1919: APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, doc. n° 34, Յ 769–70.
24. Report by Siranush Manugian, at the fourth session of the trial of Trebizond, 3 April 1919: La
Renaissance, no. 104, 4 April 1919.
25. Hovagimian, op. cit., pp. 220–1; APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Կ 618, no. 69, Bloody pages of Trébizonde;
APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Թ 363–4, n° 3, “Comment les Arméniens de Trébizonde furent anéan-
tis.” Those killed were Setrag Yesayan, an official in the Office of the Public Debt and Dashnak
leader, Puzant Jermagian, bookseller and Dashnak leader, Arshag Bedrosian, tailor and Dashnak
leader, Shahen Azaplarian, accountant and Dashnak leader, Vren Kasbarian, merchant and
Dashnak leader, Karnig Jizmejian, Suren Karageozian and his five brothers, Russian subjects, the
four Meghavorian brothers, Russian subjects, Hrant Malkhasian, henchakist, Manug Baloyan,
Aram Vorperian, Levon Diradurian, Hrant Sarafian, Hagop Kedeshian, and the three Sarian
brothers.
26. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Ի 214, Թ 354–5 and 358, those responsible for the deportations and mas-
sacres at Trebizond in June-July 1915.
27. Nor Giank, no. 168, 8 April 1919; La Renaissance, no. 109, 8 April 1919.
28. Ibidem.
29. Report by Nâzım bey, at the fifteenth session of the trial of Trebizond, 30 April 1919: Nor Giank,
no. 182, 1 May 1919; La Renaissance, no. 132, 6 May 1919; Report by the Dr. Avni, a health inspec-
tor in Trebizond, at the fourth session of the trial of Trebizond, 3 April 1919: La Renaissance, no.
104, 4 April 1919.
30. Report by Philomene Nurian, Constantinople, 1 May 1919: APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, doc. no. 34, Յ
769–70; La Renaissance, no. 49, 28 January 1919.
31. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Ի 214, Թ 354–5, 358, those responsible for the deportations and massacres
at Trebizond in June-July 1915.
32. Examination of Imamzâde Mustafa at the fourth session of the trial of Trebizond, 3 April 1919: La
33. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Ի 214, Թ 354–5, 358, those responsible for the deportations and massacres
at Trebizond in June-July 1915.
34. Report by the Dr. Avni, a health inspector in Trebizond, at the fourth session of the trial of Trebizond,
3 April 1919: La Renaissance, no. 104, 4 April 1919; interview of G. Gorrini, Italian consul général
in Trebizond, 25 August 1915: Toynbee, Le Traitement des Arméniens, op. cit., doc. 27, pp. 285–7;
letter from German consul in Trebizond, the Dr. Bergfeld, 9 July 1915, to the chancelier Bethmann
Hollweg: Lepsius (ed.), Archives du génocide des Arméniens, op. cit., doc. 109, pp. 104–7; letter of
American consul in Trebizond, Oscar S. Heizer, 7 July 1915, in Ara Sarafian (ed.), United States
Official Records on the Armenian Genocide, 1915–1917, Princeton 2004, pp. 126–7.
35. Cf. ref. of the n. 34.
36. Hovagimian, op. cit., p. 227.
37. Letter from the American consul Heizer to Morgenthau, 28 July 1915: Sarafian (ed.), United States
Official Records, op. cit., pp. 178–9.
38. Letter from the American consul Heizer to Morgenthau, 7 July 1915: ibidem, pp. 126–7.
40. Letter from the American consul Heizer to Morgenthau, 7 July 1915: ibidem, pp. 126–7.
41. Report by Nuri bey, the head of the police in Trebizond, at the first session of the trial of Trebizond,
Istanbul, 26 March 1919.
42. Verdict of the Trebizond trial, 22 May 1919: Takvim-ı Vakayi, no. 3616, 6 August 1919, pp.
50–2, condemning to death in absentia Cemal Azmi bey and Yenibahçeli Nail bey, Mehmed
Ali, the director of customs, to ten years of hard labor, and the others accused to minor
punishment.
43. The legal material connected with the Trebizond trial was compiled by the PCI Bureau: APC/
APJ, PCI Bureau, file XXXII, Թ 540–70 and 811–33 (newspapers in Osmanlı, Armenian, and
French on the Trebizond trial).

44. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Ի 214 and Թ 354–5, 358, those responsible for the deportations and mas-
sacres at Trebizond.
45. Ibidem; cf. as well the informations collected at the trial who enlighten the responsibility of each
one.
46. Report at the fourth session of the trial of Trebizond, 3 April 1919: La Renaissance, no. 104,
4 April 1919.
47. Ibidem.
48. Report by Sofia Makhokhian, at the third session of the trial of Trebizond, 1 April 1919: APC/
APJ, PCI Bureau, doc. no. 34, Յ 769–70. The witness stated that the accused had also “seized
merchandise from his father’s store.”
49. We shall address this question somewhat later, especially in connection with the sixth session of
the trial of Trebizond, 7 April 1919.
4 April 1919.
51. Report at the third session of the trial of Trebizond, 1 April 1919: APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, doc. no.
34, Յ 769–70.
4 April 1919.
53. Ibidem.
54. Report at the third session of the trial of Trebizond, 1 April 1919.
55. Ibidem.
56. Report at the seventh session of the trial of Trebizond, 8 April 1919: La Renaissance, no. 110,
9 April 1919.
4 April 1919.
58. Ibidem. In the 4 January 1919 issue of Verchin Lur, an article signed by “Dr. A. Kh.” mentions Vasfi
Bey, a health inspector in Trebizond, who poisoned orphans in the Red Crescent Hospital. But
this is the only accusation leveled at Vasfi Bey.
59. Examination at the tenth session of the trial of Trebizond, 12 April 1919: La Renaissance,
no. 114, 13 April 1919; Nor Giank, no. 168, 13 April 1919.
60. Examination of the Dr. Ali Saib, at the third session of the trial of Trebizond, 1 April 1919: Nor
Giank, 4 January and 25 February 1919, the testimony given by Adnan bey again Ali Saib, and La
Renaissance, 14 February 1919.
61. Ibidem.
62. Nor Giank, no. 174, 20 April 1919; La Renaissance, no. 120, 22 April 1919.
63. After the departure of its leaders, the CUP organized its last congress on 1 November and decided
to disband on 5 November in order to found the Teceddüt Fırkası (the Party of Renewal), officially
registered on 11 November 1918: Zürcher, The Unionist, op. cit., p. 73.
64. Nor Giank, 4 January and 25 February 1919, the testimony given by Adnan bey again Ali Saib, and
La Renaissance, 14 February 1919.
65. Ibidem.
66. Ibidem.
67. Report by the Father Laurent at the seventh session of the trial of Trebizond, 8 April 1919: La
68. Report by Louis Vidal at the sixth session of the trial of Trebizond, 7 April 1919: Nor Giank,
no. 168, 8 April 1919, and La Renaissance, no. 109, 8 April 1919.
69. Ibidem.
70. Examination at the fifth session of the trial of Trebizond, 5 April 1919: La Renaissance, no. 108, 6
April 1919; Nor Giank, no. 162, 6 April 1919.
71. Report by Abdüllah Ruşdi at the sixth session of the trial of Trebizond, 7 April 1919: Nor Giank, no.
168, 8 April 1919, and La Renaissance, no. 109, 8 April 1919. The witness points out that his wife
wanted to follow the men who were taking him away but that she was prevented from doing so.
72. Ibidem.
73. Report by the Major Edhem Bey at the fifteenth session of the trial of Trebizond, 30 April 1919:
La Renaissance, no. 132, 6 May 1919; Nor Giank, no. 182, 1 May 1919.

Notes 927
74. Report by the Colonel Vasfi, 39 years old, to be retired of service, at the fourth session of the trial
of Trebizond, 3 April 1919: La Renaissance, no. 104, 4 April 1919.
75. Cf. note 1509.
76. Letter from the Consul Heizer to Morgenthau, 10 July 1915: Sarafian (ed.), United States Official
Records, op. cit., p. 146.
77. Report by Arif Bey at the fourteenth session of the trial of Trebizond, 26 April 1919: La Renaissance,
78. Report by Kenan Bey at the sixteenth session of the trial of Trebizond, 5 May 1919: La Renaissance,
no. 134 and 141, 8 and 16 May 1919; Nor Giank, no. 186, 6 May 1919.
79. Report by Yusuf Rıza Bey at the first session of the trial of Trebizond, 26 March 1919.
80. Report by Talât bey at the first session of the trial of Trebizond, 26 March 1919.
4 April 1919.
82. Report at the fourth session of the trial of Trebizond, 3 April 1919: ibidem.
83. Report at the fourth session of the trial of Trebizond, 3 April 1919: ibidem. The reading of
General Vehib Pasha’s report on the atrocities perpetrated in Trebizond and Erzerum annoyed
Yusuf Rıza, who declared that the CUP had played a “glorious role in [Ottoman] history” and
that the crimes were committed without the knowledge of the Central Committee: second
session of the trial of Trebizond, 28 March 1919, in La Renaissance, no. 102, 30 March 1919.
84. Report by Necmeddin Bey at the fifth session of the trial of Trebizond, 5 April 1919: La Renaissance,
85. Prosecution address by the general prosecutor, Feridun Bey, at the seventeenth session of the trial
of Trebizond, 16 May 1919: La Renaissance, no. 144 and 146, 20 and 22 May 1919. The prosecutor
also mentioned their main accomplices, Agent Mustafa, Niyazi Bey, Mehmed Ali and the Dr. Ali
Saib, noting that it had not been proven that Dr. Ali Saib carried out the poisonings of which he
stood accused.
86. Speech for the defense at the eighteenth session of the trial of Trebizond, 18 May 1919.
87. Verdict of the trial of Trebizond, 22 May 1919: Takvim-ı Vakayi, no. 3616, 6 August 1919,
pp. 50–2.
88. Takvim-ı Vakayi, no. 3557, 25 May 1919, pp. 91–113, notably pp. 104–7, the examination of Yusuf
Rıza, and p. 113, on the independent functioning of the Organization.
90. Report by Lutfi Bey at the seventh session of the trial of Trebizond, 8 April 1919: La Renaissance,
no. 110, 9 April 1919. Nuri Bey admitted, during his examination at the ninth session of the trial
of Trebizond, 10 April 1919 (Nor Giank, no. 166, 11 April 1919; La Renaissance, no. 112, 11 April
1919), that the police had had a hand in “the business” of the deportation: “Armenians were
arrested on the basis of lists transmitted to us. Two battalions of soldiers were waiting there; the
police turned the Armenians over to these soldiers. This happened day after day. The police did
not participate in anything else.”
92. Report by Lutfi Bey at the eighth session of the trial of Trebizond, 9 April 1919: La Renaissance,
93. Ibidem.
94. Report by Nâzım Bey, at the fifteenth session of the trial of Trebizond, 30 April 1919: Nor Giank,
no. 182, 1 May 1919; La Renaissance, no. 132, 6 May 1919.
95. Examination of Niyazi, at the sixth session of the trial of Trebizond, 7 April 1919: Nor Giank, no.
168, 8 April 1919; La Renaissance, no. 109, 8 April 1919.
96. Ibidem.
97. Report by Lutfi Bey at the seventh session of the trial of Trebizond, 8 April 1919: La Renaissance,
no. 110, 9 April 1919.
98. Examination of Nuri Bey, at the ninth session of the trial of Trebizond, 10 April 1919: Nor Giank,
no. 166, 11 April 1919; La Renaissance, no. 112, 11 April 1919.
99. Ibidem.

100. Ibidem.
101. Ibidem, examination of Agent Mustafa.
102. Report by Nuri Bey at the seventh session of the trial of Trebizond, 8 April 1919: La Renaissance,
no. 110, 9 April 1919.
103. Report by Arusiag Kilijian, at the third session of the trial of Trebizond, 1 April 1919: APC/APJ,
PCI Bureau, doc. no. 34, Յ 769–70.
104. Report by the Dr. Avni Bey at the eighth session of the trial of Trebizond, 9 April 1919: La
Renaissance, no. 111, 10 April 1919; Nor Giank, no. 165 and 166, 10 and 11 April 1919. Afterwards,
Mehmed Ali took Makhokhian’s daughter to Samsun, then Constantinople.
105. Eleventh session of the trial of Trebizond, 13 April 1919: Nor Giank, no. 169, 14 April 1919; La
Renaissance, no. 115, 15 April 1919; twelfth session, 16 April 1919: Nor Giank, no. 171, 17 April
1919; La Renaissance, no. 117, 17 April 1919. It’s the case of Nemlizâde Cemal Bey and of the
Trebizond deputy, Naci Bey.
Records, op. cit., pp. 178–9.
107. Letter from the Consul Heizer to Morgenthau, 12 July 1915: ibidem, p. 146.
109. Zavria (pop. 403), Mala et Orus (325), Satari (130), Anifa (221), Azret (95), Elmanos (124), Tots
(149), summer home of the Armenians of Trebizond, Ile (101), Ichaksa (150), Ilanos (130), Ilana
(40), Laghana (400), Kharaga (40), Khorghorud (20), Kavlala (114), Kukhla (67), Krobi (147),
Jochara (363), Mahmad (60), Makhtele (300), Mader (160), Mimira (186), Mancheler (84),
Nokhadzana (134), Bodamia (17), Samarakha (289), Verana (115), Pirvane (180), Kaloyna (40)
and Olasa (42): ibidem, p. 190.
Records, op. cit., pp. 178–9.
111. Report by Louis Vidal at the sixth session of the trial of Trebizond, 7 April 1919: Nor Giank, no.
168, 8 April 1919, and La Renaissance, no. 109, 8 April 1919.
113. PC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Թ 363–4, How the Armenians of Trebizond were destroyed.
114. Deportees from other regions noted that this convoy from Trebizond was present in Fırıncilar; cf.
supra, p. 418. We have already mentioned Zeynel Bey’s and Haci Bedri’s activities in this gorge.
116. Report by Philomene Nurian, Constantinople, 1 May 1919, at the fourth session of the trial of
Trebizond, 3 April 1919: APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, doc. n° 34, Յ 769–70; La Renaissance, no. 49, 28
January 1919.
117. Cf. supra, p. 399. It would appear that a few deportees from Trebizond managed to hide for some
time in Harput’s upper quarter; they were deported from there in November 1915: cf. supra,
p. 401.
118. Cf. supra, p. 400.
119. Cf. n. 116.
120. Cf. supra, pp. 301–2; the verdict of the court-martial, dated 20 July 1920, condemning to death
“Mehmed Nusret Bey, kaymakam of Bayburt and later mutesarif of Arğana Maden, and Lieutenant
Necati Bey, the leader of a squadron of çetes, both of whom bear responsibility for the massacres
of Bayburt,” was published in Tercüman-ı Hakikat no. 14136, 5 Frürio 1920. Nusret was hanged on
5 August 1920, at 5 o’clock in the morning, on Bayazid Square: La Renaissance, no. 522, 6 August
1920.
121. Cf. n. 116.
122. We have already pointed out that Cemal Azmi used squadrons of çetes “to commit atrocities, and
that many deportees were massacred on the road between Trebizond and Gümüşhane.” Report
by Nuri Bey at the first session of the trial of Trebizond, 26 March 1919: La Renaissance, no. 99,
27 March 1919.
123. Testimony given to the court-martial by the junior officer Mehmed Faik. son of Osman, of the
second company of the first battalion of the Trebizond regiment of the mounted gendarmerie, a
native of Trebizond, 24 years old, single, on 21 and 22 July 1915 (8/9 by the Julian calendar): APC/
APJ, PCI Bureau, file XXXII, Մ 561–2.

Notes 929
124. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, file XXXII, Մ 563/2, telegram no. 1700, from the president of the enquiry
section of Erzincan court-martial to the vali of Trebizond, Cemal Azmi, 5/18 August 1915.
125. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, file XXXII, Մ 563/1, from the vali of Trebizond, Cemal Azmi, to the
president of the enquiry section of Erzincan court-martial, 5/18 August 1915.
126. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, file XXXII, Մ 563/3, telegram no. 1453, from the vali of Trebizond, Cemal
Azmi, to the president of the enquiry section of Erzincan court-martial, 9 August 1915.
127. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, file XXXII, Մ 561–2, testimony given to the court-martial by the junior
officer Faik, son of Osman, of the second company of the first battalion of the Trebizond regi-
ment of the mounted gendarmerie, a native of Trebizond, 24 years old, single, on 21 and 22 July
1915.
128. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, file XXXII, Մ 558–60, Testimony given to the court-martial by the
accused Osman, son of Ruşen, from the İmaret neighborhood of Trebizond, a third-degree gradu-
ate of the School of Economy, civil servant, 22 years old, single.
129. Cf note 1602.
130. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, file XXXII, Մ 560, testimony given to the court--martial by the accused
Ayub Sabri, son of Mufid Hasan, of the second company of the first battalion of the Trebizond
regiment of the mounted gendarmerie, 20 years old, married.
131. Ibidem.
132. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, file XXXII, Մ 558–60, Testimony given to the court-martial by the
accused Osman, son of Ruşen, from the İmaret neighborhood of Trebizond, a third-degree gradu-
ate of the School of Economy, civil servant, 22 years old, single.
133. Ibidem.
134. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, file XXXII, Մ 558, copy of the testimony given to the court-martial by
the accused Hafız Seyfeddine, son of İbrahim, of the second company of the first battalion of the
Trebizond regiment of the mounted gendarmerie, 22 years old, married.
135. Cf. note 1607.
136. Testimony given to the court-martial by Mehmed Faik, doc. cit.: APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, file
XXXII, Մ 561–2.
137. Ibidem.
138. Kévorkian & Paboudjian, Les Arméniens dans l’Empire ottoman, op. cit., p. 196; Hovagimian, op.
cit., pp. 488–518.
139. Ibidem, pp. 519–20.
140. Ibidem, pp. 520–1. The witness pointed out that the lawyer, Kevork Biulbiulian, hastily left for
Mosul “to find a house there.” This says a good deal about the state of mind of certain Ordu
Armenians, who were convinced of the authorities’ good intentions.
141. Bauernfeind, Journal de Malatia 1915, op. cit., p. 308, Diary of 15 August 1915.
142. Hovagimian, op. cit., p. 522.
143. Minutes in Nor Giank, no. 179, 27 April 1919 and La Renaissance, no. 125, 27 April 1919.
144. Ibidem, pp. 523–5, reports of some survivors.
145. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Թ 359–60, lists, in Latin letters, the names those responsible for the
deportations and massacres in the kaza of Ordu.
146. Report by Lutfi Bey at the eighth session of the trial of Trebizond, 9 April 1919: La Renaissance,
147. Kévorkian & Paboudjian, Les Arméniens dans l’Empire ottoman, op. cit., pp. 192–5; Hovagimian,
op. cit., pp. 462–77.
148. Minutes in Nor Giank, no. 179, 27 April 1919 and La Renaissance, no. 125, 27 April 1919.
149. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Ի 217 and Թ 358, lists of the names those responsible for the deportations
and massacres in Kirason.
151. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Թ 365, “L’extermination des Arméniens de Kirason, récit d’une rescapée”;
BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 27, Kirason (text nearly similar); The details of the report
given by Mariam Kokmanian of Kirason and published in the 17 January 1919 issue of Jagadamard
(no. 54), suggest that Kokmanian is the author cited in the two documents mentioned above.
152. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Ի 217 and Թ 358, lists of the names those responsible for the deportations
and massacres in Kirason.

153. Kévorkian & Paboudjian, Les Arméniens dans l’Empire ottoman, op. cit., pp. 202–4; Hovagimian,
op. cit., pp. 543–54.
154. Ibidem, pp. 737, 740. He replaced Mihran Zohrab (the brother of the parliamentary deputy
Krikor Zohrab), who was relieved of his duties on 2 June 1915, the day his brother was arrested:
Sharurian, Chronology ... of Krikor Zohrab, op. cit., p. 467.
155. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Ի 216, lists of the names those responsible for the deportations and mas-
sacres in Gümüşhane.
158. Ibidem, pp. 196–202.
159. Two reports sent directly to the Imperial Chancellor Berthmann Hollweg by the German vice-
consul in Samsun, Kuckhoff , 27 June and 4 July 1915: cf. Politisches Archiv des Auswärtigen
Amtes, Türkeï 183, band 36, J. nr. 269. The second in Lepsius, Deutschland und Armenien, op. cit.,
pp. 104–6; Lepsius, Archives du génocide des Arméniens, op. cit., pp.108–11. These reports corrobo-
rate the information provided by the American consul: “All the Armenian without exception
had to leave ... According to the mutesarif, the deportees who left Samsun were led toward Urfa.
It is quite clear that no Armenian will get that far” (cf. ibidem, pp. 109–10).
160. We have his correspondence with the American Ambassador in Constantinople, available under
the shelf mark Record Group 84 at the National Archives (Washington D.C.), Record of Foreign
Service Posts of the Department of State, Consular Posts, Samsun, Turkey, Miscellaneous
Documents, c49, c8. 1, box 5, 6 and 7 for the years that interest us.
161. US NArch., RG 59, 867. 4016/373.
162. Peter had been living and working in Samsun as a businessman for some time.
163. US NArch., RG 84, Samsun, c49, c8. 1, box 5, letter from Trébizonde, 11 May 1915, [ref. no.]
811.1.
164. US NArch., RG 84, Samsun, c49, c8. 1, box 5, [Copy] of the “ Circulaire, note verbale” no. G1.
64141 and no. S1.85 from the Sublime Porte, minister of Foreign Affairs, to the American ambas-
sador in Constantinople, 18 April 1915.
165. US NArch., RG 84, Samsun, c49, c8. 1, box 5, telegram from W. Peter to H. Morgenthau, 26 June
1915.
166. US NArch., RG 84, Samsun, c49, c8. 1, box 5, telegram from W. Peter to H. Morgenthau, 24 June
1915.
167. US NArch., RG 84, Samsun, c49, c8. 1, box 5, letter from Peter to Morgenthau, Samsun, 31
August 1915.
168. US NArch., RG 84, Samsun, c49, c8. 1, box 5, report from Peter to Morgenthau, 27 June 1915,
p. 3.
169. US NArch., RG 84, Samsun, c49, c8. 1, box 5, report from Peter to Morgenthau, 10 July 1915,
p. 1.
170. US NArch., RG 84, Samsun, c49, c8. 1, box 5, report from Peter to Morgenthau, 26 August 1915,
p. 5. It is corroborated by “the report by an American from Samsun who arrived in Dedeagaç on
27 October 1915” which indicated that, “all along the road from Samsun to Angora, one comes
upon large numbers of Armenian corpses” (cf. A. Beylerian, Les grandes puissances, l’Empire otto-
man et les Arméniens dans les Archives françaises (1914–1918), Paris 1983, p. 139).
171. US NArch., RG 84, Samsun, c49, c8. 1, box 5, report from Peter to Morgenthau, 26 August 1915,
p. 6.
172. US NArch., RG 84, Samsun, c49, c8. 1, box 5, letter from Peter to the “Honorable légation
du royaume de Roumanie, [à] Constantinople,” Samsun, 30 June 1915, “Concerne affaires
arméniennes.”
173. US NArch., RG 84, Samsun, c49, c8. 1, box 5, report from Peter to Morgenthau, Samsun, 10 July
1915, “concerne expulsion Arméniens.”
174. US NArch., RG 84, Samsun, c49, c8. 1, box 5.
175. US NArch., RG 84, Samsun, c49, c8. 1, box 5, letter from Peter to Morgenthau, 4 December 1915.
176. US NArch., RG 84, Samsun, c49, c8. 1, box 7, letter from Peter to Abram Elkus, new American
ambassador, 14 October 1916, “G. Tokatlian et Dr Siméonides du consulat de Russie [in
Samsun].”

Notes 931
177. US NArch., RG 84, Samsun, c49, c8. 1, box 6, letter from Elkus to Peter, 2 December 1916.
178. US NArch., RG 84, Samsun, c49, c8. 1, box 5, letter from Peter to the American consul in
Geneva, F. B. Keene, Samsun, 28 July 1915.
179. US NArch., RG 84, Samsun, c49, c8. 1, box 5, letter from Peter to Morgenthau, 17 December
1915.
180. US NArch., RG 84, Samsun, c49, c8. 1, box 5, letter from Peter to the Rumanian general consul
in Constantinople, 13 November 1915.
181. US NArch., RG 84, Samsun, c49, c8. 1, box 7, circular from the Banque de Salonique to his cor-
respondents in Samsun, Constantinople, l6 July 1915.
182. US NArch., RG 84, Samsun, c49, c8. 1, box 5, letters between Peter and the Richmond.
183. US NArch., RG 84, Samsun, c49, c8. 1, box 6, letter from Peter to Elkus, 14 October 1916,
about the contract of “Ovakim Kevork Masatian, insured with Equitable Ass. C., no. [of contrat]
1626139, Frs. 6 000 [et] The Star Ass. C. London, no. [of contrat] 114645, Frs. ?”
184. US NArch., RG 84, Samsun, c49, c8. 1, box 7, letter from the N. Y. Life Insurance to Elkus, 21 December
1916; letter from Elkus to Peter, 5 January 1917; letter from Peter to Elkus, 25 January 1917.
185. Ibidem, letter from the N Y Life Insurance Company to Elkus, 21 December 1916.
186. Archives du ministère des Affaires étrangères (Paris), Guerre 1914–1918, Turquie, vol. 888, f° 16,
in Beylerian, op. cit., pp. 175–6.
187. Payladzou Captanian, Mémoires d’une déportée arménienne, Paris 1920. Captanian was one of the
rare survivors from Samsun to have reached Aleppo.
188. Cf. supra, p. 441.
189. Cf. supra, p. 441.
190. Cf. supra, p. 440.
191. Cf. supra, pp. 404, 413.
192. Cf. supra, p. 404.
193. Captanian, Mémoires d’une déportée, op. cit.
194. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Յ 167–8, file of Safet Pasha, military commandant of Samsun.
195. Ibidem.
197. Ibidem, pp. 683–4.
199. Examination of Kenan Bey, at the sixteenth session of the trial of Trebizond, 5 May 1919: Nor
Giank, no. 186, 6 May 1919 and La Renaissance, no. 134 and 141, 8 and 16 May 1919.
204. Ibidem.
206. Ibidem, p. 726. Among the shooted men: Sarkisian, Siragian, Mgrdich Ekserian, Onnig Parseghian,
Nazareth Mutafian, Vartan Simonian, Armenag Eoksuzian, Sarkis and Nighogos Mutafian.
207. Ibidem, p. 728.
208. Ibidem, p. 731.
209. Ibidem, pp. 732–3.
210. Ibidem, pp. 733–8.
212. Hovaguimian, op. cit., pp. 721, 723.
213. Ibidem, p. 729.
10 Deportations and Massacres in the Vilayet of Angora

cit., pp. 172, 182, 186 give similar figures.
2. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Դ 370, “Muslims who emigrated during the Balkan war and the general
war.”

3. Cf. supra, pp. 186 and 246. Born in Makriköy, a small town to the west of Istanbul, Atıf Bey, an
officer and CUP fedayi, was later to serve as the parliamentary deputy from Angora or Biğa. In his
capacity as a member of the Ittihad’s Central Committee, he became one of the five leaders of the
Special Organization in fall 1914. After serving as interim vali of Angora, he was appointed vali
of Kastamonu. His role in the Special Organization was revealed at the second session of the trial
of Unionists, 4 May 1919: Takvim-ı Vakayi, no. 3543, 12 May 1919, pp. 29–31, during the examina-
tion of Atıf Bey, about the code used by the Teşkilat-ı Mahsusa, and during the examination of
Cevad Bey, at the fourth session of the trial of Unionists, 8 May 1919: Takvim-ı Vakayi, no. 3549,
p. 63. Cevad named the leaders of the Special Organization: the head of the Department of State
Security, Aziz Bey, Dr. Nâzim, Atıf Bey, and so on.
4. The examination of Midhat Şükrü, general secretary of CUP, at the fifth session of the trial of
Unionist, 12 May 1919, clearly revealed that the CUP intervened directly in local affairs: Takvim-ı
Vakayi, no. 3554, 21 May 1919, p. 85.
5. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Թ 370, file about Atıf Bey, who was vali of Kastamonu and also interim
vali of Angora.
6. BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 7, Angora, “Angora, récit du massacre et de la déportation
des Arméniens,” Aleppo, 17 February 1919, by eight survivors, father G. Kasabian and al., f° 1.
These witnesses confirmed that Hasan Mazhar resisted orders.
7. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Թ 396 and Գ 19, List of the responsibles in the vilayet of Angora, Թ 451
and 460, Դ 179–80, List of the responsibles in the vilayet of Angora.
8. Report by Ali Haydar, the Colonel Mehmed Vasıf, the Captain Fehmi and Mahmud Celaleddin,
12 March 1915: APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Մ 733; Krieger, op. cit., p. 215. We have the list of the
people released from prison: APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, file no. XLIV, Մ 532, report from Ali Haydar
to Istanbul, 5 February 1919.
9. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, file no. XLIV, Մ 534, list of the people released from prison on 15 May
1915 in order to be incorporated into the Special Organization: Kara Haliloğlu Mehmed Ali,
Bebekoğlu Halil, Veli Kehiaoğlu Mustafa, Hüseyinoğlu Mehmed Magdülmemak, Koç Oğlanoğlu
Ahmed, etc.
10. The verdict in the trial of the CUP responsible secretaries and delegates, handed down on
8 January 1920: Takvim-ı Vakayi, n° 3772, February 1920, p. 2, col. 2, p. 3, col. 1; APC/APJ,
PCI Bureau, file no. XLIV, Մ 482–94, examination of Kemal by Hasan Mazhar, 16 December
1918.
11. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Յ 458–61 and Թ 420–3 (continued on pp. 2–5), Faits et documents, no. 46,
Angora, signed J. Valence.
12. BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 7, Angora, “Angora, récit du massacre et de la déportation
des Arméniens,” Aleppo, 17 February 1919, f° 1v°.
13. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Յ 458–61 and Թ 420–3, doc. cit. J. Valence specifies that the Russian sub-
jects stay in prison.
14. BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 7, doc. cit., f° 1v°.
15. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Յ 458–61 and Թ 420–3, doc. cit.
16. Ibidem; BNu/Fonds Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 7, doc. cit., f° 1v°.
17. Ibidem, f° 2; APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Յ 458–61 and Թ 420–3, doc. cit., give 15/28 August, for the
arrest of Catholic Armenians (approximately 2,000).
18. BNu/Fonds Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 7, doc. cit., ff. 2–3.
19. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Յ 458–61 and Թ 420–3, doc. cit.
20. Letter from the German chargé d’affaires Hohenlohe, Pera, 4 September 1915: Lepsius (ed.),
21. Letter from Pallavicini to the minister Burian, 3 September 1915: Österreichisches Staatsarchiv,
HHStA PA LX, Interna, file 272, no. 72 A-H, f° 346.
22. Report by Frances Gage, with the letter of Henry Morgenthau to the State Department, 22
December 1915: Toynbee, The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, op. cit., doc. 96, p.
404; APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Յ 458–61 and Թ 420–3, doc. cit.
23. BNu/Fonds Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 7, doc. cit., ff. 3–4.
24. Ibidem, f° 6.
25. Ibidem, f° 7.

Notes 933
26. SHAT, Service Historique de la Marine, S.R. Marine, Turquie, 1BB7 236, doc. no. 2054 B-9,
Constantinople, 3 May 1920, L. Feuillet, report by İbrahim Bey, pp. 12, 27–8; İttihat-Terakki’nin
sorgulanması, op. cit., pp. 133–69.
27. BNu/Fonds Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 7, doc. cit., ff. 9–10; APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Թ 396 and Գ 19,
“List of responsibles in the vilayet of Angora,” Թ 451, 460, Դ 179–80, French version.
28. Ibidem.
30. Garabed Terzian, Պատմագիրք Ստանոզի Հայոց [History of Armenians of Stanoz], Beirut 1969,
pp. 56–61.
31. Ibidem, pp. 63–4.
32. Ibidem, pp. 66–7.
33. Ibidem, pp. 67–9.
34. Ibidem, p. 71.
36. BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 7, Angora, report by Manug Manugian, 28 December 1918,
f° 11.
37. Ibidem, f° 12; APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Թ 426, the responsibles for the deportations in Nallıhan.
38. Ibidem.
39. BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 7, Angora, report by Manug Manugian, 28 December 1918,
ff. 13–14.
40. Ibidem, ff. 14–16.
41. Ibidem, ff. 16–17.
42. Ibidem, f° 18; APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Թ 426, the responsibles for the deportations in Nallıhan.
43. Ibidem.
45. Krikor Der Hovhannesian, Պատմագիրք Սիվրիհիսարի Հայոց [History of Armenians of
Sivrihisar], Beirut 1965, p. 328.
46. Ibidem, pp. 330–1.
47. Ibidem, pp. 333–5.
48. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Ի 549, no. 80/3, and Յ 523.
49. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Թ 396 and Գ 19, “ List of responsibles in the vilayet of Angora,” Թ 457–9,
432, file 70, French version.
50. Ibidem.
51. Ibidem. In January-February 1920, the trial of the 40 people who carried out the massacres in
Sivrihisar was held before the Eskişehir court-martial; four of the accused who had had subaltern
roles were present. The others continued to threaten the Armenians who were still present: La
Renaissance, no. 383, 27 February 1920.
52. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Թ 448, 451, “Déportation du village de Balahisar.”
54. Ibidem, pp. 213–14; Karpat, op. cit., p. 172.
56. Verdict of the Yozgat trial, 8 April 1919: Takvim-ı Vakayi, no. 3617, 7 August 1919, pp. 1–3, who
condemned the kaymakam, Kemal Bey, to death, and sentenced the commander of the gendarme-
rie Tevfik Bey to 15 years at hard labor.
57. Krieger, op. cit., provides a virtually exhaustive account of these newspaper reports, session by
session.
58. Ata Bey was not officially named to his post until 26 September 1915 – that is, after the massacres
had ended; he remained in it until 15 March 1917.
59. Zhamanag, 29 March 1919, p. 1, col. 3–4 and p. 4, col. 1–3. These remarks were disputed by the
interim mutesarif, Kemal Bey, who objected that Azniv Ibranosian could not have knowledge of
such things; Ibranosian retorted that she had had “occasion to visit the wife of Vehbi Bey, the
director of the Treasury (muhasebeci),” while Kemal and Tevfik, the commander of the gendarme-
rie, “conversed with Vehbi.”
60. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Յ 560 and Թ 452–3, List of responsibles in the sancak of Yozgat.
61. Reprinted in Jagadamard, 4 January 1919.

62. Verdict in the trial of the CUP responsible secretaries and delegates, handed down on 8 January
1920 [Kanunusanî 1336]: Takvim-ı Vakayi, n° 3772, February 1920, p. 2, col. 2, p. 3, col. 1; APC/
APJ, PCI Bureau, file XLIV, Մ 482–94, examination of Kemal by Hasan Mazhar, 16 December
(Kanunuevvel) 1918.
63. Cf. n. 59.
64. Letter from Cebbarzâde Edib Bey, from Yozgat, kaymakam of Silivke, to the mutesarif of Yozgat,
10 February 1919, in which the author states that it was Cemal Bey who informed him of the
substance of Necati’s remarks. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Մ 534. This puts Necati’s arrival in Yozgat
around 3 August.
65. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Մ 574–7, declaration of the General Salim Mehmed, military comman-
dant of Yozgat, before the judge of preliminary investigation of Yozgat, 9 December 1918.
66. Ibidem. His testimony is the more believable in that he himself refused “to participate in the pro-
gram”: seventh session of the trial of Yozgat, 18 February 1919: report by Halil İbrahim Recayi Bey,
45 years old, from Monastir, commander of the 5th Army.
67. BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 17, Yozgat, report by the Dr. Mgrdich Kechyan (sancak of
Yozgat), f° 28.
68. Ibidem, f° 27.
dant of Yozgat, 9 December 1918.
70. Ibidem.
71. Ibidem.
72. BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 17, Yozgat, report by the Dr. Mgrdich Kechyan, f° 35.
dant of Yozgat, 9 December 1918.
p. 172, puts the total number of Armenians in the kaza at 15,670.
75. BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 17, Yozgat, report by Movses Papazian, from Pöhrenk (sancak
of Yozgat), f° 1.
76. Report published in La Renaissance, no. 122, 24 April 1919.
77. Ibidem.
78. Report published in Zhamanag, 22 February 1919, p. 4.
79. Report published in La Renaissance, no. 122, 24 April 1919; APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Մ 350–1,
report by Mufteri Rifât from Yozgat, 1 December 1918 to the Ministry of the Interior, confirmed
that the two villages were attacked, adding that Turkish villagers from the vicinity came to
the attacked villages because the cries and the odor associated with the massacre had become
unbearable, and told Tevfik that what he was doing was contrary to the sharia. He answered that
they were interfering with his work, took his revolver from its holster and fired on the delega-
tion, wounding several people: BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 17, Yozgat, report by Movsès
Papazian, from Pöhrenk (sancak de Yozgat), f° 1v°, says that the second groups was murdered in
Kadılı.
80. Ibidem, f° 6.
81. Report published in La Renaissance, no. 122, 24 April 1919.
82. Ibidem.
83. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Մ 350–1, report by Mufteri Rifât from Yozgat, 1 December 1918 to the
Ministry of Interior.
84. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, file XXVI, Հ 326, letter from the court-martial of Constantinople to the
mutesarif of Yozgat, 4 February 1919.
85. SHAT, Service Historique de la Marine, Service de Renseignements de la Marine, Turquie,
1BB7 231, doc. no. 312, Constantinople, February 1919, “Boghazlian, sandjak de Yozgad (vilayet
d’Angora).”
86. BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 17, Yozgat, report by Movses Papazian, from Pöhrenk (sancak
of Yozgat), f° 2.
87. Ibidem, ff. 2r°-v° et 4v°.
89. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Թ 324, testimony of Tevfik Bey.

Notes 935
90. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Յ 560, list of responsibles in the kaza of Boğazlian, Damas, 5 March
1919.
91. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Թ 446–7, file no. 71, “L’extermination des Arméniens de Bozuk et
Çakmak,” states that the massacres of the males by the çetes were directed by İbrahim Bey from
Boğazlian and Ahmed Bey from Kozan; APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Թ 324, examination of Tevfik
Bey, which reveals that the adolescents were systematically rounded up and that most of them
were “crammed into prisons and cellars” before being killed.
92. BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 17, Yozgat, ff. 1–21, report by Movses Papazian, f° 5; BNu/
Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file no. 17, Yozgat, report by Dr. Mgrdich Kechyan, f° 29.
93. Ibidem, ff. 29–30. Kechyan indicates that the most “intelligent and promising” of the Islamicized
children were later transferred to the orphanage baptized Şifa Yurdisi in Talis, but that those who
remained in Yozgat were in such a state that none of the “survived” the privations to which they
were subjected.
94. Ibidem, f° 35; APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Թ 446–7, file no. 71, “L’extermination des Arméniens de
Bozuk et Çakmak,” states that Kulis Bey, an officer in the department of military security, super-
vised the operations together with Kemal Bey.
95. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Մ 511, chiffred telegram from Mustafa Bey, military commandant of
Boğazlian, to the commandant by interim of the 5th Army, via Şahabeddin, in Kayseri, 14/27
Temmuz/July 1915, no. 18; request no. 377, 12/25 July, and no. 379, 13/26 July.
96. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Մ 511, telegram from Mustafa Bey, to the commandant by interim of the
5th Army, in Angora, Halil Recayi Bey, 22 Temmuz/4 August 1915, no. 16.
97. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Մ 511, chiffred telegram from Halil Recayi Bey to Mustafa Bey, Angora,
22 Temmuz/4 August 1915, no. 16.
98. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Մ 540, chiffred telegram from Halil Recayi Bey to the commandant by
interim of the 15th division, the Colonel Şahabeddin, in Kayseri, Angora, 23 Temmuz/5 August
1915.
99. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Հ 631.
100. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Մ 478, file XXXV, chiffred telegram from the mutesarif of Kayseri, Kemal
Bey, to the president of court-martial, in Constantinople, 8 February 1919.
101. Cf. supra, p. 503.
102. BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 17, Yozgat, report by Movses Papazian, from Pöhrenk, ff.
5v°-7v°.
103. Ibidem, ff. 8v°-9.
104. Ibidem, f° 18v°.
105. Ibidem, f° 19.
106. Ibidem, ff. 19v°-20v°. Involved were the witness, his brother Aristakes, his cousins Hovsep
and Hampartsum Stambolian, and also Parsegh Parseghian, Benjamin Karadedeyan, Zamita
Baliozian, Taniel Torosian, and Rafayel Arzumanian.
107. Report by the director of Yozgat Turkish orphanage, Şevki Bey, in Jagadamard, 4 January 1919.
108. Report by Azniv Ibranossian, the wife of the director of Ibranossian Fathers in Yozgat, at the
fifteenth session of the trial of Yozagat, 28 March 1919: Zhamanag, 29 March 1919, p. 1.
109. Report at the eighth session of trial of Yozgat, 21 February 1919, in Zhamanag, 22 February 1919,
p. 4.
110. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Հ 326, file XXVI, no. 74, letter from the president of the court-martial to
the mutesarif of Yozgat, 4 February 1919.
111. Zhamanag, 27 March 1919.
112. Ibidem.
113. Ibidem. Government officials often used formulations of this sort, introducing incoherencies that
only the correspondents would notice, in order to issue an extermination order. In this particular
case, the prosecutor clearly understood that the order to send the women’s and girls’ “possessions”
to Yozgat meant, given that they had already been stripped of their possessions before leaving for
Yozgat, that they were to be killed.
114. Ibidem. The presiding judge reminded Kemal that in his first [December 1918] declaration he
had said that he had burned many of the documents having to do with the deportations: “you
have,” he said, “signed a statement to this effect.” Kemal answered that he had been extremely

tired and had expressed himself “hastily.” The prosecutor, who was a member of the governmen-
tal commission of inquiry, observed that Kemal had taken three to four hours to write out his
answers.
115. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Յ 560, list of responsibles in the kaza of Boğazlian, Damas, 5 March
1919.
116. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Յ 560 and Թ 452–3, list of responsibles in the sancak of Yozgat.
117. BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, liasse 17, Yozgat, report by Dr. Mgrdich Kechyan, f° 38.
118. Ibidem.
119. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Ժ 478–9.
120. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Թ 266, telegram from the president of the court-martial to the vali of
Angora, 22 February 1919.
121. Reports of Christaki, an employee of the German company, and Simon, a 29-year-old deportee
from Harput studying law in Constantinople, who were in Yozgat in 1915, at the seventh session
of the trial of Yozgat, 18 February 1919; report by Azniv Ibranosian, at the fifteenth session of the
trial of Yozgat, 28 March 1919: Zhamanag, 29 March 1919.
122. Report by Simon, a 29-year-old deportee from Harput, at the seventh session of the trial of
Yozgat, 18 February 1919.
123. Report by Azniv Ibranosian, at the fifteenth session of the trial of Yozgat, 28 March 1919:
Zhamanag, 29 March 1919.
124. Zhamanag, 25 March 1919; La Renaissance, no. 97, 25 March 1919; Jagadamard, 25 March 1919;
Nor Giank, 25 March 1919; APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Թ 324, examination of Tevfik in the court-
martial.
125. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Յ 560 and Թ 452–3, list of responsibles in the sancak of Yozgat.
127. Reports of Christaki, an employee of the German company, at the seventh session of the trial of
128. Cf. n. 124.
129. Cf. n. 126.
131. Ibidem, f° 47.
132. Cf. supra, p. 508.
134. Ibidem, f° 47.
135. Ibidem, ff. 47–8.
136. Report by Stepan at the fifth session of the trial of Yozgat, 15 February 1919.
137. Report by Eugenie Varvarian, 18 years old, an native of Yozgat, whose caravan was pillaged in
Çiftlik and massacred near Keller, at the first session of the trial of Yozgat, 11 February 1919.
138. Ibidem.
139. Report at the eighth session of the trial of Yozgat, 11 February 1919.
140. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Մ 350, letter from the civil inspector Nedim Bey, in charge to investigate
criminals in the sancak of Yozgat, to Emin Bey, 28 December 1918.
231, doc. no. 259, Constantinople, 7 February 1919, “Rapport sur les atrocités de Yozgat, dressé
par un fonctionnaire turc,” 30 December 1918.
142. Confession of Şükrü, commander of gendarmerie in Yozgat, in Balakian, op. cit., pp. 221–30. It
was the mission of the second commission, headed by Hulusi Bey, to investigate the atrocities
perpetrated in the Angora and Konya regions. Hulusi Bey, a court inspector, the brother-in-law
of Tahsin Bey, the vali of Erzerum, and a CUP member since 1908, seems to have covered up the
mass crimes committed in the region and contented himself with punishing a few gendarmes for
“abuses”: APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Յ 25–34, “Second report on Turks responsibles for the armenian
atrocities of the Bureau of Information: the question of Turkish witnesses (Part 1).”
143. Ibidem.

Notes 937
145. Ibidem. Letter from the president of the court-martial to the mutesarif of Yozgat, 5 February
1919.
146. BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file no. 17, Yozgat, report by Dr. Mgrdich Kechyan, ff. 48–9.
147. Examination published in Zhamanag, 29 March 1919.
148. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Մ 350–51, report by Mufteri Rifât, from Yozgat, 1 December 1918, to the
minister of interior.
149. Ibidem.
150. Reports of Christaki, an employee of the German company, at the seventh session of the trial of
231, doc. no. 259, Constantinople, 7 February 1919, “Rapport sur les atrocités de Yozgat, dressé
par un fonctionnaire turc,” 30 December 1918.
152. Report by Vehbi, at the fifteenth session fo trial of Yozgat, 28 March 1919: Zhamanag, 29 March
1919.
153. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Թ 433, file 45–6; SHAT, Service Historique de la Marine, Service de
Renseignements de la Marine, Turquie, 1BB7 231, doc. no. 312, Constantinople, February 1919,
“Boghazlian, sandjak de Yozgad (vilayet d’Angora).”
231, doc. no. 312, Constantinople, February 1919.
157. Confession of Şükrü, commander of gendarmerie in Yozgat, in Balakian, op. cit., pp. 221–30.
158. Cf. supra, pp. 501–2; SHAT, Service Historique de la Marine, Service de Renseignements de la
Marine, Turquie, 1BB7 231, doc. no. 312, Constantinople, February 1919.
160. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Հ 599, telegram from Major Ahmed, military commandant of
Akdağmaden, to the Mutesarif Cemal bey, 11/12 July 1915 (11/12 Temmuz). This was probably
the group we mentioned on p. 631, above.
161. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Մ 350–1, report by Mufteri Rifât, from Yozgat, 1 December 1918, to the
minister of interior.
163. Ibidem, pp. 220–5.
164. Arshag Alboyajian, Պատմութիւն Հայ Կեսարիոյ [History of Armenian Caesarea], II, Cairo
1937, p. 1435.
165. Ibidem, pp. 1437–8.
166. BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 26, Kayseri, report by Yervant Der Mardirosian, a 23-year-
old native of Talas who taught in Talas’s American College, f° 42.
167. Aris Kalfayan, Չօմախլու [Tchomakhlou/çomaklu], New York 1930, p. 81; Alboyajian, op. cit.,
II, p. 1445; BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file no. 26, Kayseri, report by Kalust Merjikian,
Bassorah, 1917: “Ce qui s’est passé à Césarée,” f° 4v°.
168. Kalfayan, op. cit., p. 84; BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 20, Tomarza, collective report,
Aleppo, 25 December 1918: “Brief report on the district of Everek,” ff. 20v°-21.
169. Ibidem, f° 22.
170. Ibidem, f° 22v°.
171. Ibidem, ff. 22v°-23. A machine for knitting socks was also presented as a deadly device, and the
person who owned it was arrested in Kayseri: BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 26, Kayseri,
report by Hovhannes Asadrian, Constantinople, 1919: “Les sauvageries commises à Kayseri,”
f° 34.
172. Alboyajian, op. cit., II, pp. 1412, 1439–40.
173. Cf. supra, p. 255.
174. BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 26, Kayseri, report by Yervant Der Mardirosian, doc. cit.,
f° 42v°.
175. Alboyajian, op. cit., II, p. 1442.
176. Barton, “Turkish Atrocities,” op. cit., pp. 121, report by Clara C. Richmond, missionary in Talas
and Kayseri, 11 May 1918.

177. Cf. supra, p. 258.

178. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Մ 541, chiffred telegram from the commandant by interim of the 15th
division, the Colonel Şahabeddin, in Kayseri, to Halil Recayi Bey, in Angora, 2/15 June 1915
[2 Haziran 1331], no. 945/1/2.
division, the Colonel Şahabeddin, in Kayseri, to Halil Recayi Bey, in Angora, 9/22 June 1915
[9 Haziran 1331].
Army, Halil Recayi Bey, in Angora, to the Ministry of War, 25 June 1915.
181. La vérité sur le mouvement révolutionnaire arménien et les mesures gouvernementales, Constantinople
1916, p. 17.
182. BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 26, Kayseri, report by Melkon Asadur, Constantinople,
1919: “L’abattoir de Césarée avec des noms seulement,” f° 9; Alboyadjian, op. cit., II, p. 1447.
183. BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 26, Kayseri, article of Diruhi Safrasdian, f° 41, edited in
Jagadamard, 5 February 1919.
184. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Գ 19 and Թ 396, List of responsibles in the vilayet of Angora, in French,
Թ 457–9, 432; Krieger, op. cit. Aris Kalfayan, a schoolteacher in Çomaklu who was interned on
26 May 1915 in Kayseri’s “depot,” a military prison next to the konak, gives detailed informa-
tion about the forms of torture utilized there and the courageous behavior of Murad Boyajian
(SDHP), Garabed Jamjian (ADL), and Kevork Vishabian (ARF), who sustained the morale of
their fellow prisoners. He also describes the devotion shown by doctors who were themselves pris-
oners, Garabed Demirjian, Toros Nazlian, and Levon Panosian, the pharmacist Sarkis Torosian,
who gave the tortured men medical care, and the services provided by the lawyers Arsen and
Mattheos Kalfayan, Aram Mendikian, Garabed Tachjian: Kalfayan, op. cit., pp. 101–2.
185. Alboyajian, op. cit., II, pp. 1416–17.
186. BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 26, Kayseri, article of Diruhi Safrasdian, f° 41, edited in
Jagadamard, 5 February 1919.
187. Ibidem; Alboyadjian, op. cit., II, pp. 1421–2.
188. Ibidem; BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 26, Kayseri, report by the Dr. Harutiun Sarkisian,
from Kayseri, f° 54, confirms that certain groups of men were liquidated between Gemerek and
Şarkışla.
189. Bauernfeind, Journal de Malatia 1915, op. cit., Diary of the 18 and 20 August, p. 312.
190. Barton, “Turkish Atrocities,” op. cit., p. 133, report by Theda B. Phelps, missionary in Talas,
Philadelphia, April 1918.
191. Յուշամատեան նուիրուած Սօցեալ Դեմոկրատ Հնչակեան Կուսակցութեան
Քառնաﬔակին [Book of Memory for the Fortieth Anniversary of the Founding of the Social
Democratic Hnchak Party], Paris 1930, pp. 234–5; BNu/ Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 26,
Kayseri, report by Kalust Merjikian, Bassorah, 1917: “Ce qui s’est passé à Césarée,” gives informa-
tion about the forms of torture used in the military prison.
192. Alboyadjian, op. cit., II, pp. 1420, 1442–3.
193. BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 26, Kayseri, report by the Dr. Harutiun Sarkisian, from
Kayseri, f° 55; ibidem, report by Melkon Asadur, Constantinople, 1919: “L’abattoir de Césarée
avec des noms seulement,” ff. 14–15. No source states that the person involved was Yakub Cemil,
whose activity in Cilicia in 1909 we have already discussed (p. 227), in the Special Organization
(p. 227), especially in Trebizond. However, given his role in the region, there can be little doubt
that the man was Cemil.
Թ 457–9 and 432; In addition to the leaders of the Special Organization, Gübgübzâde Sureya bey,
Kâtibzâde Nuh et Imamzâde Reşid, several local notables took part in the operations designed
to liquidate the Armenian males: Hacilerlizâde Mustafa, Mehtirzâde Osman, Şahinoğlu Mustafa,
Bıçakcioğlu Mehmed, Uşakizâde Osman, Durgârzâde Hilmi bey, Mollazâde Ahmed Emin, Ak
Alininzâde Haci Ali, Diklilizâde Ömer bey, Feyzizâde Osman bey, İmamzâde Osman, Dedestenizâde
Mehmed, Dedestenizâde Mustafa, Dedestenizâde Cemal bey, Dedestenizâde Mahmud, Imamzâde
Mehmed, Yahiya bey Kadir, İmamoğlu Ali, Çerkezoğlu Mustafa, Oğulduğı Katib Mehmed,
Karahimseli Mehmed, Yağmurzâde İsmail, çavuşzâde Hamid, Arapzâde Abdurraman.

Notes 939
195. Ibidem.
196. Barton, “Turkish Atrocities,” op. cit., report by Theda B. Phelps, missionary in Talas, Philadelphia,
April 1918, p. 134.
197. BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 26, Kayseri, report by Kalust Merjikian, Bassorat, 1917: “Ce
qui s’est passé à Césarée,” f° 6.
198. Barton, “Turkish Atrocities,” op. cit., report by Clara C. Richmond, missionary in Talas and
Kayseri, 11 May 1918, p. 124.
199. BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 26, Kayseri, report by the Dr. Harutiun Sarkisian, from
Kayseri, f° 54.
Kayseri, 11 May 1918, p. 127.
201. Ibidem, report by Theda B. Phelps, missionary in Talas, Philadelphia, April 1918, pp. 136–7.
202. BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 26, Kayseri, report by Melkon Asadur, Constantinople,
1919: “L’abattoir de Césarée avec des noms seulement,” ff 17–18.
203. Ibidem, f° 13; APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Գ 19 and Թ 396, List of responsibles in the vilayet of
Angora, in French, Թ 457–9, 432.
204. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Թ 427, report on Sabri Bey, chief of the correspondence Bureau in
Kayseri.
205. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Յ 560, in Armenian, report, Damas, 5 March 1919: “The killers and
accapareurs of Talas.”
Kayseri, 11 May 1918, p. 121.
207. Ibidem, p. 122.
208. Ibidem, pp. 122–3.
209. BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 26, Kayseri, report by Yervant Der Mardirosian, a 23 year-
old native of Talas who taught in Talas’s American College, f° 43r°-v°.
210. BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 26, Kayseri, report by Kalust Merjikian, Bassorah, 1917: “Ce
qui s’est passé à Césarée,” f° 7.
211. Kévorkian & Paboudjian, Les Arméniens dans l’Empire ottoman, op. cit., pp. 225–7; Alex
Krikorian & Setrak Karageozian, Յիշատակարան Էվէրէկ-Ֆէնէսէի [Memorial of Everek-
Fenese], Paris 1963.
212. Ibidem, pp. 227–9.
Թ 451, 460, 432, Դ 179–80.
214. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Յ 560, in Armenian, report, Damascus, 5 March 1919.
215. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Թ 443, 452, file 111, Everek.
216. BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 20, Tomarza, collectif report, Aleppo, 25 December 1918,
“Brief report on the district of Everek,” f° 23.
217. Ibidem.
218. Ibidem, 23v°.
219. Ibidem, 24r°-v°. The document observed that, amid the panic sown by these departures, local
Ittihadists abducted a few young women, who they raped and then killed.
220. Ibidem, f° 25.
221. Ibidem, f° 25r°-v°.
222. Ibidem, f° 31. In this group were ten female schoolteachers employed at Kayseri’s American
school. None survived; Kalfayan, op. cit.; English translation: Aris Kalfayan, Chomaklu, New
York 1982, gives a detailed account of the way Salih Zeki liquidated the Armenian population
of the little town and published several official documents; that they are authentic is plausible.
223. Kévorkian & Paboudjian, Les Arméniens dans l’Empire ottoman, op. cit., pp. 228–30; Hovhannes
Tomardzatsi Torosian, Պատմութիւն Հայ Տոմարծայի [History of Armenian Tomarza], 3 vol.,
Beirut 1959–1969.
224. BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 20, Tomarza, report by Garabed Zorajian, f° 1.
225. Ibidem, ff. 2–3.
226. Cf. supra, p. 522.
227. BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 20, Tomarza, report by Garabed Zorajian, f° 4.

228. Ibidem, f° 25, collective report, Aleppo, 25 December 1918, “Brief report on the district of Everek,”
f° 25.
229. La Renaissance, no. 410, 31 March 1920.
231. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Թ 443 and 452, file 116, the deportations in Kirşehir; SHAT, Service
Historique de la Marine, Service de Renseignements de la Marine, Turquie, 1BB7 231, doc. no.
340, Constantinople, 19 February 1919, “Les massacres de Kirchehir et de ses dépendances, dépo-
sition d’un témoin.”
232. Ibidem, f° 1.
233. Ibidem.
234. Ibidem, ff. 2–3.
235. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Յ 560, in Armenian, report, Damascus, 5 March 1919, in French, Թ
459–60–1, list of those responsible for the massacres and deportations in Kirşehir.
236. Ibidem.
237. BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 26, Kayseri, report by Yervant Der Mardirosian, a 23 year-
old native of Talas who taught in Talas’s American College, f° 45.
238. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Թ 395, the killers of Keskin/Denek Maden.
239. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Թ 449, Keskin/Denek Maden.
240. BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 26, Kayseri, report by Yervant Der Mardirosian, f° 45.
241. Téotig, Memorial, op. cit., provides a list of those detained in Ayaş, with their biographies; BNu/
Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 3, the prisoners of Ayaş, letter from V. Mardikian to A. Andonian,
Bruxelles, 26 April 1947, f° 6. More than 70 men, among the best known, had already arrived.
242. Dr. Boghosian, “Պատմութեան համար. Ճշտում մը [An Accuracy for History],” Baykar, 16 July
1927.
243. Terzian, Stanoz, op. cit., pp. 61–7.
244. BNu/ Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 3, the prisoners of Ayaş, letter from V. Mardikian to Aram
Andonian, Bruxelles, 26 April 1947, ff. 6–7.
245. Dr. Avedis Nakashian, Այաշի Բանտը [The Prison of Ayaş], Boston 1925, pp. 32–42.
246. Cf. n. 244, f° 8 and supra, p. 516.
247. At the time, Aknuni continued to defend his former positions; he was convinced that Talât was a
“noble character,” citing as proof the fact that Talât had come to see him two weeks earlier, when
Aknuni was sick in bed: Dr. Avedis Nakashian, op. cit., pp. 43–4,
248. Ibidem; BNu/ Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 3, the prisoners of Ayaş, f° 40. German circles were
rather quickly learned of their departure, as is shown by a letter from the Dr. J. Lepsius to the
German Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 15 June 1915: Lepsius, Deutschland und Armenien, op. cit.,
p. 85.
249. BNu/ Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 3, the prisoners of Ayaş, f° 48.
250. Cf. supra, p. 367, n. 90.
251. BNu/ Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 3, the prisoners of Ayaş, letter from V. Mardikian to A.
Andonian, Bruxelles, 26 April 1947, ff. 6–7; Nakashian, op. cit., pp. 47–8, notes that P. Shabaz,
an intellectual educated in Paris, was first interned in the prison in Ayntab, then taken to
Adiyaman, and finally executed near Malatia under appalling conditions.
252. BNu/ Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 3, the prisoners of Ayaş, letter from V. Mardikian to A.
Andonian, Bruxelles, 26 April 1947, f° 8
253. Ibidem, f° 9.
11 Deportations and Massacres in the Vilayet of Kastamonu

pp. 180, 184, gives the same figures; APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Կ 544, statistics by vilayet.
2. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Կ 789–90, Armenians before the war in the vilayet of Kastamonu.
3. Ibidem.
4. Ibidem; Kévorkian & Paboudjian, Les Arméniens dans l’Empire ottoman, op. cit., pp. 175–8.
5. Cf. supra, pp. 253–4.

Notes 941
6. Trial of Cemal Oğuz, responsible secretary of the CUP in çangırı: La Renaissance, no. 330, 24
December 1919, and no. 365, 6 February 1920.
7. We have seen that Fehmi was one of the speakers at the meeting organized by the CUP at Bayazid
Square on 21 September 1912, on the eve of the first Balkan War: cf. supra, p. 135; He was found
guilty at the trial of the responsible secretaries and condemned to ten years of hard labor, the 8
January 1920: Takvim-ı Vakayi, no. 3772, February 1920, p. 2, col. 2, p. 3, col. 1.
8. Examination of Atıf Bey, one of the leaders of the Special Organization, with regard to the cir-
cumstances surrounding the recall of Reşid Bey, who “refused to carry out his orders”: sixth session
of the trial of Ittihadist, 17 May 1919, Takvim-ı Vakayi, no. 3557, 25 May 1919, pp. 99–104. An
Armenian account confirms that Reşid blocked the deportation of the vilayet’s Armenians: BNu/
Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 38, çangırı, f° 34.
9. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Թ 495, “Document sur l’ex-vali de Kastamonu, Atıf bey,” signed Mehmed
Necib.
10. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, ԺԳ 95–8, “List of responsibles in the vilayet of Kastamonu.”
11. Ibidem.
12. BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 38, Çangırı, f° 25.
13. Ibidem, ff. 37–9; f° 107v°, letter from the Father Vartan Karagueuzian to Aram Andonian, 25
February 1947.
14. Barton, “Turkish Atrocities,” op. cit., report by Clara C. Richmond, missionary in Talas and Kayseri,
11 May 1918, p. 126.
15. Cf. supra, pp. 253–4.
16. BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 38, Çangırı, ff. 1 and 21.
17. Ibidem, ff. 21–2: Dr. Krikor Jelal, Dr. Parsegh Dinanian, Vrtanes Papazian, Hayg Khojasarian,
Nshan Kalfayan, Armenag Parseghian, Garabed Deovletian, Vaghinag Bardizbanian, Norig Der
Stepanian, Hagop Beylerian, Vahan Altunian, Manug Basmajian, Hagop Korian, Hovhannes
Terlemezian, Samuel Tomajan, Simon Melkonian, Apig Jambaz, Melkon Guleserian, Avedis
Zarifian.
18. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Յ 144, file about İsmail Canbolat and Դ 279–80, file no. 13/1 (in English):
of Circassian origin, born in Kosovo, a graduate of Harbiye and parliamentary deputy from
Constantinople.
19. BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 38, Çangırı, ff. 29–30.
20. Ibidem, f° 26; f° 107, letter from Father Vartan Karagueuzian to Aram Andonian, Cairo, 25
February 1947, states that this group left on 11 July.
22. Ibidem, f° 28.
23. BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 38, Çangırı, f° 107, letter from father Vartan Karagueuzian
to Aram Andonian, Cairo, 25 February 1947. In a second, 1 April 1947 letter to Andonian, Father
Vartan states that they saw Sevag’s and Varuzhan’s guards return to Çangırı the evening of the
same day: ibidem, f° 113.
24. Ibidem, f° 107v°.
25. Ibidem, f° 110. Cf. supra, pp. 30–1, n. 1, on D. Kelekian’s role in the Young Turk movement.
26. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Թ 495, “Document sur l’ex-vali de Kastamonu, Atıf bey,” signed Mehmed
Necib.
27. BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 38, Çangırı, f° 62, list of the çangırı internee established by
A. Andonian.
28. Ibidem, f° 34; APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, ԺԳ 95–6–7–8, “List of responsibles in the vilayet of
Kastamonu, çangırı.”
29. Trial of Cemal Oğuz, responsible secretary in çangırı: La Renaissance, no. 357, 27 January 1920.
30. Trial of Cemal Oğuz, responsible secretary in çangırı: La Renaissance, no. 363, 4 February 1920.
31. Verdict of the trial of Cemal Oğuz: La Renaissance, no. 369, 8 February 1920.
32. Kévorkian & Paboudjian, Les Arméniens dans l’Empire ottoman, op. cit., pp. 177–8; APC/APJ, PCI
Bureau, Կ 789–90, Armenians before the war in the vilayet of Kastamonu. Only the Armenians
of Zonguldak were spared, thanks to the kaymakam, İbrahim Bey, who had close relations with an
Armenian from the port: Aguni, op. cit., p. 289.

33. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, ԺԳ 95–6–7–8, “List of responsibles in the vilayet of Kastamonu,” Bolu,
and Ի 212.
34. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Թ 489, “Les condamnations de Bolu, témoignage d’un rescapé. Sur Ahmed
Midhat, ex-chef de la police d’Istanbul”: APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Գ 19 and Թ 396, “List of respon-
sibles in the vilayet of Angora,” Թ 457–9 and 432 (in French).
35. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Թ 491–2, on İzzet bey, chief of the police in Bolu.
36. Ibidem.
37. Kévorkian & Paboudjian, Les Arméniens dans l’Empire ottoman, op. cit., pp. 177–8; APC/APJ, PCI
Bureau, Կ 789–90, Armenians before the war in the vilayet of Kastamonu.
39. BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 38, Çangırı, f° 107v°, letter from Father Vartan Karagueuzian
to Aram Andonian, Cairo, 25 February 1947.
40. Ibidem, f° 37.
12 Constantinople in the Period of the

1. Cf. supra, pp. 254–9.
2. Sharurian, Chronology ... of Krikor Zohrab, op. cit., p. 465.
3. Ibidem, pp. 466–7.
4. Ibidem, p. 467.
5. Ibidem, p. 467–8.
6. Ibidem, p. 469.
7. Cf. supra, p. 327. According to Yervant Odian, The cursed years, 1914–1919, op. cit., no. 17, Talât
or his aide in the Interior Ministry, Ali Münîf, personally telephoned K. Zohrab’s wife to tell her
that “her husband had died of a heart attack in Urfa.”
8. Sharurian, Chronology ... of Krikor Zohrab, op. cit., pp. 492–3. We shall come back to the passage of
the two deputies through Aleppo; it allows us to grasp the reactions in the provinces to the CUP’s
policies.
9. Among those authorized to return to Istanbul, Dr. V. Torkomian and Hayg Khojasarian, of whom
the latter went to the Patriarchate to receive the aid earmarked for schoolteachers living under-
ground (Sarkis Srents, Hagop Kiufejian, known as Oshagan, and so on), were the only ones to
assist the Patriarchate: Zaven Der Yeghiayan, Memoirs, op. cit., p. 101.
10. Ibidem, p. 103.
11. Cf. supra, p. 293.
12. Letter from Wangenheim to the Chancellor Hollweg, Pera, 17 June 1915: Lepsius (ed.), Archives
du génocide des Arméniens, op. cit., doc. 81, p. 96, comments on this visit; Weber, Eagles on the
Crescent: Germany, Austria and the Diplomacy of the Turkish Alliance, 1914–1918, op. cit., p. 151.
13. Zaven Der Yeghiayan, Memoirs, op. cit., pp. 103–4.
14. Ibidem, p. 105.
15. Ibidem, pp. 110–11.
16. Ibidem, p. 113.
17. Ibidem, pp. 116–17.
18. Ibidem, p. 118.
19. Ibidem, p. 119.
20. Ibidem, p. 120.
21. Ibidem, p. 121.
22. Ibidem, pp. 121–2. “Last year,” Said Halim recalled, “I told Monsieur Giers, the Russian Ambassador:
‘The Armenian people belongs to us, and it is incumbent on us to see to its welfare.’ ”
23. Ibidem, p. 123.
25. Cf. supra, p. 249.
26. Letter from Wangenheim to the chancelier Hollweg, Pera, 17 June 1915: Lepsius (ed.), Archives du
génocide des Arméniens, op. cit., doc. 81, p. 96.

Notes 943

28. Ibidem, pp. 124–5.
29. Ibidem, p. 126.
30. Cf. supra, pp. 257–8, 516–7, 791.
31. The patriarch mentions that Khosrov Behrigian, his seminary fellow student in Armash, was not
in any case “henchakiste”: Zaven Der Yeghiayan, Memoirs, op. cit., p. 127.
32. Ibidem, p. 129.
33. Ibidem, p. 130.
34. Ibidem, p. 130. The patriarch also mentions the role of Professor A. Khachadurian, the director of
the Getronagan school, who communicated with him whenever he traveled to Galata until he,
too, was deported; he apparently had means of transmitting information to the ARF’s Central
Committee.
35. Ibidem, pp. 189–90.
36. Ibidem, pp. 131, 142. He mentions, in particular, his reports of 7 June and 15 August 1915, which
reached France and Britain under Bishop Turian’s signature.
37. Ibidem, p. 136.
38. Ibidem, p. 137–49.
39. In the sixth part of the present study, we shall see that the Red Crescent had been transformed
into an agency in the CUP’s service; at its head were ranking members of the party.
40. Ibidem, pp. 154–8; Aguni, op. cit., p. 100, notes that the patriarch turned to Morgenthau to in the
attempt to prevent the Armenians of the capital from being deported.
41. Ibidem, p. 159.
42. Ibidem, p. 160.
43. Dadrian, Histoire du Génocide, op. cit., pp. 429–34, quotations pp. 432, 434.
45. Ibidem, p. 164.
46. Letter from Metternich to the Chancellor Hollweg, Pera, 7 December 1915: Lepsius (ed.), Archives
du génocide des Arméniens, op. cit., doc. 209, pp. 185–6.
48. Ibidem, p. 182.
49. Ibidem, p. 183. circa 1,000 Turkish £.
50. Ibidem, p. 184, points out that Reşad Bey was rather well disposed and saved a number of indi-
viduals such as Yervant Perdajian, Kevork Mesrob, Mesrob Naroyan and Apig Moubahiajian.
51. Ghazar Charek, Մարզպետ Հաճի Հիւսէին [Marzbed (Hadji Hüseyin)], 2 vol., Beirut 1945.
52. Berdjouhi, Jours de cendres à Istanbul, French trans. By Armen Barseghian, Marseille 2004.
53. Barseghian, a native of Tomarza and ARF cadre in Persia, Van, and Bitlis, was deported in 1915,
but managed to escape and work on the Bagdadbahn construction site under a false name: cf.
supra, p. 60, n. 68.
54. Charek, op. cit., pp. II–III.
55. Berdjouhi, Jours de cendres à Istanbul, op. cit., p. 55.
56. Ibidem, p. 56.
57. Ibidem, pp. 60–2, relates the case of a little girl of three or four from Tamzara who was taken to
Istanbul by the executioner of her parents, who offered her as a gift to his wife.
58. Ibidem, pp. 70–1.
59. M. Ormanian, The Church of Armenia, London 1912, annexe II, pp. 239–40.
60. Karpat, op. cit., pp. 170, 184–6. The city had around eight hundred thousand inhabitants at the
time.
61. Safrastyan, “Կոստանդնուպօլսի Հայոց Պատրիարգարանի Կողﬕց Թուրքիայի
Արդարադատութեան եւ Դաւանանգների Մինիստրության ներկայացւած հայկական
Եկեղեցիների եւ վանքերի ցուցակները ու դագրիրները, 1912–1913 [Takrir and Listings
of the Armenian Churches and Monasteries Presented to the Ministry of Justice and Religious
Denominations by the Armenian Patriarchate of Constantinople],” Echmiadzin 1 (1965), pp. 43–5.
62. Armenian Patriarchate of Constantinople, Վիճակացոյց Թաղային Վարժարանաց
Կոստանդնուպօլսոյ [Statistics on Constantinople’s Parish Schools], January 1907.

64. Ibidem, p. 93.

65. Aguni, op. cit., p. 100. The author was an editor at the daily Zhamanag.
66. Yervant Odian, The cursed years, 1914–1919, op. cit., no. 13.
67. Aguni, op. cit., p. 101.
68. Ibidem, p.102.
69. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Յ 144, file on İsmail Canbolat and Դ 279–80, file no. 13/1 (in English):
of Circassian origin, born in Kosovo, a graduate of Harbiye and parliamentary deputy from
Constantinople.
70. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Ժ 60–2, list of the accused, “secret-confidential.”
71. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Ի 125–30.
72. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Յ 197, file no. 30/1, Dossiers of Turks Responsible for the Armenians
Atrocities. Tevfik was probably an Armenian orphan from Amasia who had been abducted after
the 1895 massacres and adopted by a Turkish family in the capital.
73. Yervant Odian, The cursed years, 1914–1919, op. cit., no. 17, 19, 22, 23.
74. Aguni, op. cit., p. 105.
75. Österreichisches Staatsarchiv, HHStA PA XL, file 273, no. 327.
76. Politisches Archiv des Auswärtigen Amtes [A.A.], Türkei 183/40, A33705.
77. A.A. Türkei 183/40, A36184, ed. by Lepsius, Deutschland und Armenien, op. cit., p. 187, and Archives
du génocide des Arméniens, op. cit., p. 185.
78. A.A. Türkei, 183/38, A30432, pp. 3–4, coted in Dadrian, Histoire du génocide arménien, op. cit.,
p. 371, n. 2.
79. BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 26, Kayseri, report by Yervant Der Mardirosian, from Talas,
doc. cit., f° 45v°.
80. Verdict of the trial of Büyükdere/San Stefano, 24 May 1919: Takvim-ı Vakayi, no. 3618, 8 August
1919, pp. 6–7.
81. Aguni, op. cit., p. 105.
13 Deportations in the Vilayet of Edirne and

the Mutesarifat of Biğa/Dardenelles
3. Ibidem, pp. 120–1; Karpat, op. cit., p. 184, puts the number of Armenians in the vilayet at 10,289.
4. Ibidem, p. 170, puts the number of Armenians in Malgara at 2,658; Kévorkian & Paboudjian, Les
Arméniens dans l’Empire ottoman, op. cit., p. 121.
6. Ibidem, pp. 170, 186; BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 18, Edirne, a document by several hands
produced on 19 February 1919 in Aleppo bay survivors from Edirne, f° 2, indicates that there were
3,500 Armenians in Çorlu and 3,000 in Gallipoli.
7. Österreichisches Staatsarchiv, HHStA PA LX, Interna, dossier 272, no. 388.
8. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Յ 137, biography of Haci Adıl bey.
9. Cf. supra, p. 83, n. 45 (biography), p. 123 (his November 1910 entry into the Central Committee)
and p. 148 (his activity as a minister in Mahmud Şevket’s cabinet).
10. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Ի 131, Թ 560, Դ 160–1, list of responsibles in the vilayet of Edirne.
11. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Թ 568–9, Andrinople.
12. Report written of a common accord by the Bulgarian consul general [in Edirne], M. G. Seraphimoff,
and the Austro-Hungarian consul, Dr. Arthur, a knight of Nadamlenzki, also responsible for
German interests [sent to the embassy in Constantinople on 6 November 1915]: Österreiches
Staatsarchiv, HHStA PA XII, dossier 209, Z.98/P.
13. Ibidem. This information is corroborated by a document by several hands produced on 19 February
1919 in Aleppo by survivors from Edirne: BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 18, Edirne, ff.
2–8v°.
14. Aguni, op. cit., pp. 258–9.
15. Cf. supra, p. 145.

Notes 945
16. Zaven Der Yeghiayan, Memoirs, op. cit., p.67.

17. Sarkis Papazian, Յուշամատեան Ռոտոսթոյի Հայերուն [Memorial Book of Armenians of
Rodosto, 1606–1922], Beirut 1971, p. 62.
18. Ibidem, p. 63.
19. Ibidem, p. 65.
20. Ibidem, pp. 65–6.
21. Ibidem, p. 66.
22. Ibidem.
23. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Ի 131, Թ 560, Դ 160–1, list of responsibles in the vilayet of Edirne.
24. Ibidem.
25. Aguni, op. cit., pp. 262–3.
26. Ibidem, p. 265; Österreichisches Staatsarchiv, HHStA PA LX, Interna, file 272, no. 388
27. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Ի 134, Թ 564–5, list of responsibles in the region of çorlu.
28. Aguni, op. cit., p. 265.
29. BNu, Archives de la délégation nationale arménienne, “Statistique de la population arménienne
en Turquie [en 1920],” IV. 46. 2, f° 1.
30. Karpat, op. cit., p. 186; Kévorkian & Paboudjian, Les Arméniens dans l’Empire ottoman, op. cit.,
p. 118; APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Կ 131, Dardanelles.
31. Aguni, op. cit., p. 265.
14 Deportations in the Mutesarifat of Ismit

2. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Յ 914, Կ 627/3, statistics on Armenian population in the region of Ismit,
29 May 1913; Karpat, op. cit., p. 186, puts their number at 58,000.
4. Ibidem, pp. 124–8.
5. Ibidem, pp. 128–1; Krikor Mkhalian, Պարտիզակ ու Պարտիզակցին [Bardizag and Its People],
Cairo 1938.
6. Kévorkian & Paboudjian, Les Arméniens dans l’Empire ottoman, op. cit., pp. 131–6; K. Fenerjian,
Պատմութիւն Արսլանպէկի [History of Arslanbeg], Paris 1971.
8. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Յ 914, report on the situation in Ismit, 30 September 1920.
10. Ibidem, pp. 128–31.
11. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Ի 136, list of responsibles in the region of Ismit.
12. T. C. Başbakanlik Arşivi, 22Sh1333, 5 July 1915, IAMM, circulaire of Ali Münîf (nazir namina),
[şf 54/ 315], doc. no. 63.
13. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Ի 136–7, list of responsibles in the region of Ismit.
14. Ibidem.
15. Aguni, op. cit., pp. 266–7. Among them were, notably, Krikor Kherkha, Hovhannes Tombulian,
Antranig Genjian, Hampartsum Dimijian, Zareh Kochian, Misak Parseghian.
16. Ibidem, pp. 268–70.
17. Ibidem, pp. 270–1.
18. Ibidem, p. 271; Ardashes Biberian & Vartan Yeghisheyan, Պատմագիրք Ատափազար Աստո
ւաարեալ Քաղաքին [History Book of God-Created City of Adabazar], Paris 1960, pp. 702–18.
19. Aguni, op. cit., p. 271.
20. Fenerjian, op. cit., pp. 148–9. These men were then sent to Eskişehir in little groups, where they
melted into the flood of deportees arriving in the railroad station there.
21. Ibidem, pp. 273–4; APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Թ 553–4, no. 59, The deportation of Armeniens in
Arslanbeg; Fenerjian, op. cit., pp. 150–1, states that seven hundred young men from the village
were mobilized in fall 1914, many of whom worked in the wool mill in Ismit (ibidem, p. 147).
22. Ibidem, pp. 152–3.
23. Mkhalian, op. cit., pp. 624–6.

24. Ibidem, pp. 627–32.

25. Ibidem, pp. 635–6.
26. Ibidem, pp. 636–7; SHAT, Service Historique de la Marine, Service de Renseignements de la
Marine, Turquie, 1BB7 231, doc. n° 280, Constantinople, 1919, “Ali Chououri, gouverneur de
Bardizag, 1914–1918” [this was Ali Şuhuri, the müdir of the nahie of Bardizag] gives information,
probably based on an Armenian source, about the exactions and “abuses” committed by this gov-
ernment official.
27. Aguni, op. cit., pp. 266–7.
28. Barton, “Turkish Atrocities,” op. cit., pp. 181–5, report by Arthur C. Ryan, missionary in Istanbul,
28 March 1918.
29. Ibidem, p. 182.
30. Ibidem, p. 183.
1BB7 231, doc. no. 340, Constantinople, 19 February 1919, “Les massacres de Kirchehir et de ses
dépendances, déposition d’un témoin,” ff. 1–2.
33. Ibidem, pp. 139–40.
34. Ibidem, pp. 140–1.
35. PCI Bureau, List of responsibles for the massacres and deportations: BNu, ms. 289, f° 15,
Karamursal.
36. La Renaissance, no. 290, 7 November 1919.
37. La Renaissance, no. 375, 18 February 1920.
38. La Renaissance, no. 347, 16 January 1920 (first session); La Renaissance, no. 369, 11 February 1920;
La Renaissance, no. 386, 2 March 1920 (verdict of the trial of Ismit, 29 February); La Renaissance,
no. 387, 3 March 1920.
39. La Renaissance, no. 382, 26 February 1920 (trials of Bahçecik and Arslanbeg).
15 Deportations and Massacres in the Vilayet of

Bursa and the Mutesarifat of Kütahya
231, doc. no. 574, Constantinople, 15 April 1919, “Information sur la situation à Brousse à la date
du 10 avril,” signed by the naval lieutenant Rollin.
3. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Թ 518, file 24; BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 45, Bursa, report by
Rupen Donabedian, 4 January 1919, “Deportations and massacres of Armenians in Bursa”; Aguni,
op. cit., p. 239.
4. T. C. Başbakanlik Arşivi, 22Sh1333, 5 Temmuz [Juillet] 1915, IAMM, circulaire of Ali Münîf
(nazir namina), [şf 54/ 315], doc. no. 63.
5. Aguni, op. cit., pp. 241–2.
6. Ibidem, p. 242; APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Թ 518, file 24; BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 45,
Bursa, report by Rupen Donabedian, 4 January 1919.
7. Zhamanag, 13 November 1919, “Funeral ceremony in Bursa.”
8. Ibidem; Aguni, op. cit., p. 242.
9. The United States consul arrived in Bursa as the deportations were just beginning; it seems that
this induced the “Turks” to somewhat “temper their actions and abandon the idea of deporting
the Armenian Protestants and Catholics”: APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Թ 518, file 24; BNu/Fonds A.
Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 45, Bursa, report by Rupen Donabedian, 4 January 1919.
10. Ibidem.
11. Aguni, op. cit., p. 244.
12. Österreichisches Staatsarchiv, HHStA PA XII 209, dispatch no. 441/P, from the consular agent
in Bursa, L. Trano, 16 August 1915, to the Ambassador in Constantinople, Pallavicini, ff. 333–4,
with the dispatch no. 69/P-D, from the ambassador Pallavicini to the baron Burian, 24 August
1915.

Notes 947
13. Ibidem, dispatch no. 53/P, from the consular agent in Bursa, L. Trano, 19 August 1915, to the
Ambassador in Constantinople, Pallavicini, ff. 336–8, with the dispatch no. 70/P-B, from the
ambassador Pallavicini to the baron Burian, 27 August 1915.
14. Ibidem, dispatch no. 464/P, from the consular agent in Bursa, L. Trano, 23 August 1915, to the
Ambassador in Constantinople, Pallavicini, ff. 342–4, with the dispatch no. 71/P-B, from the
Ambassador Pallavicini to the Baron Burian, 31 August 1915.
15. Ibidem.
16. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Թ 518, file 24.
17. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Ի 202, list of responsibles in Bursa.
18. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Թ 518, file 24.
19. Cf. supra, p. 530.
20. Examination of Dr. Ahmed Midhat, at the second session of the trial of the kâtibi mesullari, 23
June 1919 (23 Haziran 1335): Takvim-ı Vakayi, no. 3589, 5 juillet 1919, pp. 172–3; Midhat was sen-
tenced to ten years at hard labor: the verdict in the trial of the CUP responsible secretaries and
delegates, handed down on 8 January 1920: Takvim-ı Vakayi, n° 3772, February 1920, p. 2, col. 2, p.
3, col. 1, pp. 53–66.
21. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Ի 202, list of responsibles in Bursa.
22. Ibidem.
23. Review of the trial: La Renaissance, no. 402, 20 March 1920. Let us also note that the Unionist
Ziya Şakir, an editor of Ertogrul in Bursa who was implicated in the deportations, was acquitted by
the court of Çorum (La Renaissance, no. 340, 7 January 1920), and, furthermore, that Osman Bey,
the former vali of Bursa, İbrahim Bey, the CUP’s responsible secretary in Bursa, and the comrades
who were interned in the prison of the court-martial, were transferred to Bursa in order to face the
court-martial there (La Renaissance, no. 132, 6 May 1919).
231, doc. no. 574, Constantinople, 15 April 1919, doc. cit., “Information sur la situation à Brousse
à la date du 10 avril.”
p. 176, states that there were a total of 22,883 Armenians and 11,884 Turks.
27. Aguni, op. cit., p. 245.
1BB7 231, doc. no. 367, Constantinople, 24 February 1919, “La déportation des Arméniens de
Tchinguiler.”
29. PCI Bureau, List of the responsibles for the massacres and deportations: BNu, ms. 289, f° 13, çenk-
iler; APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Ի 197 and Թ 561–2 , list of responsibles in çenkiler.
1BB7 231, doc. no. 367, Constantinople, 24 February 1919; Aguni, History of the Massacre of one
Million Armenians, op. cit., p. 247, states that Sahag Trayents and Usta Tavit were among the men
massacred.
231, doc. no. 367, Constantinople, 24 February 1919.
32. Aguni, op. cit., p. 248.
33. Ibidem, p. 249. A few soldier’s families were allowed to settle in the villages of Eskişehir, after an
order to that effect arrived from Istanbul (ibidem, p. 247).
34. Ibidem, p. 246.
35. PCI Bureau, List of the responsibles for the massacres and deportations: BNu, ms. 289, f° 13, çenk-
iler; APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Ի 197 and Թ 561–2 , list of responsibles in çenkiler.
p. 176, states that there were a total of 3,348 in the kaza.
p. 176.
38. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Ի 197 and Թ 561–2 , list of responsibles in Kirmasti.
p. 176.

40. Ibidem.
41. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Ի 198, 144 (English version) and Թ 562–3, list of responsibles in
Bilecik.
42. Ibidem.
43. Father Y. P., “Պիլէճիկի Աղէտը, 1915 [The Catastrophe of Bilecik, 1915],” Pazmaveb 1921,
p. 117.
44. Ibidem, pp. 118–19.
176.
46. Ibidem; Kévorkian & Paboudjian, Les Arméniens dans l’Empire ottoman, op. cit., p. 150 .
47. Ibidem; Karpat, op. cit., p. 176.
48. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Ի 198, List of responsibles in İnegöl.
p. 186.
50. Ibidem; Kévorkian & Paboudjian, Les Arméniens dans l’Empire ottoman, op. cit., pp. 158–9 .
51. Ibidem; APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Ի 627/2 and Յ 989, Balıkeser, bilan.
52. Aguni, op. cit., pp. 287–8; APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Յ 920.
53. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Ի 138–9 and Թ 556–7, list of responsibles in Balıkeser.
54. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Ի 138 and Թ 558–9, list of responsibles in Bandırma.
55. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Ի 138 and Թ 558–9, list of responsibles in Eydincik.
p. 186, states that there were a total of 3,449 in the kaza.
58. Aguni, op. cit., pp. 287–8; APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Յ 920.
59. BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 38, çangırı, ff 107v°, 112–13, letter from Vartan Karageuzian
to Aram Andonian, 25 February 1947.
p. 186.
61. Aguni, op. cit., p. 286.
62. Examination of the Dr. Besim Zühtü, responsible secretary in Eskişehir, at the second session of
the trial of the kâtibi mesullari, 23 June 1919 (23 Haziran 1335): Takvim-ı Vakayi, no. 3589, 5 July
1919, pp. 171–17?; Dr. Nesim Zühtü was released: the verdict in the trial of the CUP responsible
secretaries and delegates, handed down on 8 January 1920: Takvim-ı Vakayi, n° 3772, February
1920, p. 2, col. 2, p. 3, col. 1 and pp. 53–66 (the full verdict).
63. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Ի 201 and Դ 177–8, list of responsibles in Eskişehir.
64. BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 38, çangırı, f° 110, letter from Vartan Karageuzian to Aram
Andonian, Cairo, 1 April 1947.
182.
66. Aguni, op. cit., p. 286; SHAT, Service Historique de la Marine, Service de Renseignements de
la Marine, Turquie, 1BB7 231, doc. no. 257, Constantinople, 6 February 1919, “Déportations
d’Afionkarahissar.”
67. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Ի 198 and Ի 147 (English version), list of responsibles in Afionkarahisar.
16 Deportations and Massacres in

the Vilayet of Aydın
1. Cf supra, p. 37, n. 161.
2. Letter from George Horton to Henry Morgenthau, Smyrnia, 30 July 1915 (U.S. State Department
Record Group 59, 867.4016/130: Ara Sarafian (ed.), United States Official Documents on the
Armenian Genocide, II, The Peripheries, Watertown 1994, pp. 107–9.
3. Letter from Vladimir Radinsky to Stefan Burian, Smyrnia, 30 August 1915: Staatsarchiv, HHStA
PA 1915.

Notes 949
5. Taner Akçam, From Empire to Republic: Turkish Nationalism & the Armenian Genocide, Londres &
New York 2004, pp. 144–6; the American consul George Horton, The Blight of Asia, London 2003,
pp. 24–33, reports his impressions of these events.
6. Hervé Georgelin, La fin de la Belle-époque à Smyrne, doctoral thesis, II, Paris/EHESS 2002,
pp. 378–9, cited the Austro-Hungarian consul Vladimir Radinsky.
7. Letter from Vladimir Radinsky to Stefan Burian, Smyrnia,10 January 1916: Staatsarchiv, HHStA
PA 1916, coted in Georgelin, op. cit., p. 379.
8. FO. 371.2772, report no. 19 547, from Adam Block to the Foreign Office, 28 January 1916, coted in
Georgelin, op. cit., p. 379, n. 4.
pp. 182, 184.
10. Letter from Vladimir Radinsky to Pallavicini, Smyrnia, 1 December 1914: Staatsarchiv HHStA K
405, coted in Georgelin, op. cit., p. 381, n. 12.
11. Georgelin, op. cit., p. 393.
245, doc. no. 109, Smyrne, 29 April 1919, “Report on the unjust and criminal acts perpetrated by
the Unionist Turkish government against the Armenians of the province of Smyrna,” by Garabed
Balabanian, pp. 5–6; letter from Vladimir Radinsky to Stefan Burian, Smyrnia, 3 May 1915:
Staatsarchiv, HHStA PA 1915.
13. “Mémoire” appended to G. Horton’s letter to H. Morgenthau, Smyrnia, 5 August 1915: Ara
Sarafian (ed.), United States Official Documents on the Armenian Genocide, II, The Peripheries,
Watertown 1994, pp. 112–13; letter from V. Radinsky to S. Burian, Smyrnia, 21 May 1915:
Staatsarchiv, HHStA PA 1915, coted in Georgelin, op. cit., p. 393, n. 1.
14. Cf. supra, p. 52, 59, 73, n. 10.
245, doc. no. 109, Smyrna, 29 April 1919, “Rapport sur les actes injustes,” pp. 8–9.
16. Cf. n. 13 “Mémoire” and G. Horton’s letter to H. Morgenthau, Smyrnia, 30 July 1915: Ara Sarafian
(ed.), United States Official Documents on the Armenian Genocide, II, The Peripheries, Watertown
1994, p. 108.
245, doc. no. 109, Smyrna, 29 April 1919, “Rapport sur les actes injustes,” p. 9.
18. Aguni, op. cit., p. 280.
19. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Թ 539, no. 12, “Liste des responsables unionistes, vilayet d’Aïdın.”
20. Aguni, op. cit., p. 281; SHAT, Service Historique de la Marine, Service de Renseignements de la
Marine, Turquie, 1BB7 245, doc. no. 109, Smyrna, 29 April 1919, “Rapport sur les actes injustes,”
p. 9.
21. Ibidem, pp. 10–11, cited Daniel, Garabed and Berdj Bali, British citizens, Ardashes Karunian
and Ardashes Isakian, Russian citizens, Giovanni Shaoum, Italian citizen, all of whom died in
Islahiye, Birecik or Der Zor.
22. Ibidem, p. 12.
23. Ibidem, pp. 12–14; Aguni, op. cit., pp. 282–4.
25. Aguni, op. cit., p. 282; SHAT, Service Historique de la Marine, Service de Renseignements de la
Marine, Turquie, 1BB7 245, doc. no. 109, Smyrna, 29 April 1919, “Rapport sur les actes injustes,”
pp. 17–19.
26. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Թ 539, no. 12, “Liste des responsables unionistes, vilayet d’Aïdın.”
245, doc. no. 109, Smyrna, 29 April 1919, “Rapport sur les actes injustes,” pp. 19–20.
29. Ibidem, pp. 20–1.
30. Aguni, op. cit., p. 282.
31. Kévorkian & Paboudjian, Les Arméniens dans l’Empire ottoman, op. cit., pp. 171–2
245, doc. no. 109, Smyrna, 29 April 1919, “Rapport sur les actes injustes,” p. 21.
33. Ibidem, pp. 21–2.

17 Deportations and Massacres in the Vilayet of Konya

1. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Կ 780, vilayet of Konya; Karpat, op. cit. , pp. 180, 182, says there were
13,855.
2. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Կ 780, vilayet of Konya, estimates the Armenian population of this sancak
at 14,809, including the two colonies of Seydişehir (pop. 175) and Ilgun (pop. 142).
3. Azmi left his post on 18 June and immediately assumed the responsibilities of the vali of Lebanon,
where he had 11 Arab nationalists executed on 21 August 19195 in Beirut’s Square of the
Canons.
4. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Թ 388–9, no. 85, “The deportations in Konya”; Gaydzag [=Mgrdich
Barsamian], “Գոնիայի Հայութեան Ողբերգութիւնը. Ականատեսի մը Յուշատետրէն [The
Tragedy of the Armenians of Konya (according to the notebook souvenirs of a witness)],” Zhoghovurt,
20 December 1918. The author was the director of Konya’s Armenian College in this period.
5. Letter from the Dr. W. Dodd to H. Morgenthau, 6 May 1915, in Ara Sarafian (ed.), United States
Official Records on the Armenian Genocide, 1915–1917, Princeton-London 2004, pp. 37–8.
6. Cf. n. 4, art. cit., Zhoghovurt, 20 December 1918.
7. Letter from the Dr. W. Dodd to H. Morgenthau, 15 August 1915, in Ara Sarafian (ed.), United
States Official Records on the Armenian Genocide, 1915–1917, op. cit., pp. 192–5.
8. Ibidem, p. 194.
9. BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 14, Konya, collective report, Aleppo, 14 December 1918, f° 6.
They were transferred to Abuharar; 200 survivors were to be found in Aleppo after the armistice
(ibidem); APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Թ 388–9, no. 85, “The deportations in Konya.”
10. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Ի 4, List of responsibles in the vilayet of Konya.
11. Ibidem.
12. Ibidem.
14. Ibidem; Letter from the Dr. Wilfred M. Post to Henry Morgenthau, 3 September 1915, in Ara
Sarafian (ed.), United States Official Records on the Armenian Genocide, 1915–1917, op. cit., pp.
246–50.
15. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Թ 388–9, no. 85, “The deportations in Konya” .
17. Letter from the Dr. W. Dodd to H. Morgenthau, 8 September 1915, in Ara Sarafian (ed.), United
States Official Records on the Armenian Genocide, 1915–1917, op. cit., p. 254.
18. BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 14, Konya, report by T. Tajirian, from Karaman, [Aleppo in
1919], f° 10.
19. BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 14, Konya, collective report by inhabitants from Akşehir,
Aleppo, 23 February 1919, f° 2v°.
20. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Ի 4, List of responsibles in the vilayet of Konya. Among the main ben-
eficiaries of the pillage of Armenian property were: Mustafa Ağazâde Ruşdi Bey, Haci Kurazâde
Haci Bekir Effendi, Haci Kurazâde Haci Rusçük Ahmed, Akağazâde Abdullah, Küse Ahmedzâde
Mustafa, Atta and his brother Haci Rıza, Kâtibzâde Tevfik, Raif, İsmail Hakkı, director of the
Regie, Avındikzâde Hüseyin bey, Momcizâde Ali, Molla Veli Zâde, İzzet Bey, director of property
(mal müdüri), Celalbeyzâde Haci Kadri Bey, Sabaheddinağazâde Alaheddin, Mahmudbeyzâde
Behir, Nacarzâde Mustafa.
21. Bauernfeind, Journal de Malatia 1915, op. cit., Diary of the 23 August 1915, p. 312.
22. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Ի 4, List of responsibles in Eregli.
23. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Կ 780, vilayet of Konya, puts 132 Armenians in Hamidiye.
24. La Renaissance, no. 48, 27 January 1919: “La déportation des Arméniens de Burdur.”
25. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Ի 4, List of responsibles in Burdur.
26. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Կ 780, vilayet of Konya.
27. Bauernfeind, Journal de Malatia 1915, op. cit., Diary of the 23 August 1915, p. 312.
28. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Ի 4, List of responsibles in the vilayet of Konya.
29. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Կ 780, vilayet of Konya.

Notes 951
18 The Deportees on the Istanbul-Ismit-

Eskişehir-Konya-Bozanti Route and Along
the Trajectory of the Bagdadbahn
1. Gerald D. Feldman, “The Deutsche Bank from World War to World Economic Crisis, 1914–1923,”
in The Deutsche Bank, 1870–1995, London 1995, pp. 138–9; Hilmar Kaiser, “The Bagdad Railway
and the Armenian Genocide, 1915–1916,” in R. G. Hovannisian (ed.), Remembrance and Denial:
the Case of the Armenian Genocide, Detroit 1998, pp. 78–92.
2. Ibidem, p. 78 and n. 2.
3. Ibidem, p. 79.
5. Ibidem, p. 79.
6. Letter from Franz Günther to the president of the Deutsche Bank, 4 September 1915: ibidem,
pp. 79–80, and n. 6.
7. Ibidem, p. 81.
8. Ibidem, p. 82.
9. Ibidem, p. 82.
10. Feldman, “The Deutsche Bank,” art. cit., p. 142.
11. Ibidem, pp. 142–3.
12. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Ձ 575, telegram no. 1068, 25 October 1915, from the Assistant Military
Commissar of Rail Transport (War Ministry), Lieutenant Şükrü, to the Board of Directors of the
Eastern Railways.
13. Ibidem.
14. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Ձ 576, telegram, 8 November 1915, from the Military Commissar of Rail
Transport (War Ministry) to the Board of Directors of the Eastern Railways.
15. Ibidem. The commission recommended, finally, “following the matter constantly,” “that the points
indicated be fully applied and carried out.”
16. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Ձ 577, telegram, 8 November 1915, from the minister of interior to the
minister of war.
17. Ghazar Charek, Marzbed (Hadji Hüseyin), op. cit., pp. 9–13.
18. Ibidem, pp. 9–10; Zaven Der Yeghiayan, Memoirs, op. cit., p. 115.
19. Feldman, “The Deutsche Bank,” art. cit., pp. 138–42.
20. Yervant Odian, The cursed years, 1914–1919, op. cit., no. 26, states that he also had to pay for the
tickets of the policemen guarding him and provide them with their daily wages; Letter from the
Dr. W. Dodd to H. Morgenthau, 8 September 1915, in Ara Sarafian (ed.), United States Official
Records on the Armenian Genocide, 1915–1917, op. cit., p. 254, mentions that it cost four times the
ordinary fare to travel in a sheep-car.
21. Photograph sent, with a dedication, to the president of the Deutsche Bank by the director of the
Bagdadbahn: Feldman, “The Deutsche Bank,” art. cit., p. 142.
22. Report by the Dr. W. Dodd, doctor in the American Hospital of Konya, 21 December 1917,
Montclair (New Jersey): Barton, “Turkish Atrocities,” op. cit., pp. 145–6.
23. Letter from the Dr. W. Post to H. Morgenthau, 3 September 1915, in Ara Sarafian (ed.), United
24. Ibidem, p. 247.
25. Report by Dr. W. Post, doctor in the American Hospital of Konya, 11 April 1918, Lawrenceville
(New Jersey): Barton, “Turkish Atrocities,” op. cit., p. 155. Dr. Post points out that the temporary
deportation law was used to send French and British citizens from the capital “to the interior.” (ibi-
dem, p. 153); Report by the Dr. W. Dodd, 21 December 1917 ( ibidem, pp. 145–6), puts the number
of deportees at 45,000 in Konya.
26. Ibidem.
27. Ibidem; Report by the Dr. W. Post, 11 April 1918: Barton, “Turkish Atrocities,” op. cit.,
p. 156.

29. Anonymous letter, Afionkarahisar, 23 September 1915: Toynbee, The Treatment of Armenians in
the Ottoman Empire, op. cit., doc. 106, p. 431.
30. Report by the Dr. W. Dodd, 21 December 1917: Barton, “Turkish Atrocities,” op. cit., p. 147. Dr. Dodd
treated many of these Armenians, those suffering from injured feet in particular.
31. Letter from the Dr. W. Post to H. Morgenthau, 27 October 1915: Toynbee, The Treatment of
Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, op. cit., doc. 111, p. 445.
32. Report by the Dr. W. Dodd, 21 December 1917: Barton, “Turkish Atrocities,” op. cit., pp. 147–8.
33. Ibidem.
34. BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 14, Konya, f° 7, collectif report, Aleppo, 14 December 1918.
36. Letter from the Dr. W. Post to William Peet, 25 November 1915: Toynbee, The Treatment of
Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, op. cit., doc. 112, pp. 447–8.
37. Ibidem, p. 449.
38. BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 14, Konya, f° 7v°, collective report, Aleppo, 14 December
1918.
39. Report from Hoover to J. Barton, n. d.: Toynbee, The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman
Empire, op. cit., doc. 104, pp. 426–7.
40. Levon Mozian, Աքսորականի մը Ոդիսականը [The Odyssey of an Exiled], Boston 1958. The
author was a reporter for the Constantinople daily Azadamard.
41. Letter from Krikor Zohrab to Clara Zohrab, Konya, 9 June 1915: Zohrab, Complete works, op. cit.,
IV, pp. 290–1.
42. Letter from Krikor Zohrab to the Minister of Interior, Talât bey, Konya, 27 May/9 June 1915: ibi-
dem, pp. 292–6.
43. Yervant Odian, The cursed years, 1914–1919, op. cit., no. 23 and 26.
44. Ibidem, no. 29.
45. Ibidem, no. 30–2.
46. Ibidem, no. 34.
47. Ibidem, no. 37.
19 Deportations from Zeitun and Dörtyol:

Repression or Genocidal Program?
1. Cf supra, pp. 249–50.
2. Letter from Kate E. Ainslie to J. Barton, 6 July 1915: Toynbee, The Treatment of Armenians in the
Ottoman Empire, op. cit., doc. 121, p. 484.
3. Letter from the American consul in Aleppo, J. B. Jackson, to H. Morgenthau, 21 April 1915: Ara
Sarafian (ed.), United States Official Records on the Armenian Genocide, 1915–1917, op. cit., p. 13.
5. Ibidem, pp. 314–18.
6. Summary of the story of the Rev. Dikran Andreasian, from Zeytoun, by father Stephen Trowbridge,
Cairo, 6 July 1915: Toynbee, The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, op. cit., doc. 121,
p. 489.
7. Agassi, Զէյթուն եւ իր Շրջակաները [Zeytun and His Surrounding area], Beirut 1968, pp. 386–9;
Aguni, op. cit., p. 46. Haydar was latter appointed vali of Mosul, where he took part in the liquida-
tion of the deportees who arrived in his region; La Renaissance, no. 153, 30 May 1919.
9. Agassi, Zeytun, op. cit., p. 389.
11. Agassi, Zeytun, op. cit., pp. 390–1; Summary of the story of the Reverend Dikran Andreasian, from
Zeytoun, by Father Stephen Trowbridge, Cairo, 6 July 1915: Toynbee, The Treatment of Armenians
in the Ottoman Empire, op. cit., doc. 121, p. 489.

Notes 953
13. Agassi, Zeytun, op. cit., pp. 390–1.

14. Ibidem.
15. Ibidem, p. 392; A letter that Wolffskeel von Reichenberg wrote to his father Karl from Damascus
on 30 March 1915 (Hilmar Kaiser (ed.), Eberhard Count Wolffskeel Von Reichenberg, Zeitoun, Mousa
Dagh, Ourfa: Letters on the Armenian Genocide, Princeton 2001, p. 4), reveals that the German
chief-of-staff of the Fourth Ottoman Army had sent four battalions, a few squadrons, and a battery
of cannon to surround Zeitun and get the better of the deserters; Summary of the story of the Rev.
Dikran Andreasian, from Zeytoun, by Father Stephen Trowbridge, Cairo, 6 July 1915: Toynbee,
The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, op. cit., doc. 121, p. 489.
Sarafian (ed.), United States Official Records on the Armenian Genocide, 1915–1917, op. cit., p. 10;
Agassi, Zeytun, op. cit., p. 392.
17. Ibidem, pp. 393–4. According to the author, who attended this meeting, H. Blank was persuaded,
when he arrived, that what was involved was a rebellion. This suggests that the authorities exag-
gerated the importance of the event (ibidem); Summary of the story of the Rev. Dikran Andreasian,
from Zeytoun, by father Stephen Trowbridge, Cairo, 6 July 1915: Toynbee, The Treatment of
18. Ibidem; Agassi, Zeytun, op. cit., p. 394; Aguni, op. cit., p. 47.
19. Report by the Dr. J. R. Merill on the la situation in Zeytou and Marach, Ayntab, 14 June 1915:
Ara Sarafian (ed.), United States Official Records on the Armenian Genocide, 1915–1917, op. cit.,
p. 67, speaks of one hundred dead and as many wounded in the Ottoman ranks.
20. Summary of the story of the Rev. Dikran Andreasian, from Zeytoun, by father Stephen Trowbridge,
Cairo, 6 July 1915: Toynbee, The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, op. cit., doc. 121,
p. 489.
22. Agassi, Zeytun, op. cit., p. 396.
24. Zaven Der Yéghiayan, Memoirs, op. cit., p. 91; This was also Wolffskeel’s sentiment: Kaiser (ed.),
Eberhard Count Wolffskeel ... Letters, op. cit., p. 14, letter to his wife, 24 April 1915.
25. In August 1915, the survivors of the camp of Sultaniye were dispatched to the deserts of Syria in
their turn.
26. Aguni, op. cit., pp. 48–52.
27. Letter from Kate E. Ainslie to J. Barton, 6 July 1915: Toynbee, The Treatment of Armenians in
the Ottoman Empire, op. cit., doc. 121, p. 484; letter from the American consul in Aleppo, J. B.
Jackson, to H. Morgenthau, 21 April 1915: Ara Sarafian (ed.), United States Official Records on the
Armenian Genocide, 1915–1917, op. cit., p. 7, summarizes a report on the situation in the mutesarifat
of Marash made by Reverand John Merril the very same day; it confirms that the Armenians were
deported from these areas.
29. Letter from the Dr. Shepard, missionary in Ayntab, 20 June 1915: Toynbee, The Treatment of
Ottoman Empire, op. cit., doc. 121, p. 484. She also witnessed the arrival of the wife of the minister
of Göksun.
32. J. Merril met these deportees on the road between Ayntab and Aleppo; he observes that they
were being sent toward Iraq: letter from the American consul in Aleppo, J. B. Jackson, to H.
Morgenthau, 21 April 1915, in Ara Sarafian (ed.), United States Official Records on the Armenian
Genocide, 1915–1917, op. cit., p. 11.
Ottoman Empire, op. cit., doc. 121, p. 484. In a letter to Morgenthau, 28 May 1915 (Ara Sarafian
[ed.], United States Official Records on the Armenian Genocide, 1915–1917, op. cit., p. 49), the consul
of Mersina, Edward I. Nathan, confirms that it was muhacirs from Macedonia who were settled
near Marash and Zeitun.

35. Toynbee, The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, op. cit., p. 397.
36. Diary of Pierre Briquet, from the Saint-Paul Institute of Tarsus, from 14 March to May 1915:
Toynbee, The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, op. cit., p. 492–4.
37. “Զէյթունցիներու Տարագրութիւնը [The Deportation of the Zeituntsi],” Zhoghovurti Tsayn, 15
May 1919.
38. Verchin Lur, 26 May/8 June 1915, repeats information given in the Official Gazette of the day,
which published the decree announcing that the name had been changed; Summary of the story
of the Rev. Dikran Andreasian, from Zeytoun, by Father Stephen Trowbridge, Cairo, 6 July 1915:
Toynbee, The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, op. cit., doc. 121, p. 489
40. Puzant Yeghiayan (ed.), Ատանայի Հայոց Պատմութիւն [History of Armenians of Adana],
Antelias 1970, p. 320.
41. Aguni, op. cit., p. 294.
42. Ibidem; letter from the German consul in Alexandretta, P. Hoffmann, to H. von Wangenheim, 7
March 1915: Lepsius (ed.), Archives du génocide des Arméniens, op. cit., doc. 18, pp. 72–3.
43. Hilmar Kaiser, Bagdad Railways. Politics and the Socio-Economic Transformation of the çukurova,
doctoral thesis, European University of Florence, 2001, p. 308.
44. Yeghiayan (ed.), History of Armenians of Adana, op. cit., pp. 321–2.
45. Ibidem, p. 323 (ff. 186–90 of the ms. report).
46. Ibidem.
47. Report by a witness, 12 March, annexed to a letter from the Dr. Eugen Büge, German consul in
Adana, to Wangenheim, 13 March 1915: Lepsius (ed.), Archives du génocide des Arméniens, op. cit.,
doc. 19, pp. 74–6.
48. Yeghiayan (ed.), History of Armenians of Adana, op. cit., pp. 321–2; Kaiser, Bagdad Railways,
these cit., p. 309; chiffred telegram from the minister of Interior to the vilayet of Adana, 2 March
1915: BOA.DH. şfr, nr. 50/141 (Osmanli Belgelerinde Ermeniler (1915–1920), Armenians in Ottoman
Documents (1915–1920), op. cit., doc. no. 2, p. 22).
49. Aguni, op. cit., p. 295, reveals who these notables were: Hovhannes Balian, Krikor Gökpanosian,
Hovhannes Aprahamian, Dikran and Sarkis Balian, Baghdasar Balian and Hagop Küchükian.
50. Ibidem.
20 Deportations in the Mutesarifat of Marash

2. Ibidem, p. 311.
3. Telegram from the consul Rössler to Wangenheim, Marash, 31 March 1915: Lepsius (ed.), Archives
du génocide des Arméniens, op. cit., doc. 22, pp. 76–7.
4. Report by Drs Caroline F. Hamilton and C. F. Ranney, doctors in Ayntab’s American hospital,
attached to a 21 April 1915 letter from the American consul in Aleppo, Jackson, to Morgenthau,
21 April 1915: Ara Sarafian (ed.), United States Official Records on the Armenian Genocide, 1915–
1917, op. cit., p. 9. In this report, Kherlakian is referred to as “Horlkahian.”
5. Ibidem, pp. 11–12.
7. Cf. n. 4, pp. 12–13.
8. Aguni, op. cit., p. 298. According to an Armenian balance-sheet of the operations, around 900
men were arrested and tortured, 328 were hanged, and 314 worker-soldiers were shot in June-July
1916: BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 34, Marash, assessment of the deportations and mas-
sacres, Aleppo, 23 December 1918, f° 31.
9. Ibidem, p. 301. Wolffskeel notes that the Armenians collected money to bribe the judge presiding
over the court-martial (Kaiser [ed.], Eberhard Count Wolffskeel ... Letters, op. cit., p. 15, letter to his
wife, 24 April 1915), which suggests that, thanks to bribes, certain inhabitants of Marash man-
aged to secure more favorable deportation conditions or avoided a death sentence.

Notes 955
10. BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 34, Marash, assessment of the deportations and massacres,
Aleppo, 23 December 1918, f° 32.
11. BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 34, list of responsibles for deportations in Marash and his
area, ff. 6–9.
21 Deportations in the Vilayet of Adana

2. Cf. supra, pp. 87 and sqq.
3. Kaiser, Bagdad Railways, thesis cit., p. 306.
4. Report, 14 December 1914, with a letter from Büge to Wangenheim, 2 February 1915; letter from
general Sanders to Wangenheim, 8 February 1915: Kaiser, Bagdad Railways, thesis cit., p. 308.
5. Diary of Miss H. E. Wallis, Adana, from September 1914 to September 1915: Toynbee, The
Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, op. cit., doc. 129, p. 515.
6. Report by William N. Chambers, a British missionary who had been working in Adana for the
American Board of Turkey for thirty-seven years, 3 December 1915: Toynbee, The Treatment of
8. In service from 4 April 1914 to 22 February 1916.
10. Diary of Miss Wallis, doc. cit.: Toynbee, The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, op.
cit., doc. 129, p. 515; letters from the consul in Mersina, Edward I. Nathan, to Henry Morgenthau,
18 and 28 May 1915: Ara Sarafian (ed.), United States Official Records on the Armenian Genocide,
1915–1917, op. cit., pp. 43 et 46; Yeghiayan (ed.), History of Armenians of Adana, op. cit., pp. 340–1,
notes, however, that systematic searches for weapons and possibly compromising documents were
carried out in Armenian neighborhoods and institutions in the last week of May 1915. The
catholicos tendered his resignation when an officer came to search his apartments.
11. Ibidem, p. 323.
12. Report by Harriet J. Fischer, missionary in Adana, 13 April 1917, Wheaton (Illinois): Barton,
“Turkish Atrocities,” op. cit., p. 161.
13. Report from Büge to Wangenheim, 18 May 1915: Kaiser, Bagdad Railways, thesis cit., p. 311.
14. Telegram from Ali Münîf to the vilayet of Adana, 25 May 1915: BOA. DH. şfr, nr. 53/113, in
Osmanli Belgelerinde Ermeniler (1915–1920), Armenians in Ottoman Documents (1915–1920), op.
cit., doc. no. 21, p. 38.
15. Yeghiayan (ed.), History of Armenians of Adana, op. cit., p. 342, cited the unpublished Memories
of the principal secretary, Kerovpe Papazian, f° 210, as an indication that the catholicos left for
Aleppo on 25 May.
16. Ibidem, pp. 343–4, the unpublished Memories of the principal secretary, Kerovpe Papazian, ff.
210–11.
17. Ibidem, pp. 344–5, ff. 211–13.
18. Letter from Nathan to Morgenthau, 28 May 1915: Ara Sarafian (ed.), United States Official
Documents on the Armenian Genocide, 1915–1917, II, op. cit., doc. no. 44, pp. 78–9.
19. Aguni, op. cit., p. 306.
20. Ibidem; in a letter to Morgenthau, 11 September 1915 (Ara Sarafian [ed.], United States Official
Records on the Armenian Genocide, 1915–1917, op. cit., p. 270), the consul Nathan confirms that Ali
Münîf was responsible for the new, harsher policy, for he had decided that there would be “without
any exception.”
21. Letter from the consul in Mersina, E. Nathan, to H. Morgenthau, 26 July 1915: Ara Sarafian (ed.),
United States Official Records on the Armenian Genocide, 1915–1917, op. cit., p. 89.
22. Report, 7 July: Kaiser, Bagdad Railways, thesis cit., p. 314.
23. Aguni, op. cit., p. 307; William N. Chambers, missionary in Adana, in a report, 3 December 1915
(Toynbee, The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, op. cit., doc. 128, p. 513), confirms
that the Protestants were not spared.
24. Ibidem, p. 512.

25. Report by Miss H. E. Wallis, from September 1914 to September 1915: Toynbee, The Treatment of
Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, op. cit., doc. 129, pp. 516–17; Elizabeth S. Webb, a missionary in
Adana, confirms the figure of twenty thousand deportees in a report written on 13 April 1917 in
Wheaton, Illinois (Barton, “Turkish Atrocities,” op. cit., p. 169).
26. Ibidem, p. 169.
27. Report of Elizabeth S. Webb, missionary in Adana, 13 April 1917, Wheaton (Illinois): Barton,
28. Yeghiayan (ed.), History of Armenians of Adana, op. cit., pp. 337, 347–9.
29. Aguni, op. cit., p. 308.
30. Letter from the consul E. Nathan, to H. Morgenthau, 11 September 1915: Ara Sarafian (ed.),
31. Report from Stöckel to Pallavicini, in Kaiser, Bagdad Railways, thesis cit., pp. 314–15.
32. Yeghiayan (ed.), History of Armenians of Adana, op. cit., p. 335, cited the unpublished Memories of
the principal secretary, Kerovpe Papazian, ff. 198–201.
33. Ibidem, p. 336.
34. Cf. supra, p. 524.
35. Unpublished Memories of the principal secretary, Kerovpe Papazian, ff. 201–3: ibidem,
pp. 336–7.
36. Yervant Odian, The cursed years, 1914–1919, op. cit., no. 39–40.
37. Report by Miss H. E. Wallis, from September 1914 to September 1915: Toynbee, The Treatment of
Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, op. cit., doc. 129, pp. 515–16.
39. Report of Elizabeth S. Webb, missionary in Adana, 13 April 1917, Wheaton (Illinois): Barton,
40. Aguni, op. cit., p. 308.
42. Ibidem, no. 43. Odian reports that Andonian left Çangırı with a group of other intellectuals, but
fell out of the car and broke his leg; this led to a stay in a hospital in Angora, whose chief physician
refused to treat him when he learned that he was Armenian. It was while treating himself and
then trying to obtain crutches that, late in August, he managed to flee the hospital and slip into
the convoys of the deportees from Angora. His companions had long since been put to death in
the vicinity of Yozgat.
43. Ibidem, no. 44. Odian noted that the two brothers ensure all the support expenses for the four
men.
44. Report by Elizabeth S. Webb, missionary in Adana, 13 April 1917, Wheaton (Illinois): Barton,
“Turkish Atrocities,” op. cit., pp. 171–2.
45. Cf. supra, p. 520.
46. Report by Elizabeth S. Webb, missionary in Adana, 13 April 1917, Wheaton (Illinois): Barton,
48. Aguni, op. cit., p. 297.
49. Ibidem, p. 296. Among the six arrested men were three important entrepreneurs: Abraham
Elagözian, Abraham and Garabed Abrahamian.
50. Letter from the consul E. Nathan, to H. Morgenthau, 18 May 1915: Ara Sarafian (ed.), United
States Official Records on the Armenian Genocide, 1915–1917, op. cit., p. 43, according to informa-
tion provided by Dr. Christie, the director of the American mission in Tarsus.
51. Aguni, op. cit., p. 297.
52. Ibidem.
53. Ibidem, pp. 308–9.
54. Letter from the consul E. Nathan, to H. Morgenthau, 11 September 1915: Ara Sarafian (ed.),
55. Aguni, op. cit., pp. 270, 310.
57. Ibidem, p. 292.
58. Ibidem, pp. 297–300.

Notes 957
59. Hagop Boghosian, Հաճընի Ընդհանուր Պատմութիւնը [General History of Hadjen], Los Angeles
1942, pp. 585–6.
60. Ibidem, pp. 586–7. Those condemned to death were Garabed Kizirian, Nazareth Shekerdemian,
Drtad Melkonian and the young Aram Boyajian, whose “confessions” had not been enough to
save him.
61. Cf. supra, p. 590.
62. Aguni, op. cit., pp. 305–30?; report by Edith M. Cold, missionary in Hacın, 16 December 1915:
Toynbee, The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, op. cit., doc. 126, p. 502; Boghosian,
General History of Hadjen, op. cit., pp. 588–90, gives a complete account of the meeting organized at
the archbishopric by the primate, which was attended by 70 to 80 notables from the city.
63. Ibidem, p. 590; report by Edith M. Cold, missionary in Hacın, 16 December 1915: Toynbee, The
Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, op. cit., doc. 126, p. 502.
64. Ibidem, pp. 502–3; Boghosian, General History of Hadjen, op. cit., p. 590.
65. Ibidem, p. 592.
66. Report by Edith M. Cold, missionary in Hacın, 16 December 1915: Toynbee, The Treatment of
67. Ibidem, p. 504; Aguni, op. cit., p. 305.
68. Ibidem; Boghosian, General History of Hadjen, op. cit., p. 592.
70. Ibidem, p. 507.
71. Ibidem, p. 509.
72. Ibidem, p. 505.
73. Boghosian, General History of Hadjen, op. cit., p. 593.
74. Aguni, op. cit., p. 305.
76. Ibidem, p. 507.
77. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, file 59, list of responsibles for the deportations in Cilicia, Hacın and Sis:
Asum effendi, Hasanağazâde Ali, Şadi effendi, Mafazâde İbrahim, Mafazâde Süleyman, Suzekzâde
Hasan, Suzekzâde Haci Ali, Suzekzâde Mustafa, Cemalzâde Mustafa, Dr. Ali effendi, Muhtar
Haci effendi and sons, Haci Mahmud effendi and his son, Kürdzâde Hulis, çulhacizâde Haci
Halil, Yarimzâde İbrahim, Kısacıkzâde Ali, Kısacıkzâde Ahmed, Haci Hasan effendi, doctor of
the municipality, Fodoş Ahmed, Dede effendi Zâde Şeyh Ca, Haci Mehmedzâde Cemil effendi,
Haci Mehmedzâde Mahmud, Total Mustafa Bey, lawyer, Aşuk Yusufoğlu Hakkı, Abdurrahman
çavuş, Lepeci Zâde, Vezirzâde Mahmud, Yurik Velizâde İbrahim, Mufti Hafız, Kusacıkzâde
Mahmud, Şamlızâde Mehmed, Şamlızâde Durmuş, Muallim İbrahim, Gök Mustafa effendi, Gök
Cemil, Topaloğlu Molla Halil effendi, Üçtatlı Şükrü, Hamamköyli Haci Bey, Şeyh Alioğlu Tahir,
Ankuzoğlu Ahmed, brothers Hökeş, Haci and Yusuf, Ormanci Mehmed, Fekeli Ummet çavuş,
Kösezâde Ahmed, Kürd Kuzuoğlu Mehmed, and çamurdanzâde Mehmed.
78. Telegram from Talât to the sancak of Kozan, 17 June 1915: BOA.DH. Şfr, nr. 54/51: Armenians
in Ottoman Documents (1915–1920), op. cit., doc. no. 37, p. 50; Misak Keleshian, Սիս Մատեան
[Book of Sis], Beirut 1949, pp. 553–61
80. Ibidem, pp. 300–1.
81. Kaiser, “The Bagdad Railway and the Armenian Genocide,” art. cit., p. 79; cf. supra, pp. 578–9.
82. SHAT, Syrie-Liban, 1-V, b.d., dossier 2351, “Rapport sur les mesures d’anéantissement prises
contre les Arméniens des régions des monts de l’Amanus” [Report on the Measures Taken to
Annihilate the Armenians in the Mountainous Amanus Region], signed by the Dr P. Hovnanian,
Bagdadbahn physician in Intilli, Vartivar Kabayan and Garabed Geukjeian, who furnished the
Bagdadbahn with supplies, Aleppo, 5 January 1919, pp. 8, 11 of annexe.
83. Ibidem, p. II.
84. Ibidem. Demirji Khodja, Harmanda Samuel, Lapashli Hovsep, Simon oghlu Peniamin, Haji
Mattheos, Darakji Ohannes oghlu Arakel and Darakji Baghdasar. Three of them were hanged,
one killed and four sent to Der Zor.

85. Ibidem, pp. IV, VII.

86. Ibidem, annexe.
87. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, file XXIII, doc. n° 158, telegram no. 67, from the presiding judge at the
court of appeals of Constantinople, Asım Bey, to the Ministry of Interior, Adana, 14/27 November
1915.
88. Asım Bey had held posts under Abdül Hamid in Damascus, Salonika, and in Uskub as the presid-
ing judge of a penal tribunal. In 1908, as a member of the CUP, he had served as a court inspec-
tor in Salonika and as interim vali of Kosovo. Later, he was promoted to the rank of Director of
the Criminal Investigations Department at the Ministry of Justice, member of the commission
that appointed civil servants, and, finally, presiding judge at the criminal court and the court of
appeals: APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Յ 25-26-27-28-29-30-31-32-33-34, “Second report on Turks respon-
sible for the armenian atrocities.”
89. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, file XXIII, doc. n° 158, telegram no. 67, from the presiding judge at the
court of appeals of Constantinople, Asım bey, to the Ministry of Interior, Adana, 14/27 November
1915.
90. Ibidem.
91. Keleshian, Book of Sis, op. cit., pp. 562–3.
22 Deportations in the Sancaks of Ayntab and Antakya

1. Kévorkian & Paboudjian, Les Arméniens dans l’Empire ottoman, op. cit., pp. 318–23. There were
another two Armenian villages, Arel and Orul, on the road leading to Rumkale and Nisibin, with
eight and 50 Armenian households, respectively.
2. Ibidem, p. 323.
3. BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 4, Ayntab, “The deportation of Armenians in Ayntab,” f°
1r°-v°, notes that much of the land on which the Armenian cemetery lay was confiscated on the
eve of the war; this led to a lawsuit that, obviously, was never terminated.
4. Ibidem.
5. Ibidem, f° 3.
6. Ibidem. Wolffskeel confirms that certain circles in Marash sent a blatantly “make up telegram” to
Istanbul in which they affirmed that the Armenians had “occupy a mosque” and “begin to kill the
Muslims”: Kaiser (ed.), Eberhard Count Wolffskeel ... Letters, op. cit., p. 14, letter to his wife, 24 April
1915.
7. Ibidem, f° 3v°. Among the men arrested were Father Movses, Hrant Sülahian, Nazaret Manushagian,
Hagop and Nazar Ghazarian, Movses Vartavarian, Hovsep Biulbiulian, Avedis Khanzadian, and
Khoren Minasian: Aguni, op. cit., p. 310.
8. Kevork Sarafian (ed.), Պատմութիւն Անթէպի Հայոց [History of the Armenians in Ayntab], I, Los
Angeles 1953, p. 1019.
9. Ibidem, p. 1020.
10. BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 4, Ayntab, f° 4.
11. Report by Miss Fearson, a resident of Ayntab, written in September 1915 after her departure from
Turkey: missionary in Ayntab and then assistant to the American vice-consul in Urfa, written on
11 April 1918: Toynbee, The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, op. cit., doc. 137, pp.
541–50; Report by Elvesta T. Leslie, an assistant to the American vice-consul in Urfa (report by
11 April 1918): Barton, “Turkish Atrocities,” op. cit., p. 107.
13. Ibidem, f° 4.
14. Telegram from the German consul in Alep, Walter Rössler, to the embassy in Constantinople, 30
July 1915: Lepsius (ed.), Archives du génocide des Arméniens, op. cit., doc. 125, pp. 119–20.
15. Letter from the Consul Jackson to Morgenthau, 3 August 1915: Ara Sarafian (ed.), United States
Official Records on the Armenian Genocide, 1915–1917, op. cit., p. 169.
16. Aguni, op. cit., p. 310; BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 4, Ayntab, f° 4v°.
17. Sarafian (ed.), Ayntab, I, op. cit., p. 1024.
18. Report by Miss Fearson, written on 11 April 1918: Toynbee, The Treatment of Armenians in the
Ottoman Empire, op. cit., doc. 137, pp. 543–4.

Notes 959
19. BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 4, Ayntab, f° 4v°.

20. Ibidem, f° 6; report by Miss Fearson, written on 11 April 1918: Toynbee, The Treatment of Armenians
in the Ottoman Empire, op. cit., doc. 137, p. 544.
22. Sarafian (ed.), Ayntab, I, op. cit., p. 1026. The director of the deportation was someone named
Yasin; he organized the pillage of the Armenians waiting for a train.
23. Letter from the Consul Jackson to Morgenthau, 19 August 1915: Ara Sarafian (ed.), United States
24. Telegram from the vali of Aleppo, Bekir Sâmi, to the Ministry of Interior, 1 September 1915:
BOA.DH. EUM, 2. Şb, nr. 68/76: Armenians in Ottoman Documents (1915–1920), op. cit., doc. n°
105, p. 100.
26. Ibidem, p. 1027.
27. Aguni, op. cit., p. 312.
30. Ibidem, pp. 1029–30.
31. Ibidem, p. 1032.
32. Ibidem, p. 1033.
33. The report by Elvesta T. Leslie, an assistant to the American vice-consul in Urfa (report by 11
April 1918): Barton, “Turkish Atrocities,” op. cit., p. 107, gives 1 December as the first convoy’s
departure date.
34. Report by Miss Fearson, written on 11 April 1918: Toynbee, The Treatment of Armenians in the
Ottoman Empire, op. cit., doc. 137, pp. 546–9.
36. Ibidem, f° 7v°. Oddly, there is never any mention of a committee responsible for “abandoned prop-
erty” in the sources at our disposal, even if auctions are mentioned.
38. Ibidem.
39. Sarafian (ed.), Ayntab, I, op. cit., pp. 1036–7.
40. Ibidem, pp. 1037–9.
41. Ibidem, pp. 1039–40.
42. Ibidem, p. 1041.
44. Sarafian (ed.), Ayntab, I, op. cit., pp. 1043–4.
45. Ibidem, p. 1042.
46. Ibidem, p. 1045.
47. BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 4, Ayntab, f° 10v°.
48. Ibidem, ff. 11–17.
49. BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 60, Kilis, report by the Committee of the deportes from Kilis,
18 December 1918, f° 1. Those present at this meeting were: Haci Mustafa, deputy of Kilis, Hüsni,
president of the CUP’s Club, Mesud, member of the Regional Council, Haci Ahmed, president of
the municipality, Muhtar, director of the Evkaf, Razi, civil servant, Nihad, director of the Regie,
and all the senior civil servants of the Kaza.
50. Ibidem.
51. Ibidem, f° 2.
52. Ibidem, ff. 3–4.
53. Ibidem, f° 5.
54. Ibidem, ff. 7–8.
56. Ibidem, p. 348.
57. Ibidem, pp. 349–51.
58. Cf. supra, pp. 606–7.
59. Telegram from Rössler to the embassy in Constantinople, 30 July 1915: Lepsius (ed.), Archives du
génocide des Arméniens, op. cit., doc. 125, pp. 119–20.

60. Zora Iskenderian, “Ժողովուրդը Ինչո՞ւ Զէնքին Փարեցաւ [Why the Population Take up Arms],”
in M. Kushakjian & B. Madurian (ed.), Յուշամատեան Մուսա Լերան [Memorial Book of Musa
Dagh], Beirut 1970, p. 315.
61. Report by the Rev. Dikran Andreasian [c. October 1915]: Toynbee, The Treatment of Armenians in
the Ottoman Empire, op. cit., doc. 130, p. 522. The Protestant minister mistakenly dated the depor-
tation order to 13 July. Obviously, he used the Julian calendar, but that is not enough to explain
this date.
62. Report by Bishop Torgom Kushagian, primate of the Armenians of Egypte, 28 September 1915:
ibidem, doc. 131, pp. 528–9.
63. Iskenderian, art. cit., in Kushakjian & Madurian (ed.), Memorial Book of Musa Dagh, op. cit.,
p. 316.
64. Ibidem, p. 327; Report by Bishop Torgom Kushagian: The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman
Empire, op. cit., doc. 131, pp. 528–9.
the Ottoman Empire, op. cit., doc. 130, p. 522.
66. Ibidem, pp. 523–4. The defense committee included, notably, Reverand Dikran Andreasian, Mikayel
Gegejian, Hetum Filian, Sahag Andekian, Khacher Mardirian, Hovnan Iskenderian, Iskender
Kelemian, Jabra Kazanjian, Boghos Kabayan, Hovhannes Kebburian, Movses Der Kalustian,
Melkon and Krikor Kuyumjian, Krikor Tovmasian, Yesayi Ibrahimian, Simon Shemmasian and
Thomas Azayan: Kushakjian & Madurian (ed.), Memorial Book of Musa Dagh, op. cit., pp. 329,
336.
the Ottoman Empire, op. cit., doc. 130, pp. 524–5.
68. Ibidem, pp. 525–6.
69. Ibidem, pp. 525–7.
70. Ibidem, p. 527; Report by Bishop Torgom Kushagian: ibidem, p. 530.
71. Iskenderian, art. cit., in Kushakjian & Madurian (ed.), Memorial Book of Musa Dagh, op. cit.,
p. 318. The principal Armenian figures arrested in Antioch were Sahag Aramian, the lawyer
Dikran Aramian, Setrak and Misak Iskenderian, Mukhtar Hagop, Movses Kazanjian, Abraham
Renjilian, Kerovpe Aslanian, Khacher Hagopian, Movses Boyajian, Hovhannes Zararsız, and
Stepan Movsesian. Only Alexandre Iskenderian managed to elude the police and flee to Musa
Dağ.
72. Ibidem, p. 327.
23 Deportations in the Mutesarifat of Urfa

2. Ephraim K. Jernazian, Judgement unto Truth. Witnessing the Armenian Genocide, transl. Alice
Haug, New Brunswick & London 2003, p. 3.
4. Aram Sahagian, Դիւցազնական Ուրֆան եւ իր Հայորդիները [Heroic Urfa and His Armenians],
Beirut 1955, pp. 763–4.
5. Ibidem, p. 765.
6. Ibidem, p. 766.
7. Telegram from Walter Rössler to the embassy in Constantinople, 13 August 1915: Lepsius (ed.),
Archives du génocide, op. cit., doc. 137, pp. 130–2. The engineer also saw how the corpses of depor-
tees were burned on the road between Urfa and Arabpunar (ibidem, p. 133).
8. Jernazian, op. cit., p. 48; Sahagian, Heroic Urfa, op. cit., pp. 774–6.
9. Ibidem, p. 771.
10. Jernazian, op. cit., p. 49.
11. Ibidem, pp. 50–4.
12. Sahagian, Heroic Urfa, op. cit., p. 771.
13. Ibidem, pp. 772–3; Jernazian, op. cit., p. 54.
14. Ibidem, p. 56.

Notes 961
15. Ibidem. The date has been determined on the basis of an indication provided by the witness, who points
out that the deportation order was issued “one week” after he began working in his new position.
16. Ibidem, p. 56.
17. Ibidem, p. 59; Sahagian, Heroic Urfa, op. cit., pp. 776–7.
18. Letter from Francis Leslie, American vice-consul in Urfa, to the Consul Jackson, Urfa, 14 June
1915: Toynbee, The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, op. cit., doc. 133, p. 536.
19. Sahagian, Heroic Urfa, op. cit., pp. 776–7. The mutesarif summoned their families and told them
to reveal where the weapons were hidden if they wished to see their husbands come back home
alive (ibidem, p. 777); Elvesta T. Leslie, an assistant to the American vice-consul in Urfa, reports
(report by 11 April 1918, in Barton, “Turkish Atrocities,” op. cit., p. 109) that Jacob Künzler and
Franz Eckart, as well as Francis Leslie and Dr. Shepard, made great efforts to ensure that these
families would be deported to Rakka, which probably was deemed safer for them.
20. Ibidem, pp. 778–9; Jernazian, op. cit., p. 60, points out that the Dashnak leader Antranig Bozajian
was brought before the Aleppo court-martial together with a schoolteacher.
21. Sahagian, Heroic Urfa, op. cit., pp. 780–1.
22. Ibidem, p. 781; Jernazian, op. cit., pp. 59–60.
24. Jernazian, op. cit., pp. 60–1.
25. Ibidem, pp. 62–3, 70; Sahagian, Heroic Urfa, op. cit., p. 782.
26. Ibidem, pp. 788–9.
27. Ibidem, pp. 790–2.
28. Ibidem, pp. 793–5.
29. Ibidem, p. 797; Report by Elvesta T. Leslie, an assistant to the American vice-consul in Urfa, 11
April 1918: Barton, “Turkish Atrocities,” op. cit., p. 110.
30. Sahagian, Heroic Urfa, op. cit., p. 771; Jernazian, op. cit., p. 71.
31. Ibidem; Sahagian, Heroic Urfa, op. cit., p. 782.
32. Cf. supra, p. 327, n. 58–60; Dadrian, “Documentation of the Armenian Genocide in Turkish
Sources,” in Genocide: A Critical Bibliographic Review, art. cit., pp. 118–20, provides an annotated
bibliography that reveals Çerkez Ahmed’s criminal activities in Van and, subsequently, the vilayet
of Dyarbekir.
33. Hans-Lukas Kieser, Der Verpasste Fiede. Mission, Ethnie und Staat in den Ostrprovinzen der Türkey,
1839–1938, Zürich 2000, p. 470, n. 149.
34. Sahagian, Heroic Urfa, op. cit., pp. 801–2.
35. Dadrian, “Documentation of the Armenian Genocide in Turkish Sources,” in Genocide: A Critical
Bibliographic Review, art. cit., pp. 119–20, provides a list of the Turkish sources on these murders,
as well as the commentaries in Rafaël de Nogales, Four Years Beneath the Crescent, op. cit., p. 73,
on Major Ahmed. The next day, Zohrab’s watch and ring were on sale in Urfa: Sahagian, Heroic
Urfa, op. cit., p. 802.
36. Ibidem, p. 803, mentions the two labor battalions liquidated on 4 August; Kieser, Der Verpasste
Fiede, op. cit., p. 471, n. 150, cites reports by Künzler and Eckart; Jernazian, op. cit., p. 73, also says
that the “gendarmes” Halil and Ahmed left for Karaköprü on 4 August, and further notes that the
Syriacs who were spared reported on these events when they returned.
37. Ibidem, pp. 73–4; Sahagian, Heroic Urfa, op. cit., pp. 804–6, 812.
38. Jernazian, op. cit., p. 74. Elvesta T. Leslie, an assistant to the American vice-consul in Urfa (Barton,
“Turkish Atrocities,” op. cit., p. 110) confirms that Urfa was attached to the vilayet of Dyarbekir in
her report by 11 April 1918
39. Ibidem, p. 75.
40. Ibidem, p. 75.
41. Ibidem.
42. Sahagian, Heroic Urfa, op. cit., p. 807; interview by Mrs. J. Vance Young, wife of Dr. Vance, doctor
in the American Hospital of Urfa, in Egyptian Gazette, 11 October 1915: Toynbee, The Treatment
of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, op. cit., doc. 135, p. 539.
43. Report by Elvesta T. Leslie, an assistant to the American vice-consul in Urfa, 11 April 1918:
Barton, “Turkish Atrocities,” op. cit., p. 110.

44. Interview by Mrs. J. Vance Young, in Egyptian Gazette, 11 October 1915: Toynbee, The Treatment
of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, op. cit., doc. 135, p. 539.
45. Letter from Jackson to Morgenthau, 25 August 1915: Ara Sarafian (ed.), United States Official
Records on the Armenian Genocide, 1915–1917, op. cit., p. 234; Jehan de Rohé [ps. of Jean-Baptiste
Rebours], Chouchanik, la jeune Arménienne, Paris 1928, p. 115, a Frenchman held in Urfa, together
with other nationals of countries at war with Turkey, witnessed these massacres.
46. Jernazian, op. cit., p. 75.
47. Sahagian, Heroic Urfa, op. cit., pp. 810–12. According to Jernazian, the decision was taken when
a squadron of gendarmes entered the Armenian quarter in order, it was said, to look for deserters
there: Jernazian, op. cit., p. 83.
49. Ibidem, p. 818.
50. Ibidem.
51. Ibidem, p. 819.
52. Ibidem, p. 821. A “military committee” charged with coordinating the defense effort was then
formed; it comprised: Mgrdich Yotneghperian, Harutiun Rastgelenian, Harutiun Simian,
Khoren Kupelian, Levon Eghperlerian, Hovhannes Izmirlian and Armenag Attarian (ibidem,
p. 823).
53. Ibidem, pp. 824–5.
54. Ibidem, pp. 827–9.
55. Kaiser (ed.), Eberhard Count Wolffskeel Von Reichenberg ... Letters, op. cit., pp. 20–1, letter to his
wife, 1 October 1915.
56. Sahagian, Heroic Urfa, op. cit., p. 831; Memorandum by an American missionary in Urfa [c. October
1915]: Toynbee, The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, op. cit., doc. 136, p. 540; Jehan
de Rohé, Chouchanik, op. cit., p. 115, witnessed the arrival of the regular forces.
57. Kaiser (ed.), Eberhard Count Wolffskeel Von Reichenberg ... Letters, op. cit., p. XV.
58. Ibidem, pp. 20–1, letter to his wife, 16 October 1915; Jernazian, op. cit., p. 85.
59. Ibidem; Sahagian, Heroic Urfa, op. cit., p. 832.
60. Ibidem , pp. 833–5; Jernazian, op. cit., p. 85.
61. Ibidem; Sahagian, Heroic Urfa, op. cit., p. 835–40.
62. Memorandum by an American missionary in Urfa [c. October 1915]: Toynbee, The Treatment of
63. Jehan de Rohé, Chouchanik, op. cit., p. 120.
64. Kaiser (ed.), Eberhard Count Wolffskeel Von Reichenberg ... Letters, op. cit., p. 28, letter to his wife,
16 October 1915.
66. Ibidem, p. 843.
67. Ibidem, p. 847.
68. Ibidem, p. 856.
69. Ibidem, p. 858.
70. Ibidem, p. 1015.
71. Ibidem, p. 947; Sarafian (ed.), Ayntab, I, op. cit., p. 1031, notes that it was Ğalib Bey who had Rev.
Soghomon Akelian hanged.
72. Report by Elvesta T. Leslie, 11 April 1918, Barton, “Turkish Atrocities,” op. cit., p. 110.
73. Ibidem, p. 111.
74. Kaiser (ed.), Eberhard Count Wolffskeel ... Letters, op. cit., p. 25, letter to his wife, 16 October 1915.
75. Ibidem, p. 28.
76. Hyacinthe Simon, Mardine, la ville héroïque. Autel et tombeau de l’Arménie durant les massacres de
1915, Jounieh, s. d., p. 91.
77. Jacob Künzler, Im Lande des Blutes. Erlebnisse in Mesopotamien während des Weltkireges (1914–1918),
introduction by Hans-Lukas Kieser, Zurich 2004, p. 92.
79. Ibidem , pp. 833–5; Jernazian, op. cit., p. 86.
231, doc. No. 299, Constantinople, 11 February 1919, “Les crimes de Franz Ec[k]art à Ourfa.” He

Notes 963
was arrested in Constantinople by the British occupation forces in February 1919 on the basis of
these accusations: APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Յ 327–8, file no. 34, report by Gabriel Daghavarian,
Constantinople, 15 January 1919.
81. Letter from F. Leslie to J. Jackson, Urfa, 14 June 1915: Toynbee, The Treatment of Armenians in the
83. Künzler, Im Lande des Blutes, op. cit., p. 98.
84. Ibidem.
85. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, dossier 59, List of those responsible for the massacres and deportations in
Urfa and its environs.
87. Letter from J. Jackson to H. Morgenthau, 25 August 1915: Ara Sarafian (ed.), United States Official
Records on the Armenian Genocide, 1915–1917, op. cit., p. 234, letter from John Merrill, president of
the Central Turkey College in Ayntab, 17 August 1915.
88. BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 4, Ayntab, ff. 26–30, about the deportation of the Armenians
of Eneş.
Part V The Second Phase of the Genocide

1 The Aleppo Sub-Directorate for Deportees: An Agency in

the Service of the Party-State’s Liquidation Policy
1. Fuat Dündar, İttihat ve Terakki’nin Müslümanları Iskân Politikası (1913–1918), Istanbul 2001,
pp. 92–174 and the map, p. 93.
2. Ibidem, pp. 201–25; APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Դ 370, “Muslims who Emigrated during the Balkan
war and the General War,” gives the following breakdown: vilayet of Andrinople 132,500; vilayet
of Adana 9,059; vilayet of Angora 10,000; vilayet of Aydın 145,868; vilayet of Alep 10,504; vilayet
of Bursa 20,853; vilayet of Sıvas 10,806; vilayet of Konya 8,512, etc., for a total of 413,922 people.
3. FO 371/6500, Turkish War Criminals, file of the prisoner Şükrü Bey, edited by Vartkes Yeghiayan,
British Foreign Office Dossiers on the Turkish War Criminals, op. cit., pp. 143–6. Şükrü became min-
ister during the kemalist period.
4. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Ի 125–128–129–130.
5. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Մ 456, no. 24, chiffred telegram from the minister of interior, Talât, to the
vilayet of Erzerum, 10/23 May 1915.
6. T. C. Başbakanlik Arşivi, 22 Sh 1333, IAMM, circular from Ali Münîf, şf 54/ 315, doc. no. 63;
APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Մ 455, no. 51, directive annexed to chiffred telegram from the comman-
dant by interim of the 15th division, the Colonel Şahabeddin, in Kayseri, to the commandant of
the 3th Army, 24 June/7 July 1915 [24 Haziran 1331]. According to Fuat Dündar, the IAMM was
renamed Aşâyir ve Muhâcirîn Müdîriyeti Umumiyesi (AMMU) in 1916.
7. Report by J. Mordtmann, Pera, l30 June 1915: J. No. zu. 4018 AA-PA Konstantinopel 169, in Kaiser,
Bagdad Railways, thesis cit., pp. 321–2, and n. 790. Fuat Dündar has very recently unearthed eth-
nographic maps and censuses established just before or during the First World War, which we had
previously known about only from accounts by witnesses such as Mordtmann: Fuat Dündar, “La
dimension ingénierie de la Turcisation de l’Anatolie: Les cartes ethnographiques et les recense-
ments,” conference, Salzburg, 14–17 April 2005.
8. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Յ 313, List of those responsible for massacres in the Aleppo-Der Zor-Mosul.
9. Falih Rıfkı Atay, Zeytindağı, Istanbul 1981, p. 64. The author, an officer in the Fourth Army, who
was traveling by rail to Aleppo with the Young Turk feminist Halide Edib, saw him board a train
in the Adana train station, and heard the story of his exploits in the provinces.
10. Ali Fuad Erden, Birinci Dünya harbinde Suriye hatıraları [Memories of the WWI in Syria], Istanbul
1954, p. 217, cited in Dadrian, “Documentation of the Armenian Genocide in Turkish Sources,”
art. cit., pp. 118–19.

11. Hilmar Kaiser, At the Crossroads of Der Zor, Death, Survival and Humanitarian Resistance in Aleppo,
1915–1917, Princeton 2001, p. 15, n. 5 and 6, provides a list of the many different dispatches about
the new arrival that Rössler sent his ambassador in June 1915.
12. We have discussed the role Kemal played in May 1909 as a member of the parliamentary com-
mission of inquiry after the massacres in Cilicia. It was Kemal who, on behalf of the government,
defended the law authorizing recruitment of criminals to the Special Organization before the
Senate at its 12/25 September 1916 session (two years late!): Vahakn Dadrian, “The Complicity of
the Party, the Government, and the Military,” Journal of Political and Military Sociology 22/1 (sum-
mer 1994), pp. 57–9.
13. Declaration of Ihsan Bey, head of the Interior Minister’s cabinet and former assistant prefect of
Kilis, at the first session of the trial of Ittihadistes, 27 April 1919: Takvim-ı Vakayi, no. 3540, 5 May
1919, p. 5.
14. Cf. supra, p. 524.
15. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Կ 104–5, Memorandum from the Dr. A. Nakashian to the British
Intelligence, Colonel Ballard, Galata, July 1920.
16. Österreichisches Staatsarchiv, HHStA PA LX, Internal, file 272, no. 397.
17. Cf. supra, p. 602.
18. V. Dadrian, “The Naïm-Andonian Documents on the World War I Destruction of the Ottoman
Armenians,” International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, vol. 18/3 (1986), pp. 331–2 and
n. 35.
19. FO 371/6501, War Criminals, file of the prisoner Mustafa Abdülhalik: Yeghiayan, British Foreign
Office Dossiers on the Turkish War Criminals, op. cit., pp. 305–19.
20. J. Kheroyan, who was appointed to the Ras ul-Ayn camp late in October 1915, presented a letter
of credentials signed by Nuri, “chief of the Directorate of Deportees”: cf. Raymond Kévorkian,
L’Extermination des déportés arméniens ottomans dans les camps de concentration de Syrie-Mésopotamie
(1915–1916), la Deuxième phase du génocide, Paris, RHAC II (1998), p. 110.
2 Displaced Populations and the Main Deportation Routes

2. US National Archives, State Department Record Group 59, 867.4016/225, no. 278, letter and
report from Jackson, to the State Department, 16 October 1915: Sarafian, United States Official
Documents, op. cit., I, pp. 105–8.
3. Ibidem, State Department RG 59, 867.4016/219, no. 382, letter and report from Jackson, to
Morgenthau, 29 September 1915: Sarafian, op. cit., I, p. 100.
4. BNu, Archives de la délégation nationale arménienne, “Statistique de la population arménienne
en Turquie [in 1920],” IV. 46. 2, ff. 1–3.
5. Ibidem.
6. T. C. Başbakanlik Arşivi, 9Za1333/18 Eylul [September] 1915, DN, letter from the vali of Dyarbekir,
the Dr. Reşid, to Ministry of Interior [12 August 1331/1915], DH.EUM, 2 şube, 68/71, doc.
no. 112.
7. Djemal Pasha, Memories of a Turkish Statesman, 1913–1919, London 1922, p. 277.
8. A.A., Türkei 183/376, K169, no. 48: Lepsius, Archives du génocide des Arméniens, op. cit., p. 93.
9. A.A., Türkei 183/38, A23991: Lepsius, Archives du génocide des Arméniens, op. cit., pp. 112–13.
10. French translation of the indictment in the Unionists’ trial: Marcus Fisch, Justicier du génocide
arménien, le procès de Tehlirian, Paris 1981, p. 266.
11. A.A., Türkei 183/38, A23991: Lepsius, Archives du génocide des Arméniens, op. cit., p. 114.
12. Telegram to the ambassador: ibidem, p. 120.
13. Beylerian, op. cit., p. 51.
14. Kévorkian, L’Extermination des déportés arméniens, op. cit., p. 78, on the camp of Bab.
15. Ibidem, p. 79.
16. US National Archives, State Department RG 59, 867.4016/219, no. 382, letter and report from
Jackson to Morgenthau, 29 September 1915: Sarafian, United States Official Documents on the
Armenian Genocide, I, op. cit., pp. 94–8.

Notes 965
17. SHAT, Syrie-Liban, 1-V, b.d., dossier 2351, “Rapport sur les mesures d’anéantissement prises contre
les Arméniens des régions des monts de l’Amanus” [Report on the Measures Taken to Annihilate
the Armenians in the Mountainous Amanus Region], signed by the Dr. Ph. Hovnanian,
Bagdadbahn physician in Intilli, Vartivar Kabayan and Garabed Geukjeian, who furnished the
Bagdadbahn with supplies, Aleppo, 5 January 1919, 11 pp. III–VI.
18. Report by Elizabeth S. Webb, missionary in Adana, 13 April 1917, in Wheaton (Illinois): Barton,
“Turkish Atrocities,” op. cit., pp. 170–1; Balakian, Le Golgotha arménien, op. cit., p. 238. This informa-
tion is corroborated by the account of Aleksan Tarpinian (Kévorkian, L’Extermination des déportés
arméniens, op. cit., pp. 63–4), who passed by way of Osmaniye/Mamura in early September; he puts
the number of deportees at 37,000.
19. Balakian, Le Golgotha arménien, op. cit., p. 238.
20. Yervant Odian, The Cursed Years, 1914–1919, op. cit., no. 45.
21. Reports about the camp of Mamura, 16 and 26 November, 1 and 13 December 1915, by Paula Schäfer
and Beatrice Rohner: Toynbee, The Treatment of Armenians, op. cit., doc. 117, pp. 469–72.
22. Report of Paula Schäfer about the camp of Mamura, 1 December 1915: ibidem, doc. 117,
pp. 470–1.
23. Balakian, Le Golgotha arménien, op. cit., p. 253; Yervant Odian, The Cursed Years, 1914–1919, op.
cit., no 47, confirms that, in late November 1915, traffic on the road was hindered by corpses,
abandoned children, and crying babies lying alongside lifeless mothers. In Hasanbeyli, Odian
encountered worker-soldiers in an amele taburi that was building a road; among them were two
compositors from the Istanbul daily Zhamanag. Of the 800 men originally in the labor battalion,
only 160 were left; they lived in the open and worked ten hours a day.
24. Ibidem, puts the mortality rate in the Islahiye camp at 150 per day; Balakian, op. cit., p. 253.
25. Lepsius, Archives du génocide des Arméniens, op. cit., doc. 185, p. 161.
26. Kévorkian, L’Extermination des déportés arméniens, op. cit., pp. 68–74.
27. Vahram Dadian, To the Desert, Pages from my Diary, trans. H. Hacikyan, Princeton & London
2003, p. 51. His convoy had left Çorum on 30 July (ibidem, pp. 20–1).
28. Ibidem, pp. 52–3.
29. Ibidem, pp. 54–5.
31. Kévorkian, L’Extermination des déportés arméniens, op. cit., p. 72.
32. Ibidem.
33. Aram Andonian, Documents officiels concernant les massacres arméniens, Paris 1920, p. 20.
35. Report from Rössler to Wolf-Metternich, 9 February 1916: Lepsius, Archives du génocide des
Arméniens, op. cit., doc. 235, p. 198. Zaven Der Yeghiayan, Memoirs, op. cit., op. cit., p. 205, traveled
through Katma, on his road into exile, around 10 or 11 November 1916; he saw deportees still liv-
ing in the open there.
36. Kévorkian, L’Extermination des déportés arméniens, op. cit., pp. 77–8, report by Aram Andonian.
37. BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, P.J. 1/3, file 14, Konya, collective report by Armenians native to Akşehir,
Aleppo, 23 February 1919, f° 3.
38. Kévorkian, L’Extermination des déportés arméniens, op. cit., p. 75, report by Hovhannes Khacherian.
39. Ibidem, p. 79, report by Aram Andonian.
40. Ibidem, pp. 77–85.
41. Ibidem.
42. Ibidem. “It was also in the course of this operation,” Andonian notes, “that we, too, were sent to
Meskene.”
43. Ibidem, pp. 87–8, report; Kaiser, At the Crossroads of Der Zor ... 1915–1917, op. cit., p. 58, n. 52, cites
the many telegrams from Rössler to Ambassador Metternich, sent in January and February 1916,
which mention the evacuation of the camp in Bab.
44. Ibidem; Lepsius, Archives du génocide des Arméniens, op. cit., p. 199.
46. Ibidem, pp. 93–7, reports about Munbuc.
47. Yervant Odian, The Cursed Years, 1914–1919, op. cit., no. 48.
48. Ibidem.

3 Aleppo, the Center of the Genocidal System and

of Relief Operations for the Deportees
1. Letter from the consul J. Jackson to H. Morgenthau, 5 June 1915: Ara Sarafian (ed.), United States
2. Puzant Yeghiayan (ed.), History of Armenians in Adana, op. cit., p. 345, cites the unpublished
Memories of the principal secretary, Kerovpe Papazian, f° 214.
3. Kaiser, At the Crossroads of Der Zor ... 1915–1917, op. cit., p. 15, n. 5.
Ottoman Empire, op. cit., doc. 121, p. 485. Ainslie points out (ibidem, p. 486) that horses, mules, and
donkeys were “requisitioned” by the authorities “for the army,” with the result that the deportees
had very few animals at their disposal.
5. Zohrab, Complete Works, op. cit., IV, letters to Clara Zohrab, Aleppo, 16 June, 12 and 15 July
1915, pp. 304–15. Zohrab wrote his last will and testament, dated 15 July, and entrusted it to the
German consul, Dr. Rössler (ibidem, pp. 319–21, the testament).
6. Telegram from Rössler to the embassy, Aleppo, 15 August 1915: Kaiser, At the Crossroads of Der
Zor ... 1915–1917, op. cit., p. 18, n. 13.
7. Ibidem, p. 24, cites some telegrams from Rössler and Jackson on this subject
8. An initial report by Martin Niepage, sent to the German embassy in Constantinople by way of
the consul, Rössler, on 15 October 1915, was published by J. Lepsius (Deutschland und Armenien,
op. cit., pp. 165–7, doc. 182). This second report, which points out German complicity, was pub-
lished only in the French translation of Livre bleu du gouvernement britannique, Paris 1916 (réédi-
tion 1987), pp. 507–16, by A. Toynbee.
9. Kaiser, At the Crossroads of Der Zor ... 1915–1917, op. cit., p. 28
10. Ibidem, p. 29.
11. Cf. supra, p. 174, n. 55.
12. On the committee were Father Harutiun Yesayan, T. Jidejian, Vahan Kavafian, Sarkis Jierjian, H.
Barsumian and the Reverend Rupen Gejghajian: Zaven Der Yeghiayan, Memoirs, op. cit., pp. 178–9.
13. Puzant Yeghiayan, Ժամանակակից Պատմութիւն Կաթողիկոսութեան Հայոց Կիլիկիոյ
[Contemporary History of the Armenian Catholicosate of Cilicia], Beirut 1975, pp. 46–56.
14. Telegram from Rössler to the embassy, Aleppo, 27 October 1915: Kaiser, At the Crossroads of Der
Zor ... 1915–1917, op. cit., p. 27. The religious dignitaries who accompanied Sahag II in his exile
in Jerusalem were Bishop Yeghishe Garoyan, Yeprem Dohmuni and Kud Mkhitarian, and Fathers
Khat and Giragos Markarian. In the following months, other Apostolic and Catholic Armenian
clergymen who had been deported from different provinces of Asia Minor also came together in
Jerusalem. The Patriarch Zaven says that Sahag was initially isolated in a village near Aleppo.
On 21 October, he left for Idlib, although the vali wanted to send him to Munbuc (where all the
clergymen had been concentrated), and on 9 November for Jerusalem. Cemal is supposed to have
forced through the decision to exile him to Jerusalem at a meeting held in Istanbul in fall 1915:
Zaven Der Yeghiayan, Memoirs, op. cit., p. 175.
15. Cf. supra, pp. 524, 539, his stay with the political prisoners in Ayaş and, p. 905, his provisional
actions in the camp for deportees in Tarsus.
16. Cf. supra, p. 539.
17. Cf. supra, p. 539, n. 51.
18. Charek, Marzbed (Haji Hüseyin), op. cit., I, pp. 26–7.
19. Kaiser, At the Crossroads of Der Zor ... 1915–1917, op. cit., pp. 31–57.
20. Ibidem, provides a good summary of what the Armenian emissaries did in Aleppo and the vicinity,
noting that all the work involved in distributing the financial aid was carried out by an Armenian
network.
21. T. C. Başbakanlik Arşivi, telegram from the Ministry of Interior to the vilayet of Aleppo, 22 July
1915, EUM BOA.DH.şfr 54A/71, and, telegram from Talât to mutesarifat of Zor, 24 July 1915, EUM
Special 28 BOA.DH. şfr 54A/91: Kaiser, At the Crossroads of Der Zor ... 1915–1917, op. cit., p. 17 et
n. 11.
22. Charek, Marzbed (Haji Hüseyin), op. cit., I, pp. 26–8.
23. Yervant Odian, The Cursed Years, 1914–1919, op. cit., no. 49 and 50.

Notes 967
24. Central Archives of AGBU/Cairo, Aleppo, no. 23, April 1910–December 1919, C8, letter from
Stephen Markarian (nephew of the Dr. Shmavonian) to Central Board in Cairo, 2 May 1916.
25. Bishop Yeghishe Chilingirian, who lived in Aleppo from November 1916 to February 1917, puts the
number of Armenian deportees in the city at between 25,000 and 30,000: Yeghishe Chilingirian,
Նկարագրութիւնք Երուսաղէﬕ-Հալէպի-Դամասկոսի Գաղթականական եւ Վանական
Զանազան Դիպաց եւ Անցքերու, 1914–1918 [Descriptions of Various Events and Developments
Bearing on the Refugees and Monks in Jerusalem, Aleppo, and Damascus, 1914–1918], Alexandria
1922, p. 31.
26. Stanley E. Kerr, The Lions of Marash: Personal Experiences with American Near East Relief, 1919–
1922, New York 1973, p. 28. According to Zaven Der Yeghiayan, Memoirs, op. cit., pp. 171, 173–4,
the Patriarchate sent large sums to Aleppo and other regions, tapping endowments that were in
principle inalienable and making use of the network established by Dr. Peet, the head of the Bible
House of Istanbul, which was run by American missionaries.
27. Report from J. Jackson to the State Secretary, Washington, 4 March 1918: Sarafian (ed.), United
States Official Documents on the Armenian Genocide, I, op. cit., pp. 149–52, “The Armenian
atrocities.”
28. “Dr. Altunian,” Veradznunt, no. 12, 12 June 1919, p. 203.
29. These employees held a certificate issued by Cemal Pasha that exempted them from the depor-
tation: Sarafian (ed.), United States Official Documents on the Armenian Genocide, I, op. cit.,
p. 152.
30. Central Archives of AGBU/Cairo, Aleppo, no. 12, 21 July 1910–26 March 1931, CII-1, letter from
the Comity of Damascus to Central Board in Cairo, 13 November 1918; Chilingirian, op. cit.,
pp. 32–3.
31. Kaiser, At the Crossroads of Der Zor ... 1915–1917, op. cit., p. 27.
32. Ibidem.
33. Antranig Dzarugian, Մանկութիւն Չունեցող Մարդիկ [Men without Childhood], Erevan 1985,
pp. 64–6
34. Report from J. Jackson to the State Secretary, Washington, 4 March 1918: Sarafian (ed.), United
States Official Documents on the Armenian Genocide, I, op. cit., p. 154, “The Armenian atrocities.”
35. Elmas Boyajian, “Հայկական Որբանոցի Կեանքէն [Fragments of the Life in an Armenian
Orphanage],” Chanaser, no. 19, 1 October 1964, p. 415; Karl Meyer, L’Arménie et la Suisse, s.l. 1986,
p. 287.
36. Ibidem, p. 416.
37. “Հայկական Որբանոցը, Հալէպ [The Armenian Orphanage in Aleppo],” Chanaser, no. 19,
1 October 1964, p. 414.
38. “Dr. Altunian,” Veradznunt, no. 12, 12 June 1919, p. 202.
39. Meyer, op. cit., p. 117.
40. Central Archives of AGBU/Cairo, C6, “Rapport sur l’orphelinat arménien (from 31 July 1915 to
30 September 1919), by the Reverend Aharon Shirajian, Aleppo, 30 November 1919.
41. Kaiser, At the Crossroads of Der Zor ... 1915–1917, op. cit., p. 54.
42. Ibidem, p. 59. Harriet J. Fischer, a missionary in Adana who was traveling through Aleppo on 1
January 1916 met a Protestant minister from Adana, Rev. Sisag, who was working in the orphan-
age headed by Rohner; Sisag estimated the number of children residing in the orphanage at 700:
report by Harriet J. Fischer, 13 April 1917, Wheaton (Illinois), in Barton, “Turkish Atrocities,” op.
cit., p. 162.
43. T. C. Başbakanlik Arşivi, telegrams from the Ministry of Interior to the vilayets, 23 March 1916
(EUM général 44298 BOA.DH.şfr 62/ 90) and 3 April 1916 (EUM Special 71 BOA.DH.şfr 62/
210): ibidem, p. 61, n. 4, 5. The orphanage directed by Rohner was finally shut down in February
1917. Around 70 children were sent to the Turkish orphanage in Ayntura, Lebanon; 370 others
slipped off to the city to avoid being sent there (Kaiser, At the Crossroads of Der Zor ... 1915–1917,
op. cit., pp. 69–70).
44. Chilingirian, op. cit., p. 34. Zaven Der Yeghiayan, Memoirs, op. cit., p. 179, indicates that this insti-
tution cared for 800 children, 300 of whom were put in Rohner’s hands in December 1915.
45. BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 14, Konya, collective report by peoples native from Akşehir,
Aleppo, 23 February 1919, f° 2v°.


47. Report, 8 November 1915: Lepsius, Archives du génocide des Arméniens, op. cit., p. 164.
48. US National Archives, State Department RG 59, 867.4016/373, report, 4 March 1918: Sarafian
(ed.), United States Official Documents on the Armenian Genocide, I, op. cit., p. 146.
50. Ibidem.
51. Ibidem, no. 54.
52. Kévorkian, L’Extermination des déportés arméniens, op. cit., pp. 98–104, report on Aleppo.
53. Ibidem, pp. 104–5; Report, 27 April 1916: Lepsius, Archives du génocide des Arméniens, op. cit.,
p. 203.
55. Chiffred telegram from Talât, minister of Interior, to the vali of Aleppo, Mustafa Abdülhalik, 18
November/1 December 1915: APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Պ 54, p. 7. The stamp indicating that Nuri
received the telegram bears the date 21 November/4 December 1915 and is accompanied by a
handwritten note: “I was sure that there were people like this and, on a few occasions, asked the
police chief to pursue them, but his investigations failed to produce results.”
4 The Camps in Suruc, Arabpunar, and Ras ul-Ayn and

the Zones of Relegation in the Vilayet of Mosul
2. Ibidem, pp. 351–2.
3. Ibidem, pp. 353–4.
4. Ibidem, pp. 356–7.
5. Ibidem, p. 358.
6. Ibidem, pp. 358–9. According to the confidences of the municipal physician in Suruc, 27,000
Armenian “patients” died in the town’s “hospital” between July and December 1915 (ibidem,
p. 380).
7. Ibidem, pp. 358–9.
8. Cf. supra, p. 296.
10. Ibidem, p. 376.
11. Ibidem, pp. 376–7.
12. Ibidem, pp. 381–2.
13. Ibidem, p. 383. Kapigian notes that the pharmacists Drtad Tarpinian, from Amasia, and Harutiun
Bakalian, from Samsun, “the only surviving male representatives of their cities,” were able to
treat the 15,000 inmates of the camp and prevent epidemics from wreaking havoc there. Several
convoys of unaccompanied women were also sent to Birecik, Nisib, and Ayntab.
14. Ibidem, pp. 394–5.
15. Ibidem, pp. 397–8.
16. Ibidem, pp. 401–2.
17. Ibidem, pp. 403–4.
18. Ibidem, pp. 409–10. Kapigian notes that around 15 Armenians from a village near the Euphrates
who had been Kurdified and Islamicized during the 1895 massacres were incorporated into their
convoy en route and then deported to Rakka.
19. Ibidem, p. 364.
20. Ibidem, pp. 365–7.
21. A.A., Türkei 183/38, A23991, report from Walter Rössler to the chancellor Bethmann Hollweg, 27
July 1915: Lepsius, Archives du génocide des Arméniens, op. cit., doc. 120, p. 114.
22. US National Archives, State Department RG 59, 867.4016/191, no. 372, report to H. Morgenthau,
29 August 1915: Sarafian (ed.), United States Official Documents on the Armenian Genocide, I, op.
cit., pp. 262–3. The vali in question, a former mutesarif of Marash, was Hayret Bey, who held his
post from May 1915 to August 1917: APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Յ 314, list of those guilty of perpetrat-
ing massacres in Mosul.

Notes 969
23. Lepsius, Archives du génocide des Arméniens, op. cit., doc. 137, pp. 130–1.
24. Ibidem.
25. Ibidem, pp. 131–3, report by Lismayer (not signed).
26. Balakian, op. cit., p. 294.
27. Ibidem.
28. Cf. supra, p. 967, n. 28, the notes bearing on Martin Niepage’s report.
30. Cf. supra, p. 635.
31. Kévorkian, L’Extermination des déportés arméniens, op. cit., pp. 65–6, report by Kalust
Hazarabedian.
32. Ibidem, pp. 107–8, report by Aram Andonian.
33. Ibidem, pp. 110–14, report by J. Kheroyan.
35. This is the figure advanced by Naim Bey in his memoirs:: Andonian, op. cit., p. 39.
36. Kévorkian, L’Extermination des déportés arméniens, op. cit., pp. 107–9, report by Aram Andonian
on Ras ul-Ayn.
37. Ibidem.
38. The information provided by Andonian is corroborated by this telegram of Rössler’s: Lepsius,
Archives du génocide des Arméniens, op. cit., doc. 257, p. 200.
39. A.A., Türkei 183/38, A27200: ibidem, pp. 203–5. This information is corroborated by the sum-
mary report written by the American Consul Jackson: US National Archives, State Department
RG 59, 867.4016/ 373, report, 4 March 1918, in Sarafian (ed.), United States Official Documents
on the Armenian Genocide, I, op. cit., pp. 148–9. This information is supplemented by Garabed
K. Muradian’s account: Kévorkian, L’Extermination des déportés arméniens, op. cit., pp. 119–20; in
her report, written on 11 April 1918, Elvesta T. Leslie, a missionary in Ayntab (Barton, “Turkish
Atrocities,” op. cit., p. 109), relates the testimony of a coachman who told her that, in fall 1915, on
the road between Urfa and Rakka, on the banks of the Euphrates, 400 to 500 babies were burned
alive together and that in March 1916, “thirty thousand” deportees from the camp in Ras ul-Ayn
were massacred.
41. Andonian, op. cit., p. 48.
42. Telegram from Holstein, consul in Mosul, to the ambassador in Constantinople, 21 July 1915:
Lepsius, Archives du génocide des Arméniens, op. cit., doc. 118, p. 111. Armenian sources put the
number of survivors from the second convoy from Siirt to reach Mosul at 50 (supra, p. 340), and
the number of survivors from Bitlis at 130 (supra, p. 353).
44. Ibidem; cf. supra, p. 300.
45. Cf. supra, p. 317.
46. Report, 5 September 1916: Lepsius, Archives du génocide des Arméniens, op. cit., doc. 298, p. 227.
Zaven Der Yeghiayan, Memoirs, op. cit., p. 237, confirms these facts, adding that these deportees
were subsequently transferred to Kirkuk.
47. National Archives, State Department RG 867. 48/271, report from Jackson to Morgenthau,
8 February 1916, no. 534.
49. Cf. supra, p. 592.
50. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Յ 314, list of those guilty of perpetrating massacres in Mosul.
51. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Յ 82, file on the colonel Abdülkadri Hilmi, a native of Kastamonu and
member of the Ottoman General Staff who was also involved in the massacres that took place in
Alexandropol in summer 1918. According to an Armenian source, of a battalion of 400 worker-
soldiers put under his command, only 60 to 80 men were still alive, “in an appalling state,” when
the English arrived in Mosul (APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Յ 321–2).
52. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Յ 781, Cevdet Bey and the massacres of Armenians in Mosul. Mehmed
Halid also held a post in Van, where he rendered his compatriots great services and participated
in the underground network based in Aleppo and Bozanti (cf. supra, pp. 632–3).

54. Ibidem, p. 235.

55. Ibidem. La Renaissance, no. 113, 13 April 1919, provides an account of the third session in the trial
of Nevzâde Bey, a close associate of Halil’s; at this trial session, it was revealed that most of these
men had founded businesses in Mosul and that it was Halil who had them deported and then
killed.
56. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Յ 781, Cevdet Bey and the massacres of Armenians in Mosul.
57. La Renaissance, no. 115, 15 April 1919, and no. 120, 22 April 1919.
58. La Renaissance, no. 111, 10 April 1919.
60. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Յ 239–40, file on lieutenant-colonel Basri Bey, member of the General
Staff of Halil pasha.
61. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Յ 781, Cevdet Bey and the massacres of Armenians in Mosul.
62. S. Zurlinden, Der Weltkrieg, II, Zurich 1918, p. 707, in V. N. Dadrian, “Documentation of the
Armenian Genocide in Turkish Sources,” art. cit., pp. 116–17. Be it noted that while another of
Halil’s henchmen, Ferid Bey, formerly second in command in Mosul, was brought before the court-
martial in Istanbul in December 1919 (La Renaissance, no. 332, 27 December 1919), but Halil him-
self was never brought to justice. The chief of Halil Pasha’s General Staff, Ernest Paraquin, further
notes that, in spring 1918, the Armenians of Mosul were put to work “on the construction of roads
in the desert”: SHAT, Service Historique de la Marine, Service de Renseignements de la Marine,
Turquie, 1BB7 235, doc. no. 1992, Constantinople, 16 April 1920, “La politique pantouranienne,”
by Ernest Paraquin, p. 5.
63. Zaven Der Yeghiayan, Memoirs, op. cit., pp. 220–1. In fall 1916, Halil also held a post in Baghdad
(ibidem, p. 222).
5 The Concentration Camps along “The Euphrates Line”

1. Report from J. Jackson to State Department, 3 August 1915: Toynbee, The Treatment of Armenians
in the Ottoman Empire, op. cit., doc. 139, p. 55, the mutesarif of Zor, then in Aleppo, announced
that there were, at this time, around 15,000 Armenians in Zor. In a wire that Rössler sent to
the embassy from Aleppo in July 1915 (Kaiser, At the Crossroads of Der Zor ... 1915–1917, op. cit.,
p. 16), he is more precise, putting the number of Armenians in Zor in late July at 15,328.
2. US National Archives, State Department RG 59, 867.4016/219, letter and annexe from the consul
Jackson to Morgenthau, 29 September 1915: Sarafian (ed.), United States Official Documents on the
Armenian Genocide, I, op. cit., pp. 100–1.
3. US National Archives, State Department RG 59, 867.48/271, letter and annexe, 8 and 3 February
1916: ibidem, I, pp. 112–13.
The director of the camp was “a man of sixty, ‘married’ to some young Armenian girls from
Zeitun”: BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 14, Konya, collective report, Aleppo, 14 December
1918.
5. Kévorkian, L’Extermination des déportés arméniens, op. cit., p. 129, report by Aram Andonian.
6. Sticks on which one cut marks in order to record deaths.
9. US National Archives, State Department RG 59, 867.4016/302: Sarafian (ed.), United States
Official Documents on the Armenian Genocide, I, op. cit., p. 131.
11. BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 14, Konya, collective report, Aleppo, 14 December 1918, f°
8; ibidem, report by T. Tajirian, native of Karaman, [Aleppo, 1919], f° 12.
13. Ibidem, pp. 121–43, reports by survivors of Meskene.
14. Ibidem, pp. 144–6, report by Krikor Ankout.
15. Ibidem, p. 144.
16. Ibidem.

Notes 971

18. Ibidem.
20. Ibidem.
22. Kévorkian, L’Extermination des déportés arméniens, op. cit., pp. 158–73, report by Krikor
Ankout.
23. Ibidem.
24. Ibidem.
25. Ibidem. This information is confirmed in Auguste Bernau’s 10 September 1916 report: US National
Archives, State Department RG 59, 867.4016/302: Sarafian (ed.), United States Official Documents
on the Armenian Genocide, I, op. cit., pp. 132–3. There were then 5,000 to 6,000 Armenians left
in Rakka at this time: “Although the Armenians of Rakka are treated better than at other places,
their misery is terrible.”
28. Ibidem, p. 415.
29. Ibidem, p. 416.
30. Ibidem, pp. 416–17. Kapigian escaped their fate, along with a few other deportees who did not
come from Erzerum, by joining the families of two of his fellow teachers, Sarkis Manukian and
Levon Karakashian. The kaymakam’s name is given in ibidem, p. 430.
31. Ibidem, pp. 418–19.
32. Ibidem, p. 430–1.
33. Ibidem, pp. 432–3.
34. Ibidem, pp. 440–2.
35. Ibidem, pp. 442–3. In spring 1919, Dr. Selian organized the transfer of the remaining deportees to
Aleppo as well as the campaign to liberate the women and children being held by the Bedouin
tribes of the region.
36. Ibidem, pp. 444–5.
37. Ibidem, pp. 450–2.
38. Ibidem, pp. 454–6.
39. Ibidem, p. 457.
40. Ibidem, pp. 458–9.
41. Ibidem, pp. 460–1.
42. Ibidem, pp. 462–5.
43. Ibidem, pp. 462–5.
44. Ibidem, pp. 468–9; APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Կ 611, “Accusations against İsmail Hakkı bey, the tor-
menter of Der Zor” (French version: Յ 323).
46. Ibidem, pp. 471–2.
47. Ibidem, pp. 472–3. Kapigian gives the names of the families that converted: the Chakmajian
brothers from Nevşehir, two households in Ereyli, a Protestant couple from Yozgat, Eftian from
Erzerum, two people from Birecik, two from Kastamonu, one from Bardizag, Dr. Levon Ohnigian
from Istanbul, and Hovhannes Zeki from the Dardanelles.
48. Ibidem, pp. 475–9.
49. Report by Elvesta T. Leslie, 11 April 1918: Barton, “Turkish Atrocities,” op. cit., p. 113.
50. Kapigian, op. cit., pp. 484–6. In spring 1917, some fifty boys in Rakka were also rounded up and
sent to Urfa: ibidem, p. 496.
51. Ibidem, pp. 496–8.
52. Ibidem, p. 504.
53. Report annexed to a letter from Rössler to Bethmann Hollweg, 16 November 1915: Lepsius,
Archives du génocide des Arméniens, op. cit., doc. 203, p. 182.
55. Ibidem, p. 175, report by Aram Andonian.
56. Ibidem, pp. 137–41, report by Aram Andonian.

57. Zeki began by personally murdering Levon Shashian and his closest collaborators: “Shashian’s
group was made up of fifteen people guarded by five Chechens and seven gendarmes. They had
all been tied up, and were then stripped ... They tortured Levon Effendi brutally: they pulled out
his teeth with pliers, gouged out his eyes and placed them in his hand, cut off his ears, nose, and
testicles, pulled flesh from his buttocks with pliers four times, and cut his hands off at the wrists,
until he finally breathed his last (this happened near Marât)”: ibidem, p. 178, report by Aram
Andonian; APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Յ 304–305–309, Memorandum about the legal prosecution of
Mustafa Sidki, one of those responsible for the massacres in Zor, before Court-Martial No. 1, chief
of the police in Zor from 1914 to 20 October 1918.
58. Cf. supra, p. 655.
59. Documents published in Takvim-ı Vakayi, no. 3540 (read out at the 12 April 1919 trial session), 5
May 1919, p. 5, as an appendix to the indictment of the Young Turk leaders
60. T. C. Başbakanlik Arşivi, 2R1334, 3R1334, 6R1334, 7R1334, 7, 8, 11 and 12 Şubat 1916, DN, tel-
egram from Ali Suad, [DH. EUM, 2.Ş.69/6, 7, 8, 9], doc. no. 158, 159, 161, 160.
61. Cf. supra, p. 652. That these massacres took place so early may find its explanation in the fact that
the deportees here were concentrated in a single site; this was far from being the case on the line
of the Euphrates.
63. Ibidem, report of 5 September 1916, p. 227.
64. Kévorkian, L’Extermination des déportés arméniens, op. cit., p. 177, report by Aram Andonian.
65. T. C. Başbakanlik Arşivi, 16Ş1334, 16 Haziran [June] 1916, IAMM, Talât au vilayet d’Aleppo, [Şfr
65/32–1], documents no. 187.
66. Figures cited in the indictment read out at the 27 April 1919 Ittihadiste trial session: Takvim-ı
Vakayi, no. 3540, 5 May 1919.
67. Cf. supra, p. 654, n. 63; APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Յ 332, “The famous Zeki.”
68. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Կ 611, “Accusations against İsmail Hakkı bey, the tormenter of Der Zor”
(French version: Յ 323).
69. Kévorkian, L’Extermination des déportés arméniens, op. cit., pp. 183–4, report by Aram
Andonian.
70. Ibidem.
71. Ibidem, p. 175 and sqq, report by Aram Andonian.
72. Ibidem, p. 178.
73. Ibidem, p. 176.
74. Ibidem, p. 177.
75. Ibidem, p. 185.
76. Ibidem, pp. 179–80.
77. Lepsius, Archives du génocide des Arméniens, op. cit., p. 219.
78. Ibidem, letter of 29 August 1916, pp. 223–4. The report by Auguste Bernau submitted to the
American consul, Jackson, on 10 September 1916, says nothing different.
79. Kévorkian, L’Extermination des déportés arméniens, op. cit.
80. Ibidem, p. 186, report by A. Andonian, and the report by the director of the Orphanage, M.
Aghazarian, pp. 219–27.
81. Ibidem, pp. 188–9.
82. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Յ 301–9, Memorandum about the legal prosecution of Mustafa Sidki, one
of those responsible for the massacres in Zor, before Court-Martial No. 1. This document men-
tions the names of witnesses who survived, from Rodosto, Geyve, Erzincan and Adabazar, as well
as those of Ottoman officers who served in the region.
83. Kévorkian, L’Extermination des déportés arméniens, op. cit., p. 190, report by A. Andonian, and the
report by the director of the Orphanage, M. Aghazarian, p. 224. It seems reasonable to suppose
that this information was taken from the source mentioned below, but with a typographical error
in the number.
84. Takvim-ı Vakayi, no. 3540, 5 May 1919.
85. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Յ 304–9, Memorandum about the legal prosecution of Mustafa Sidki. The
figures on those massacred between Marât and Shedaddiye were furnished by the head of Zor’s
Department of Statistic, Urfali Mahmud bey.

Notes 973
86. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Յ 314, List of those responsible for massacres in Der Zor; . Zaven Der
Yeghiayan, Memories, op. cit., pp. 214–15.
87. Ibidem, pp. 217–18.
88. Ibidem, p. 218.
90. Ibidem, no. 77.
91. Ibidem, no. 80.
92. Ibidem, no. 82.
93. Ibidem, no. 83.
94. Ibidem, no. 85–6.
95. Ibidem, no. 86–90.
96. Ibidem, no. 96–100.
97. Ibidem, no. 102.
99. Ibidem, no. 104–5.
100. Ibidem, no. 112–13.
101. Ibidem, no. 114.
102. Ibidem, no. 116.
103. Ibidem, no. 117.
104. Ibidem, no. 121.
105. Kévorkian, L’Extermination des déportés arméniens, op. cit.
6 The Deportees on the Hama-Homs-Damascus-

Dera’a-Jerusalem-Amman-Maan Line
1. Cf. supra, p. 609.
2. T. C. Başbakanlik Arşivi, 22Sh1333, 5 July 1915, IAMM, circular send by Ali Münîf, [Şf 54/315],
doc. no. 63.
3. T. C. Başbakanlik Arşivi, 10Za1333, 19 September 1915, DN, [DH. EUM, 2 Şube, 68/ 78], docu-
ment no. 116.
4. US National Archives, State Department RG 59, 867.4016/212, letter from Damas to Morgenthau:
Sarafian (ed.), United States Official Documents on the Armenian Genocide, I, op. cit., pp. 82–6;
this document was published anonymously in 1916 in the French version of the British govern-
ment’s Blue Book: Toynbee, op. cit., pp. 497–500.
5. Ibidem, p. 500.
6. Ibidem, pp. 166–7, Memorandum.
7. US National Archives, State Department RG 59, 867.4016/219, letter to H. Morgenthau:
Sarafian (ed.), United States Offi cial Documents on the Armenian Genocide, I, op. cit.,
pp. 94–5.
8. Ibidem, p. 100.
9. Ibidem, pp. 112–13.
10. Cf. supra, p. 645. Yervant Odian, The cursed years, 1914–1919, op. cit., no. 51.
11. Ibidem, no. 52.
12. Archives de la Bibl. Nubar, A. Genjian, “Հայերը Տամասկոսի մէջ Ազատագրումէն Առաջ եւ
Վերջ [The Armenians in Damascus before and after liberation],” p. 1. Vahé Tachjian kindly put
the materials mentioned here at my disposal.
13. Malakia Ormanian, Խոհք եւ Խօսք [Reflections and Things], Jerusalem 1929, p. 352.
14. Chilingirian, op. cit., pp. 29, 42.
15. Genjian, doc. cit., p. 5.
16. Ibidem, p. 2.
17. Chilingirian, op. cit., p. 30.
18. Ibidem, p. 32.
19. Zaven Der Yeghiayan, Memories, op. cit., pp. 173, 180.
20. Ormanian, Reflections and Things, op. cit., p. 353.

21. Ibidem, p. 348. The two men continued to receive a monthly salary from the state (ibidem,
pp. 304, 350). These religious dignitaries were assigned residences in the presbytery of the church
of Saint Sarkis in Damascus.
22. Ibidem, pp. 353–4.
23. Ibidem.
24. Ibidem, p. 318.
25. Bibl. Nubar, AGBU Archives, correspondence of the administrative Headquarters, vol. 25, let-
ter from the Central committee to the Prof. Muradian, 29 March 1918, ff. 339–41; Zaven Der
Yeghiayan, Memories, op. cit., p. 177.
26. Cf. supra, p. 641, n. 14. According to the patriarch, Sahag sent him, as soon as he had arrived
in Jerusalem, a report indicating that tens of thousands of Armenians were on the road; they
were living out in the open and suffering from famine: Zaven Der Yeghiayan, Memories, op. cit.,
p. 177.
27. Ormanian, op. cit., p. 346.
28. Bibl. Nubar, AGBU Archives, correspondence of the administrative Headquarters, vol. 25, letter
from the Central committee to the Prof. Muradian, 29 March 1918, ff. 339–41.
29. Report by Harriet J. Fischer, missionary in Adana, 13 April 1917, Wheaton (Illinois): Barton,
“Turkish Atrocities,” op. cit., pp. 164–5.
30. Cf. supra, p. 644; Kaiser, At the Crossroads of Der Zor ... 1915–1917, op. cit., pp. 69–70. Late in 1916,
the Mazlumian brothers were themselves deported from Aleppo, but their friend Cemal succeeded
in having them sent to Beirut, in Zahle, with Aram Andonian: Yervant Odian, The cursed years,
1914–1919, op. cit., no. 63.
32. Archives of the Catholicosate, Antelias, 26/1, Homs-Hama (1916–40), II/22, letter from
bishop Yeghishe Garoyan to Sahag II, Hama, 27 June 1916, kindly put at my disposal by Vahé
Tachjian.
33. Yervant Odian, The cursed years, 1914–1919, op. cit., no. 54–5. Odian states that he was able to
leave for Hama with a family from Adana because Onnig Mazlumian interceded with Cemal on
his behalf.
34. Ibidem, no. 55. Odian mentions, notably, the case of Maritsa Mserian, the wife of a tobacco pro-
ducer, who told him that her 30 companions had survived by swallowing their gold coins day after
day in order to escape the body searches that their torturers imposed on them daily. The other
members of their convoy died on the road.
35. Ibidem, no. 56. Odian says that Mihran Boyajian, Samuel and Avedis Avedisian, Artin Nersesian,
native of Tarsus, Sarkis Kantsabedian and the lawyer Hampartsum Sarafian were among those he
met.
36. Ibidem, no. 56–7.
37. Ibidem, no. 58.
38. Ibidem, no. 59.
39. Zaven Der Yeghiayan, Memories, op. cit., p. 177. There is every reason to believe that it was the
underground network that allowed him to remain abreast of the situation and transmit his recom-
mendations to the deportees.
41. Ibidem, no. 60/1.
42. Ibidem, no. 60/2.
43. Ibidem, no. 61.
44. Ibidem, no. 61 and [62] (cited 61).
45. Ibidem, no. [62] (cited 61).
46. Ibidem, no. 63.
47. Archives of the Catholicosate, Antelias, 26/1, Homs-Hama (1916–1940), II/13, letter from father
Nerses Tavukjian to Sahag II, Hama, 3 November 1918.
48. Bibl. Nubar, arch. of the DNA, 1–15, correspondence February-March 1919, letter no. 32 from the
UNA of Beyrouth to Boghos Nubar, 2 December 1918.
49. Ibidem.
50. Zaven Der Yeghiayan, Memories, op. cit., p. 177.

Notes 975
51. After the Armistice, in June 1919, Hasan Amca published a series of four articles in the Istanbul
daily Alemdar in which he related the fate of these deportees; the reactions of “public opinion”
forced the paper to suspend publication of the series. The French-language Istanbul daily La
Renaissance published an unabridged translation of these articles, under the title Faits et docu-
ments, in no. 186, p. 3, 8 July 1919, no. 189, pp. 2, 11 July 1919, no. 192, p. 2, 15 July 1919, and no.
198, pp. 2–3, 22 July 1919.
52. Ibidem, no. 186, 8 July 1919, p. 3.
53. Ibidem, no. 189, 11 July 1919, p. 2.
54. Ibidem, no. 192, 15 July 1919, p. 2.
55. Ibidem.
56. Djemal pasha, Memories of a Turkish Statesman, 1913–1918, op. cit., p. 279.
7 The Peculiar Case of Ahmed Cemal: The Ittihad’s

Independent Spirit or an Agent of the Genocide?
1. Kouyoumdjian, Le Liban à la veille et au début de la Grande Guerre. Memories d’un gouverneur, op.
cit.
2. Djemal pacha, La vérité sur la Question Syrienne, Istanbul 1916.
3. The law of 26 October 1915: Lepsius (ed.), Archives du génocide des Arméniens, op. cit., p. 282,
4. Letter to the imperial chancellor, 11 May 1916: ibidem, pp. 212–13.
5. Letter to Metternich: ibidem, p. 214.
6. In a letter from Metternich to the imperial chancellor, 10 July 1916: ibidem, pp. 216–17.
7. Letter from Hoffmann to Metternich, 29 August 1916: ibidem, pp. 223–5.
8. Zaven Der Yeghiayan, Memories, op. cit., p. 177. An anonymous report by an inhabitant of Athlit
(near Mt. Carmel in Syria) that the War Office transmitted to the French military attaché in
London in November 1916 mentions a voyage that Cemal is supposed to have made to Istanbul,
during which he is said to have called for an end to the massacres that would make it possible
to profit from the deportees’ labor-power. Constantinople, the report says, nicknamed him the
“Armenian Pasha” as a result. The same document confirms that a campaign had been conducted
in the Hauran to save several thousand genocide survivors: SHAT (Vincennes), box 7N1253,
rapport annexed to a letter from colonel de la Panouse to the minister of the War, London, 1
December 1916, 8.
9. T. C. Başbakanlik Arşivi, 30Ra1334, 5 February 1915, EUM, [Dh. Şfr, 60/239], doc.
no. 167.
10. Public Record Office, FO 371/2492, file 200 744, reports of 29, 30 and 31 December 1915.
11. Cf. supra, p. 160, n. 66.
12. Bibl. Nubar, Archives of the Délégation nationale arménienne, P.I. 1.2, Correspondence Arménie,
I, letter from Y. Zavriev to Boghos Nubar, 1 February 1916; Arménie III, January-March 1916, let-
ters from Zavriev to Nubar; G. Gavelin, “Sazonov, Zavriev and Cemal pacha,” Erevan, 5 June
1927.
13. Beylérian, Les grandes puissances, l’Empire ottoman et les Arméniens, op. cit., pp. 156–62; C. Jay
Smith, The Russian Struggle for Power (1914–1917), New York 1956; documents edited in Razdel
Aziatskoi Turtsii (RAT), Moscou, Commissariat du peuple aux Affaires étrangères, pp. 141–51;
German edition, Die europaïschen Mächte und die Türkei während des Weltkrieges: Konstantinopel
und die Meerengen, ed. E. A. Adamov, 4 vol., Dresde 1930–1932.
14. Beylérian, Les grandes puissances, l’Empire ottoman et les Arméniens, op. cit., p. 156.
15. AMAE, Guerre 1914–1918, Turquie, vol. 871, 125 r°-v°: ibidem.
16. An army doctor, Zavriev had from 1912–14 played crucial roles in the affair surrounding the
reforms in the eastern provinces of the empire and then as vice-governor of the Ottoman prov-
inces occupied by the Russian army: Gabriel Lazian, Յեղափոխական Դէմքեր [Revolutionary
Figures], Cairo 1945, pp. 250–8.
17. Bibl. Nubar, Archives of the Délégation nationale arménienne, P.I. 1.2, Correspondence Arménie,
I, letter-report from Zavriev to Nubar, London, 9 August 1915, 15 pp.
18. Lazian, op. cit., p. 259.

19. AMAE, Guerre 1914–1918, Turquie, vol. 871, f° 125r°-v°: Beylerian, op. cit., pp. 156–62.
20. AMAE, Guerre 1914–1918, Turquie, vol. 871, ff. 128–9, letter to the French ambassadors in Rome,
London and Petrograd, 28 December 1915: ibidem, pp. 157–8.
21. AMAE, Guerre 1914–1918, Turquie, vol. 871, f° 132, letter from Petrograd, 30 December 1915:
ibidem, p. 159.
22. AMAE, Guerre 1914–1918, Turquie, vol. 871, f° 134r°-v°, note from the Russian ambassador in
Paris, 31 December 1915: ibidem, p. 159.
23. Bibl. Nubar, Archives of the Délégation nationale arménienne, P.I. 1.2, Correspondence Arménie
III, January-March 1916.
24. Ibidem, letter from Paris, 18 February 1916.
25. Ibidem.
26. Jay Smith, The Russian Struggle for Power, op. cit., pp. 354–8.
8 The Armenian Deportees on the Bagdadbahn Construction

Sites in the Taurus and Amanus Mountains
1. Cf. supra, pp. 577–80.
2. Teotig, “ ‘Ազգը չէ ﬔռա եւ անհնար է որ ﬔռնի’. Բանտի եւ Աքսորի Տարիներ [The Nation
Is Not Dead and It Is Impossible That It Should Die: Years of Prison and Exile],” Antelias 1985,
p. 69.
4. Ibidem, pp. 292–3. Kévork was brought before the court-martial in Adana two months before the
armistice, with 80 other Armenian management-level employees, but avoided being condemned
to death by bribing his judges. Teotig met, for example, Father Krikoris Balakian, dressed as a lay-
man (and without a beard), as well as Aguni in Belemedik: Teotig, “The nation is not dead,” op. cit.,
pp. 60, 66.
6. Kévorkian, L’Extermination des déportés arméniens, op. cit., p. 66, report by Kaloust Hazarabedian.
8. Ibidem, pp. 290–1.
9. Kaiser, “The Bagdad Railway,” art. cit., p. 87.
10. SHAT, Syrie-Liban, 1-V, b.d., file 2351, “Report on the annihilation measure taken against the
Armenians in the Amanus mountain region,” signed by the Dr Ph. Hovnanian, Bagdadbahn phy-
sician in Intilli, Vartivar Kabayan and Garabed Geukjian, suppliers of the Bagdadbahn, Aleppo,
5 January 1919, 11 pp.
11. Cf. supra, pp. 575–6.
13. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Հ 185: Sublime Porte, copy of the chiffred telegram no. 2676, from the
minister of interior, to the vali of Konya, 7/20 January 1916. Certified copy, 27 March 1335 [1919]
(Takvim-ı Vakayi, no. 3540).
14. Balakian, op. cit., p. 303.
16. Aguni, op. cit., pp. 290–1.
17. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Յ 169, file of Ağia bey, a Circassian officer.
18. Kévorkian, L’Extermination des déportés arméniens, op. cit., pp. 63–5, reports by Aleksan Tarpinian
and Sahag Cheghekjian.
20. Aguni, op. cit., pp. 290–1.
21. Kaiser, “The Bagdad Railway,” art. cit., pp. 88–9. Even the doctors in Intilli were deported.
22. Ibidem.
23. Ibidem, p. 90 and n. 25.
25. Ibidem; Kaiser, “The Bagdad Railway,” art. cit., p. 91.

Notes 977

28. Report by Harriet J. Fischer, 13 April 1917, Wheaton (Illinois): Barton, “Turkish Atrocities,” op. cit.,
p. 163.
29. SHAT, Syrie-Liban, 1-V, b.d., file 2351, “Report on the annihilation measure taken against the
Armenians in the Amanus mountain region,” signed by the Dr Ph. Hovnanian, Bagdadbahn phy-
sician in Intilli, Vartivar Kabayan and Garabed Geukjian, suppliers of the Bagdadbahn, Aleppo,
5 January 1919, pp. VI–X.
30. Teotig, “The nation is not dead,” op. cit., p. 65; Aguni, op. cit., p. 292.
31. Ibidem, p. 294.
32. Ibidem, p. 292.
33. Teotig, “The nation is not dead,” op. cit., p. 72.
9 The Second Phase of the Genocide: The Dissolution of

the Armenian Patriarchate and the Decision to
Liquidate the Last Deportees
1. Takvim-ı Vakayi, no. 2611, 28 July 1916, pp. 1–5.
4. Father Yervant Perdahjian, Անցքեր ու Դէպքեր Պոլսոյ մէջ Փոխանորդարանի Կողմէ
[Events and Facts Observed in Constantinople by the [Patriarchal] Vicariate], Bibl. Nubar, ms. 288
(P.I. 2/6), French translation and edition by Raymond Kévorkian, Revue d’Histoire Arménienne
Contemporaine I (1995), pp. 247–87. The manuscript was completed in Jerusalem, the 14 February
1918.
5. Ibidem, pp. 270–1.
6. Ibidem, p. 273.
7. Ibidem.
8. Ibidem, pp. 273–4.
9. Ibidem, pp. 274–5.
10. Ibidem, p. 275. Perdahdjian point out that the Official Gazette is distributed only in evening “afin
que personne ne soit informé de ce qui allait se passer.”
11. Ibidem.
12. Ibidem, p. 276.
13. Ibidem, p. 278.
14. Ibidem, p. 279.
15. Zaven Der Yeghiayan, Memories, op. cit., pp. 191 et sqq.
16. Ibidem, p. 174.
17. National Archives, State Department, R. G. 867.48/ 271, letter from J. Jackson to H. Morgenthau,
8 February 1916, no. 534.
18. The camp in Bozanti (summer–fall 1915): about 10,000 dead; Mamura (summer–fall 1915):
around 40,000 dead; Islahiye (August 1915–early 1916): around 60,000 dead; work camps near the
Amanus tunnels (May–June 1916): 20,000 dead; Rajo, Katma and Azaz (fall 1915–spring 1916):
around 60 000 dead; Bab and Akhterim (October 1915–spring 1916): about 50,000 to 60,000
dead; Lale and Tefrice (December 1915–February 1916): around 5,000 dead; Munbuc (fall 1915–
February 1916): ?; Aleppo and the camps in its outskirts (summer 1915–fall 1918): around 10,000
dead; Ras ul-Ayn (summer 1915–April 1916): around 13,000 deaths due to famine or epidemics
and 40,000 massacred in the environs; Meskene (November 1915–April 1916): around 30,000
dead; Dipsi (November 1915–April 1916): around 30,000 dead; Abuharar (November 1915–April
1916): ?; Hamam (November 1915–April 1916): ?; Sebka (opposite Rakka, November 1915–June
1916): around 5,000 dead; Zor-Marât (November 1915–December 1916): 195, 750 massacred
between Suvar and Sheddadiye; Mosul region (fall 1915–1917): 15,000 thousand people massacred
by General Halil; the regions of Hama/Homs/ Damas/Amman/Hauran/ Maan (fall 1915–summer
1916): around 20,000 deaths, notably in the Hauran.

19. BNu/Fonds Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 59, Erzerum, report by Boghos Vartanian, native of Erzerum,
5 August 1916, f° 61 v°. We have noted, on the other hand, the non-public opposition of several
Central Committee members to the liquidation of the Armenians (cf. supra, p. 249).
20. Letters from Metternich to Bethmann Hollweg, 9 and 21 December 1915, and 24 January 1916:
Lepsius (ed.), op. cit., doc. 210, p. 203, doc. 217, p. 208, doc. 230, p. 229.
21. Weber, Eagles on the Crescent: Germany, Austria and the Diplomacy of the Turkish Alliance, 1914–
1918, op. cit., pp. 159–67.
22. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Հ 183: Sublime Porte, copy of chiffred telegram no. 2351, from the minister
of interior, to the vilayet of Konya, 3/18 December 1915. [Certified copy, 28 March 1335 (1919)] (in
Takvim-ı Vakayi, no. 3540, pp. 8–14).
23. Kaiser, At the Crossroads of Der Zor ... 1915–1917, op. cit., pp. 36–7.
1918, op. cit., p. 184.
25. Istanbul 1916.
26. Letter of 25 December 1916: Lepsius (ed.), Archives du génocide des Arméniens, op. cit., p. 240.
1918, op. cit., pp. 184–6.
1918, op. cit., pp. 201–2.
30. Aguni, op. cit., pp. 98–9.
31. Österreichisches Staatsarchiv, HHStA PA XL, file 275, no. 34. Remarks made “spontaneously” in
the presence of the parliamentary deputy Natanian Effendi that the Ottoman press was careful not
to make public. The Ambassador does, however, add that “this volte-face by Talât is due, first and
foremost, to Javid Bey, who is supposed to have agreed to join the Cabinet only on that condition.”
Part VI The Last Days of the Ottoman Empire: The

Executioners and Their Judges Face-to-Face
1 Grand Vizier Talât Pasha’s New Turkey; or,

Reanimating Pan-Turkism
1. Cf. infra, p. 833, n. 45.
2. Cf. supra, p. 123, n. 22.
3. Cf. supra, p. 181, n. 119.
4. AMAE, Série Guerre 1914–1918, vol. 862, report attached to the dispatch from the French ambas-
sador in Bern to the foreign minister, 28 November 1917, p. 49.
5. Cf. supra, p. 181, n. 118.
6. Cf. supra, p. 123, n. 32.
7. Cf. supra, p. 181, n. 117.
8. Cf. supra, p. 219, n. 21.
9. AMAE, Série Guerre 1914–1918, vol. 862, report attached to the dispatch from the French ambas-
sador in Bern to the foreign minister, 28 November 1917, p. 49.
10. Astourian, “The Armenian Genocide: An Interpretation,” art. cit., pp. 138–40, n. 15–16, 122–3,
provides an exhaustive list of these sources.
11. Published in full in the 25 September 1917 Ikdam. The French translation is attached to a 28
November 1917 dispatch from the French ambassador in Bern to the foreign minister: AMAE,
Série Guerre 1914–1918, vol. 862, pp. 50–60.
12. Ibidem, p. 51.
13. Ibidem, pp. 52–3. Echos of this speech appear in R.L.C., “L’Arménie et l’Allemagne,” La Croix, 13
October 1917; La Suisse, 7 October 1917.

Notes 979
14. AMAE, Série Guerre 1914–1918, vol. 862, p. 54.

15. Ibidem, pp. 55–6.
16. Ibidem, pp. 56–7.
17. Ibidem, p. 57.
18. Ibidem.
19. Ibidem, p. 60.
20. Arif Cemil, The Special Organisation, art. cit., Vakıt/Haratch 89.
21. Hovannisian, Armenia on the Road to Independence, op. cit., pp. 109–10; an 8 December 1917 tel-
egram from France’s military attaché in London, General de La Panouse, to Georges Clemenceau
(8 December 1917) announces negotiations for a truce agreement: AMAE, Guerre 1914–1918,
Turquie, vol. 894, f° 57: Beylerian, Les Grandes Puissances, op. cit., p. 431.
22. Ibidem, pp. 119–20.
23. Ibidem.
24. Ibidem, pp. 121–2; Dadrian, Histoire du génocide arménien, op. cit., p. 550. The newly created Ninth
Army was made up of four divisions comprising a total of 30,000 men and a group of auxiliaries
comprising 20,000 militiamen and gendarmes: Zürcher, The Unionist, op. cit., p. 94.
25. Hovannisian, Armenia on the Road to Independence, op. cit., pp. 121–3.
26. Ibidem, pp. 113–15; A. Poidebard, Rôle militaire des Arméniens sur le Front du Caucase après la
défection de l’Armée russe, Paris 1920, p. 13. This corps comprised three divisions commanded by
General Areshian, General Silikov, and General Antranig, and a cavalry brigade under the orders
of Colonel Korganov.
28. Ibidem, p. 172.
29. Ibidem, pp. 172–4.
30. A.A. Türkei 183/51, A21877, 23 May 1918: Dadrian, Histoire du génocide arménien, op. cit., p. 552,
n. 2.
31. Deutsches Zentralarchiv (Postdam), Bestand Reicheskanzlei, no. 2458/9, Blatt 292, report of
3 June 1918, p. 2: ibidem, p. 552, n. 3.
32. A.A. Türkei 183/53, A32123, 10 July 1918: ibidem, p. 552, n. 4.
33. A.A. Türkei 183/53, A32145, 11 July 1918: ibidem, p. 552, n. 5.
34. A.A. Türkei 158/20, A31679, 13 July 1918: ibidem, pp. 552–3, n. 7.
35. Deutsches Zentralarchiv, Blatt 287, 31 July 1918: ibidem, p. 553, n. 8.
36. A.A. Türkei 183/54, A39244, 3 September 1918.
37. SHAT, Service Historique de la Marine, Service de renseignements de la Marine, Turquie, 1BB7
235, doc. no. 1992, Constantinople, 16 April 1920, “La politique pantouranienne,” by Ernest
Paraquin, p. 1.
38. Ibidem, p. 2. In Persia, it was Azerbaijan that the CUP, Halil said, hoped to incorporate “in the
near future,” despite confessional divisions (ibidem, p. 3).
39. Ibidem, pp. 3–4. Paraquin notes that Mosul served as a pivot for external propaganda campaigns
aiming to create a network of “proselytes of Pan-Turkish national aspirations.” “Messengers”
were designated there. Among them were Arabs used as “Pan-Turkish propagandists in the
Caucasus, where they enjoyed great prestige” as representatives of a holy people, blessed by the
Prophet.”
40. Ibidem, p. 4.
41. Ibidem, p. 5.
42. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Յ 82, file of Colonel Abdülkadri Hilmi, a native of Kastamonu and mem-
ber of the Ottoman General Staff who was arrested by the British and deported to Malta in May
1919. Hilmi also supervised massacres of worker-soldiers in Mosul: cf. supra, p. 653.
44. Ibidem, p. 176.
45. Ibidem, p. 180.
46. Ibidem, p. 178.
47. Ibidem, p. 182.
48. Ibidem, pp. 188–9. On 2 June, Vehib Pasha informed Enver that, in response to an Azerbaijani
appeal, the Turkish forces were joining the struggle against the Bolsheviks.

49. Ibidem, pp. 191–4.

50. Ibidem, pp. 194–6.
51. Ibidem, p. 204, reports that it was after Berlin had threatened to withdraw all its officers from
the Turkish contingents that Enver ordered the release of the German prisoners being held
in Kars and gave up the idea of taking control of the Georgian rail network; SHAT, Service
Historique de la Marine, Service de renseignements de la Marine, Turquie, 1BB7 235, doc.
no. 1992, Constantinople, 16 April 1920, “La politique pantouranienne,” by Ernest Paraquin,
p. 6.
52. A.A. Türkei 183/51, A28553, no. 1178, 3 June 1918: Dadrian, Histoire du génocide, op. cit., p. 555,
n. 17.
53. Österreichisches Staatsarchiv, 10 Russland/155, no. 61/P.A., report from the ambassador Hohenlohe
to the minister Burian, 29 May 1918: ibidem, p. 556, n. 19.
54. Ibidem, n. 20: Kriegsarchiv, KM. Präs. 47/-I/26–1917, letter from Pomiankowski to the Austrian
Headquarter commandant, 20 August 1918.
56. Golnazarian-Nichanian, Les Arméniens d’Azerbaïdjan, thesis cit., p. 173.
57. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Ժ 60–61–62, list of the accused transmitted to the British high commis-
sioner in February 1919 that mentions the massacres of worker-soldiers and civilians in the Mosul
region. Lieutenant Lüttichau, who had completed an inspection tour in the East, mentions the
atrocities committed by Ali Ihasan, who “on untold occasions deliberately gave the Germans to
understand that he would not leave a single Armenian alive in the area under his control”: A.A.
Türkei 183/54, A44066, pp. 12–13, report of the summer 1918, in Dadrian, Histoire du génocide
arménien, op. cit., p. 558, n. 25. In his memoirs, Ihsan states that the operations in Persia were
intended to justify the Caucasian campaign in the Germans’ eyes: Zürcher, The Unionist, op. cit.,
p. 95, n. 23.
58. Arsen-Trchnig, Վասպուրականի վերջին անցքերը եւ նահանջը [The Final Events in
Vasburagan and the Exodus], Bibl. Nubar, file P.I. 1/4, f° 1. According to Arsen-Trchnig, from 3,000
to 4,000 people incapable of walking were taken to the island of Lim; he does not know what
became of them (ibidem, f° 3).
59. L.C. Dunsterville, “Military Mission to North-West Persia, 1918,” in Journal of the Central Asian
Society, VIII/2 (1921), pp. 79–98.
60. Telegram from Lecomte to the MAE, Tehran, 24 April 1918, AMAE, N. S. Perse, vol. 21, f° 317:
Golnazarian-Nichanian, Les Arméniens d’Azerbaïdjan, thesis cit., p. 176.
61. Vazgen, “Ատրպատականի Գոյամարտը [The Battle of Azerbaijan],” Hayrenik amsagir,
62. Golnazarian-Nichanian, Les Arméniens d’Azerbaïdjan, thesis cit., p. 171, points out that the Syriacs
vainly offered him 300 rifles.
63. Mohammad Amin Riâhi, Târikh-e Khoy [History of Khoy], Tehran 1372 (1993), pp. 504–5; Riâhi
makes use of a notebook belonging to Mollâ Ja’far-e Khoyi, an eyewitness to these events; it indi-
cates that there were 7,000 refugees. Another source puts their number at 15,000 (ibidem, p. 504,
n. 7). According to Sister Marie de Lapeyrière, Simko left Mâku for Salmâs on 8 April, accompa-
nied by his men: Archives de la Mission Lazariste, “Compte-rendu des événements qui eurent lieu
en Perse, années 1918–1919,” pp. 37bis-40.
64. Arsen-Trchnig, The Final Events in Van and the Exodus, doc. cit., f° 3. Arsen-Trchnig states that in
their panicked flight to Salmâs, the refugees abandoned their property.
66. Arsen-Trchnig, The Final Events in Van and the Exodus, doc. cit., f° 3.
67. Ibidem.
68. Ibidem, p. 168.
69. Ibidem, p. 169.
70. Riâhi, Târikh-e Khoy, op. cit., p. 508: Golnazarian-Nichanian, Les Arméniens d’Azerbaïdjan, thesis
cit., p. 169.
71. Ibidem, pp. 178–80; Arsen-Trchnig, The Final Events in Van and the Exodus, doc. cit., ff. 6–7. Under
pressure from the French and American governments, the Persian authorities opened an inquiry
in October 1919 in order to establish who was responsible for these massacres; the inquiry brought

Notes 981
out the participation of the local population in these atrocities (Golnazarian-Nichanian, Les
Arméniens d’Azerbaïdjan, thesis cit., pp. 179–80).
72. Ibidem, pp. 180–1.
73. Ibidem, p. 182.
74. Ibidem, p. 185.
75. Father Franssen gives a translation in its Mémoires d’un missionnaire, p. 79: ibidem,
p. 185.
76. Ibidem, p. 186.
77. Ibidem.
78. Ibidem, pp. 186–7.
79. Ibidem, p. 187. Franssen provides the rest of Munir’s declaration, which mentions six “enemies of
Islam” from Julfa who were hanged by the “Ottoman Army” because they had given assistance to
“infidels.” (Mémoires, p. 82).
80. Ibidem, pp. 188–9.
81. Ibidem, p. 190.
82. Mémoires, p. 92: ibidem, p. 190. The speech is mentioned in a corroborating report by the French
consul, Saugon, sent to the French Foreign Ministry on 8 March 1919; there are a few minor
variations in Saugon’s account of it: AMAE, série E. Levant, 1918–1940. Arménie 4, 1919, ff.
41–2.
83. Ibidem, f° 43.
235, doc. no. 1992, Constantinople, 16 April 1920, “La politique pantouranienne,” by Ernest
Paraquin, p. 12.
86. Report by the French consul, Saugon, sent to the French Foreign Ministry on 8 March 1919:
AMAE, Asie 1918–1940, Perse, vol. 16, ff. 21–3, in Golnazarian-Nichanian, Les Arméniens
d’Azerbaïdjan, thesis cit., p. 200, n. 19, gives a fairly complete account of the Syriac and Armenian
losses.
87. Ibidem, pp. 200–1, cites a report from The Armenian Prelacy Archives of Tabriz, 27 December
1918.
88. Riâhi, Târikh-e Khoy, op. cit., p. 505: Golnazarian-Nichanian, Les Arméniens d’Azerbaïdjan, thesis
cit., p. 201.
89. Riâhi, Târikh-e Khoy, op. cit., p. 515: ibidem.
90. National Archives of Armenia, Fonds 57, vol. 5, file 198, ff. 1a-2a: Ibidem, pp. 202–3.
91. G. Korganoff, La participation des Arméniens à la Guerre mondiale sur le front du Caucase (1914–
1918), Paris 1927, pp. 172–3.
93. Ibidem, pp. 222–5.
94. Ibidem, pp. 225–7.
95. A.A. Türkei 183/54, A34707, 26 September 1918, report to the General Seeckt, chief of the
Ottoman General Headquarter: Dadrian, Histoire du génocide arménien, op. cit., p. 554, n. 12.
Shortly thereafter, Paraquin was relieved of his functions by Halil for having denounced the
Baku massacres.
96. Murat Çulcu, Ermeni Entrikalarının Perde Arkasi. “Torlakyan Davası” [History of Armenian
Intrigues As Seen from Inside: “The Torlakyan Trial”], Istanbul 1990, p. 240.
97. Cf. supra, p. 44, n. 9.
98. Muhittin Bergen, “Bizimkiler ve Azerbaycan [Us and the Azerbaijan],” Yakın Tarihiniz 2 (1962),
p. 158: Dadrian, Histoire du génocide arménien, op. cit., p. 555, n. 15.
99. Amaduni Virabian (ed.), Հայերի Կոտորածները Բաքվի եւ Ելիզավետպոլի Նահանգներում
[The Armenian Massacres in the Provinces of Bakou and Elisabethpol, 1918–1920], Erevan 2003, p.
116, doc. 107, 9 October 1918 dispatch from Arshag Jamalian to the Armenian delegation in
Constantinople.
100. Ibidem, pp. 120–1, 19 October 1918 dispatch.
101. Arshavir Shakhatuni, “Խալիլ Փաշայի Հանդիպուﬓերը Արաﬕն Հետ [Halil Pasha’s
exchanges with Aram],” in Aram, Erevan 1991, pp. 495–506.

2 The Refounding of the Young Turk Party Shortly

Before and Shortly After the Armistice
1. Zhoghovurt, 23, 25 October and 7 November 1918; Zürcher, The Unionist, op. cit., p. 73. The new
party was officially registered on 11 November (ibidem).
2. Ibidem.
4. Ibidem, p. 74. Most of the provincial clubs were converted into offices of Tecceddüt Fırkası. Mahmut
Celâl [Bayar] (1884–1987), the CUP’s responsible secretary in Smyrna and, later, a member of the
Special Organization, was charged with establishing Tecceddüt in Smyrna before he joined the
Kemalists in Anatolia. He ended his career as president of the republic (1950–1960).
5. Ibidem, p. 85.
6. Ibidem, p. 95.
8. Ibidem, p. 77.
9. Ibidem, p. 78.
11. Cf. supra, p. 69, n. 141.
12. Zürcher, The Unionist, op. cit., pp. 81–2, cites, as an example, the first cell created by Baha Said
and Kara Vasıf in a tearoom located opposite the Mahmudpaşa Mosque, with Kel Ali [Çetinkaya],
Major Yenibahçeli Şükrü ([Oğuz)], Major Çerkez Reşid, Refık İsmail, Major Sevkiyatçı Ali Rıza,
and, according to certain sources, Colonel Galatalı Şevket (the commander of the Tenth Division
of the Army of the Caucasus) and Edip Servet [Tör], a CUP member since 1906.
13. Ibidem, p. 82–3. Halide Edip [Adıvar] played an important role in this network that organized
escapes until spring 1920 and her flight after the British occupation.
14. Ibidem, pp. 83–4.
15. Ibidem, p. 86. Çerkez Ethem (1885–1948), an officer of the Special Organization, collaborated
with Rauf [Orbay]’s group in Bandırma, based on a farm in Salihli belonging to the former
leader of the Special Organization, Kuşçubaşizâde Eşref, which served as a hiding place for
weapons.
16. Ibidem, p. 103.
17. Ibidem, p. 104.
18. Ibidem, p. 105. This plan is described in detail in the memoirs of a Unionist, Şeref [Çavuşoğlu].
19. Harry Stuermer, Deux ans de guerre à Constantinople, Paris 1917, pp. 107–9.
20. Archives nationales (Paris), F12/7962, Turquie (secret) m.a. 44905, Financial, C.X.E.014722,
report on the “economic conditions” in Turkey, Berne, 11 January 1918, provides indications
about the system that was established to ensure these monopolies. Mehmed Cavid and Rahmi
Bey, the vali of Smyrna, seem to have granted themselves the monopoly on exporting opium
(ibidem, f° 2).
236. The record of these hearings was partially published in 1933 by the newspaper Vakit, under
the title Harb Kabinelerının ısticvabi [Hearings of Members of the Ministry of War], and published
in full, in Turkish written in Latin letters, in Osman Selim Kocahanoğlu, Ittihat-Terakki’nin
sorgulanması ve Yargılanması (1918–1919), Istanbul 1998.
22. Zürcher, The Unionist, op. cit., p. 83.
23. Cf. supra, p. 200.
24. Archives nationales (Paris), F12/7962, Turquie (secret) m.a. 57805, Financial, C.X.E.051596,
Geneva, 27 September 1918, London, 2 October 1918.
25. Zürcher, Turkey: A Modern History, op. cit., pp. 138–40.
27. Cf. supra, pp. 175, 180, 218, 219, 222, 289, etc.
28. Zürcher, The Unionist, op. cit., p. 98. He was dismissed only on the 18 February 1919 demand of
General George Milne, the Commander-in-Chief of the British army of the Black Sea.
30. Zürcher, The Unionist, op. cit., pp. 75, 89.

Notes 983
31. Ibidem, pp. 90–1. The Vilayâti Şarkiye Müdafaai Hukuku Milliye Cemiyeti was created on 4
December 1918; it included many former parliamentary deputies and prefects. Its official organ
was the newspaper Hadisat (The Event), published by Süleyman Nazıf.
32. Ibidem, p. 91. Hoca Raïf [Dinç] (1874–1949), a Unionist parliamentary deputy from Erzerum, who
returned from Constantinople in late December 1918, was particularly active in this regard.
33. La Renaissance, no. 80, 5 March 1919; La Renaissance, no. 142, 17 May 1919; La Renaissance, no.
266, 10 October 1919, announced the fall of Ferid’s government and its replacement by Ali Rıza
Pasha. In an article entitled “La Dislocation de la Turquie,” published in the 22 October 1918
Matin, General Şerif Pasha describes the nomination of the İzzet cabinet as “a last disguise, to
give the impression of a change.” The French secret service noted that “the Committee is sup-
posed to have verbally threatened the Sultan, whom it held responsible for the legal prosecution
of the party.” It also seems that the military commander of the city, Fayzi, was “dependent on
the Committee” and threatened the prefect of police “when arrests of the members of the CUP”
continued to be made: SHAT, Service Historique de la Marine, Service de renseignements de la
Marine, Turquie, 1BB7 231, doc. no. 43, Constantinople, report of 21 December 1918.
36. La Renaissance, no. 57, 5 February 1919; SHAT, Service Historique de la Marine, Service de ren-
seignements de la Marine, Turquie, 1BB7 231, doc. no. 200, Constantinople, report of 30 January
1919.
37. Ibidem.
48. La Renaissance, no. 118, 18 April 1919. The pace of arrests was slowed in May. Among the other
Ittihadists arrested were Mustafa Abdülhalik, 27 October (La Renaissance, no. 281, 28 October
1919) and Dr. Ali Saib, 16 December (La Renaissance, no. 324, 17 December 1919).
49. Ahmed Bedevi Kuran, Osmanlı Iperatorlugunda Inkilâp Hareketleri ve Milli Mücadele [The
Revolutionary Movements in the Ottoman Empire and the National Struggle], Istanbul 1959, p. 772.
50. M. Larcher, La guerre turque dans la Guerre mondiale, Paris, E. Chiron, 1926, pp. 540, 635, indi-
cates that, out of a total of 2,850,000 Ottoman soldiers, 1,565,000 deserted in the course of the
First World War. La Renaissance, no. 68 and 87, 18 February and 13 March 1919, indicates similar
evaluation.
52. Ibidem, p. 101.
53. La Renaissance, no. 12, 21 December 1918.
54. Takvim-ı Vakayi, no. 3425, 22 Kanunuvel.
3 The Debates in the Ottoman Parliament in

the Wake of the Mudros Armistice
1. The president of the Hürryet Ittilaf, Mustafa Sabri, declared, in the daily Sabah (reprinted in Nor
Gyank, no. 107, 3 February 1919) that they were able to escape thanks to İzzet pacha.
2. Dadrian, Histoire du génocide arménien, op. cit., pp. 505–6.
3. Meclisi Mebusan Zabıt Ceridesi [Minutes of the Sessions of the Ottoman Parliament], 3th legisla-
ture, 5th session, vol. 1, 4 November 1334 [1918], pp. 95, 100, 109, in V. Dadrian, Հայկական

Ցեղասպանութիւնը Խորհրդարանային եւ Պատմագիտական Քննարկուﬓերով [The

Treatment of the Armenian Genocide by the Ottoman Parliament and Its Historical Analysis],
Watertown 1995, pp. 7–8 and n. 1.
4. Ibidem, pp. 100, 109.
5. Ibidem, pp. 12–13.
6. Haigazn K. Kazarian, an Ottoman academic who took part in the Battle of Gallipoli and later
served as an officer in the English forces – notably from March 1920 on, on the General Staff of
the British navy in Constantinople – reveals in his book. In his book, Ցեղասպան Թուրքը [The
Genocidaire Turk], Beirut 1968 – Haigazn K. Kazarian, that the General Staff set up its offices
on the premises of the Ministry of the Ottoman navy in Kasım Pasha (ibidem, p. 6). He worked
under the direction of Intelligence Service officer, Ryan, on the archives of Evrak odasi, Kazarian
had access to, and copied, certain of the documents preserved there, notably the version of the
deportation law including the four paragraphs that were never made public, in addition to the four
published in the version of the law that was signed by Sultan Reşad and Grand Vizier Said Halim
and published in the Takvim-ı Vakayi (ibidem, pp. 179–80).
7. Meclisi Mebusan Zabıt Ceridesi [Record of the Sessions of the Ottoman Parliament], 3th legislature,
5th session, vol. 1, 18 November 1334 [1918], pp. 143–61, 109, in V. Dadrian, The Treatment of the
Armenian Genocide, op. cit., pp. 56–7.
8. Ibidem, note 17. V. Dadrian provides precise information about Sâmi’s criminal activities, and also
about his abduction of young girls whom he generously offered to his colleagues in Constantinople.
Indicted by the Ottoman court-martial, Sâmi was arrested and then released after pretending to
be insane; he was later apprehended by the British and exiled to Malta while waiting to be tried.
For more details, cf. supra, pp. 346–8.
9. Meclisi Mebusan Zabıt Ceridesi [Minutes of the Sessions of the Ottoman Parliament], 3th legislature,
5th session, vol. 1, 9 December 1334 [1918], pp. 257–8, 109, in V. Dadrian, The Treatment of the
Armenian Genocide, op. cit., pp. 56–7.
10. Ibidem, 11 December 1334 [1918], pp. 286–301, in Dadrian, op. cit., pp. 61–74.
11. Ibidem, pp. 300–1, in Dadrian, op. cit., pp. 70–1.
12. Ibidem, 12 December 1334 [1918], pp. 305–17, in Dadrian, op. cit., pp. 74–86.
13. Ibidem, p. 322, in Dadrian, op. cit., p. 86.
236. These hearings saw only partial publication in 1933 in the newspaper Vakıt, under the title
Harb Kabinelerının Isticvabi (Interrogations of the members of the War Ministry), and were pub-
lished in full in Latin letters in Osman Selim Kocahanoğlu, İttihat-Terakki’nin Sorgulanması ve
Yargılanması (1918–1919), Istanbul 1998.
15. SHAT, SHM, S.R. Marine, Turquie, 1BB7 236, doc. no. 1651 B-9, Constantinople, 24 January 1920,
lieutenant de vaisseau Goybet: p. 3, annexe 14; İttihat-Terakki’nin Sorgulanması ve Yargılanması
(1918–1919), op. cit., pp. 293–382, also details the makeup of the commission, headed by Abdüllah
Azmi, and the dates of the hearings.
16. Ibidem, p. 7.
17. SHM, S.R. Marine, Turquie, 1BB7 236, doc. no. 1654 B-9, Constantinople, 26 January 1920, lieu-
tenant de vaisseau Goybet, annexe 15, p. 10.
18. Ibidem, p. 11.
19. Ibidem, p. 12.
20. SHAT, SHM, S.R. Marine, Turquie, 1BB7 236, doc. no. 1687 B-9, Constantinople, 31 January
1920, lieutenant de vaisseau Goybet, annexe 17, p. 17.
21. Ibidem, doc. no. 1724 B-9, Constantinople, 7 February 1920, L. Feuillet, annexe 19, examina-
tion of Halil Bey, pp. 4, 6; İttihat-Terakki’nin Sorgulanması ve Yargılanması (1918–1919), op. cit.,
pp. 265–91.
22. Ibidem, p. 22.
23. SHAT, SHM, S.R. Marine, Turquie, 1BB7 236, doc. no. 1805 B-9, Constantinople, 26 February
1920, L. Feuillet, annexe 20, examination of Said Halim, p. 18; İttihat-Terakki’nin Sorgulanması ve
Yargılanması (1918–1919), op. cit., pp. 55–97.
24. Ibidem, p. 19.
25. Ibidem, p. 20.

Notes 985
26. Ibidem, pp. 21–2.

27. Ibidem, pp. 23–4.
28. Ibidem, pp. 25–6.
29. Ibidem, pp. 29–30.
30. Kazarian, op. cit., p. 34. A former mutesarif of Serez, where he took part in the massacre of the
Macedonians in 1912, Şükrü was implicated in the murder of journalists and liberal politicians.
31. SHAT, SHM, S.R. Marine, Turquie, 1BB7 236, doc. no. 1862 B-9, Constantinople, 19 March 1920,
L. Feuillet, annexe 20, examination of Ahmed Şükrü Bey, pp. 21–4; İttihat-Terakki’nin Sorgulanması
ve Yargılanması (1918–1919), op. cit., pp. 171–207.
32. Ibidem, pp. 25, 36.
33. SHAT, SHM, S.R. Marine, Turquie, 1BB7 236, doc. no. 1968 B-9, Constantinople, 15 April 1920,
transl. L. Feuillet, examination of Ahmed Nesimi Bey in front of the Fifth Commission of the
Ottoman parliament, pp. 1–2, 10; İttihat-Terakki’nin Sorgulanması ve Yargılanması (1918–1919), op.
cit., pp. 209–51.
34. Ibidem, pp. 11–12.
35. Ibidem, pp. 13–18, 43.
36. SHAT, SHM, S.R. Marine, Turquie, 1BB7 236, doc. no. 2054 B-9, Constantinople, 3 May 1920, L.
Feuillet, examination of İbrahim Bey, pp. 12, 27–8; İttihat-Terakki’nin Sorgulanması ve Yargılanması
(1918–1919), op. cit., pp. 133–69.
37. Ibidem, pp. 27–41.
38. SHAT, SHM, S.R. Marine, Turquie, 1BB7 236, doc. no. 2000 B-9, Constantinople, 21 April
1920, transl. L. Feuillet, examination of the head of State Security and second in command at
the Ministry of the Interior, İsmail Canbolat Bey, pp. 7–8; İttihat-Terakki’nin Sorgulanması ve
Yargılanması (1918–1919), op. cit., pp. 417–36. It was a department of this Directorate for Emigrés,
the Sub-Directorate for Deportees based in Aleppo, which ran the 25 concentration camps in
Syria where several hundred thousand Armenians lost their lives.
39. Krieger, Yozgat, op. cit., p. 51.
40. Minute of the session: La Renaissance, no. 13, 22 December 1918, p. 1.
4 The Mazhar Governmental Commission of Inquiry

and the Creation of Courts Martial
1. Taner Akçam, Insan Haklari ve Ermeni Sorunu, Ankara 1999, pp. 445–6, indicates in detail how
the Commission of Inquiry was formed; also serving on it were a judge on the Final Court of
Appeal, Avramakis; Artin Mosdichian, a judge on the Istanbul Court of Appeal; and two civil
inspectors, Husni and Emin Bey: Krieger, Yozgat, op. cit., p. 305.
2. V. Dadrian, Histoire du génocide arménien, op. cit., p. 507.
3. Krieger, Yozgat, op. cit., p. 33, cites the Turkish newspapers: Adalet, Akçam, Alemdar, Sabah, Peyam,
Tasviri Efkâr, Vakıt, Yeni Gün, Zaman; the Armenian newspapers: Aravod, Ariamard, Artsakank,
Azadamard, Darakir, Giligia, Horizon, Hay Lur, Jagadamard, Zhamanag, Nor Giank, Nor Or,
Puzantion, Veradznunt, Verchin Lur; the French newspapers: Le Bosphore, Le Moniteur Oriental,
La Renaissance, Le Spectateur d’Orient, L’Officiel, which reported on the various sessions of the
trials.
4. Cf. supra, pp. 286–7.
5. The indictment, drawn up on 12 April 1919, was read out before the court-martial on 27 April
1919, as were a whole series of letters and documents on which the accusation was based: Takvim-ı
Vakayi, no. 3540, 5 May 1919, p. 6.
6. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Յ 152 and Դ 281 (in English), doc. no. 14/1, file of Midhat Şükrü Bey.
7. Indictment and various documents in support of the accusation: Takvim-ı Vakayi, no. 3540, 5 May
1919, p. 6.
8. Ibidem, extract from General Vehib’s written deposition (p. 17), which also mentions a large
number of “directives, circulars, encrypted telegrams sent by the Interior Ministry and the
Ministry of War to the valis of the provinces and army commanders with a view to massacring the
Armenians rapidly and without exception.” Vehib’s deposition also reveals that Kâmil Effendi,

a parliamentary deputy from Istanbul and the chairman of the Second Parliamentary Sub-
Commission, told Ikdam of the disappearance of the files pertaining to the Fifth Commission’s
inquiry that had been deposed in the parliament’s archives after parliament was dissolved. At
the request of Mustafa Asim, the parliament’s general secretary turned these archives over to the
government; according to information gathered by the Minster of War and the court-martial, the
stolen documents were those attached to the minutes of the interrogations: Zhoghovurti Tsayn,
no. 456, 6 April 1920.
9. Nor Giank, no. 107, 3 February 1919.
10. La Renaissance, no. 7, 15 December 1918, p. 1, and Ariamard, 18 December 1918, p. 2.
11. Cf. supra, pp. 286–7.
12. Fifth session of the Unionists’ trial, 12 May 1919: Takvim-ı Vakayi, no. 3554, 21 May 1919, pp.
67–9. The bureau’s telegram, signed by Aziz, Atıf, Nâzım, and Halil, is dated 13 November 1914.
The judge presiding at the court had another telegram read out and then asked Colonel Cevad
whether he had been the one who had written “to be destroyed” in the margins of this telegram,
and whether he had received instructions to do so (ibidem, p. 68).
13. Cf. supra, pp. 184–6.
14. Takvim-ı Vakayi, no. 3554, 21 May 1919, pp. 67–8. The marginal note in one of the telegrams reads
“Teşkilât-i Mahsusa. The rules state that one must send the originals of the telegrams. The 8th of
the present month [November 1914]. Cevad.”
15. Krieger, Yozgat, op. cit., p. 33.
16. Public Record Office, FO 371/4174, no. 102551, from the high commissioner in Constantinople,
Arthur Calthorpe, to Lord Curzon, Constantinople, 27 June 1919, concerning official documents
in the possession of the mutesarif of Ayntab seized by the British military authorities on 4 February
1919. A 12 May 1919 telegram sent by the delegate in Trebizond to the high commissioner in
Constantinople, M. Defrance (CADN, Trébizonde, file 77, no. 38), indicates that, according to
the Syrian doctor Reshid Kavak Bey, part of the archives of the Committee of Union and Progress
were transported to Nakhichevan the previous December by way of Erzerum and Trebizond and
were still to be found in that city, in the house of someone named Jaffar Bey.
17. Dadrian, Histoire du génocide arménien, op. cit., p. 507.
18. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Հ 186, chiffred telegram no. 197, from the secretary of the vilayet of Konya
to the acting vali, transmitted to the Ministry of Interior, 27 March 1335 (1919) or 24 Cemazi ul-
Akher 1337.
19. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Հ 247–8, letter from the Ministry of Interior to the president of the court-
martial, 27 July 1919, accompanying the decrypted version of a telegram from Dr. Reşid to İsmail
Hakkı, vali of Adana, 17 May 1915.
20. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Հ 183–5, letter confirming reception of documents transmitted by the
authorities in Konya, certified on 27 March 1919 by the interior minister.
21. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Հ 146, Sublime Porte, Ministry of Interior, special bureau of the direction
General Security, letter from Cemal Bey to the president of the court-martial, 30 Cemazi ul-Akhr
1337 (2 April 1335 [1919]).
22. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Հ 247–8, letter from the Ministry of Interior to the president of the court-
martial, 27 July 1919, accompanying the decrypted version of a telegram from Dr Reşid to İsmail
Hakkı, vali of Adana, 17 May 1915.
23. La Renaissance, no. 5, 13 December 1918. The two civilian magistrates were Şevket Bey and Artin
Mosdichian, both from the Appeals Court. Two other members were to be designated by the
military authorities (La Renaissance, no. 8, 16 December 1918).
24. Dadrian, Histoire du génocide arménien, op. cit., pp. 508–9, cites the imperial decrees published in
Takvim-ı Vakayi officially creating the courts martial.
25. La Renaissance, no. 34, 13 January 1919.
27. V. Dadrian refers to two court sessions in March 1919: 1) that of 8 March, at which the presiding
judge was Fevzi Pasha (Takvim-ı Vakayi, no. 3493); 2) that of 19 March, at which the presiding
judge was Nâzım Pasha (Journal d’Orient, 23 April 1919; Takvim-ı Vakayi, no. 3503).
28. Krieger, op. cit., pp. 309–10.
29. La Renaissance, no. 113, 12 April 1919, p. 1.

Notes 987
30. La Renaissance, no. 43, 26 January 1919. This founding member of the CUP committed suicide
some ten days later: Kieser, “Dr Mehmed Reshid (1873–1919),” art. cit., p. 265.
32. La Renaissance, no. 140, 141 and 142, 15, 16 and 17 May 1919.
33. La Renaissance, no. 208, 2 August 1919, from Turkçe Stambul.
34. La Renaissance, no. 281, 28 October 1919.
38. Extract from General Vehib’s written deposition, 5 December 1918: Takvim-ı Vakayi, no. 3540, 5
May 1919, p. 7, col. 2 and 12 pp. full written deposition: APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Հ 171–82.
43. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Յ 662–6, file no. 1, June 1919 letter from Setrag Karageuzian about Trebizond
and the investigations conducted there after the armistice. CADN, Consulat de Trébizonde, file
77, telegram no. 48 from the high commissioner delegate in Trebizond to the high commissioner
in Constantinople, M. Defrance, 1 June 1919, referring to a meeting with Karageuzian, who com-
plained “confidentially of the problems he had encountered on his mission and his intention to
resign from his post.”
44. Ibidem.
5 The Armenian Survivors in their Places of

“Relegation” in the Last Days of the War
1. Bibl. Nubar, AGBU Archives, correspondence, vol. 23, letter from the Central Committee to the
Colonel Deeds, chief of the Intelligence Department, War Office, 5 November 1917, f° 225.
2. Ibidem, vol. 23, letter from the Central Committee to the Colonel Brémond, 16 November 1917,
f° 272.
3. Ibidem, vol. 23, letter from the Central Committee to chief of the Intelligence Department in
Cairo, 16 November 1917, f° 276.
4. Ibidem, vol. 24, letter from the Central Committee to chief of the Intelligence Department in
Cairo, 31 December 1917, f° 139.
5. Ibidem, vol. 26, letter from the Central Committee to Boghos Nubar, 22 April 1918, f° 48.
6. “900 déportés libérés à leur tour à Tafile (Sinai),” Miutiun, January-February 1918, no. 61, p. 5.
7. Bibl. Nubar, AGBU Archives, correspondence, vol. 26, f° 91; SHAT, Service Historique de
la Marine, Service de renseignements de la Marine, sous-série Q87, report by Guassen, dated
Jerusalem, 19 January 1919, confirms, based on information communicated by Ar. Mindikian, that
tensions were running high in this region and that the harems contained many girls and young
women whom the Armenian delegates were unable to recover.
9. Ibidem.
11. Yervant Odian, The Cursed Years, 1914–1919, op. cit., no. 124, 134.
12. Ibidem, no. 137–40.
13. Ibidem, no. 145–7.
15. Zaven Der Yeghiayan, Memories, op. cit., pp. 242–3.
16. Ibidem, p. 247. Bibl. Nubar, Archives of the DNA, 1–15, letter from bishop M. Seropian to Boghos
Nubar, Mosul, 6 January 1919, mentions 100 prostitutes.
17. Zaven Der Yeghiayan, Memories, op. cit., pp. 249–50, 269, 273. Father Barsegh Torosian, of
Arslanbeg, and Father Ghevont, of Geyve, helped gather up these survivors and provide them
with food and lodging.

18. Ibidem, p. 254. The patriarch put together a makeshift orphanage in a house in Mosul rented on
10 January 1919 (ibidem, p. 255).
19. Ibidem, p. 256.
20. Ibidem, p. 270.
21. Golnazarian-Nichanian, Les Arméniens d’Azerbaïdjan, thesis cit., pp. 198–9.
22. A.M.G., 16 N 3186: A. Beylerian, Les grandes Puissances, op. cit., p. 670.
23. Report to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 26 December 1918: National Archives of Armenia,
fonds 276, vol. 1, file 79, no. 1–7: Golnazarian-Nichanian, Les Arméniens d’Azerbaïdjan, thesis cit.,
p. 200.
24. National Archives of Armenia, fonds 57, vol. 5, liasse 198, ff. 1a–2a: ibidem, pp. 202–3.
25. AGBU’s Central Archives (Cairo), Baghdad, 1910–1937, CIII-7, letter from the Baghdad Committee
to the headquarters of Cairo, 18 June 1920.
27. Ibidem, p. 262.
28. Ibidem, pp. 266–8.
30. BNu/Fonds A. Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 26, Kayseri, report of Yervant Der Mardirosian, a 23-year-old
native of Talas who taught in Talas’s American College, f° 46.
32. Yervant Odian, The Cursed Years, 1914–1919, op. cit., no. 153, 159 and 164.
34. Ibidem, no. 170–1; Zhamanag, 15 October 1918.
36. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Կ 808–9, exactions committed in the province since the armistice. Among
the victims were the Dr. Sisak, Aida Boyajian, Aghavni and Hagop Kirkirian, etc. In Zara 140
survivors and 325 in the sancak of Şabinkarahisar: APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Կ 485–7, statistics for
the vilayet of Sıvas.
37. Ibidem.
39. Ibidem, p. 73. The distinction between the Kemalist movement and the CUP made by official
Turkish historiography would seem to be artificial as far as the period of the Congress of Sıvas is
concerned (ibidem, pp. 68–9).
40. Cf. n. 36.
42. Ibidem. According to the Patriarchate’s report, 2,797 people were condemned and executed; 2,040
were Armenians and 757 were Greeks.
43. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Կ 811, “La situation des chrétiens dans le vilayet de Trébizonde depuis
l’Armistice de Moudros [The Christians’ Situation in the Vilayet of Trebizond since the Mudros
Armistice].”
44. CADN, Consulat de Trébizonde, file 77, telegram no. 6 from the high commissioner delegate in
Trebizond to the high commissioner in Constantinople, M. Defrance, 13 January 1919.
45. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Կ 815–29.
46. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, է 101, report, Trebizond, 25 June 1919.
47. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Ձ 914, report on the situation in Ismit, 30 September 1920 (in arm.)
48. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Յ 282–90, report on the pillaging and exactions in 1919–1921 in the region
of Ismit.
49. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Կ 851–6, report on the situation in the vilayet of Bursa in 1919; on the
exactions in Çengiler, cf. ibidem, Կ 856.
50. Cf. supra, p. 558, on the massacres of the males held in Orhaneli in the Atranos regions.
231, doc. no. 1992, report by lieutenant Rollin, Constantinople, 15 April 1919, pp. 2–3.
52. Ibidem, p. 4.
53. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Կ 873, file no. 144, Bursa.
54. CADN, Consulat de Trébizonde, file 66, telegram no. 6 from the high commissioner delegate in
Trebizond to the high commissioner in Constantinople, M. Defrance, June 1919.

Notes 989
55. CADN, Consulat de Trébizonde, file 77, report no. 1 from the agent Kevork Aharonian to the
high commissioner delegate in Trebizond, 1 May 1919.
56. Ibidem, p. 3.
57. CADN, Consulat de Trébizonde, file 76, report from the agent Kevork Aharonian to the high
commissioner delegate in Trebizond, 15 August 1919.The agent states that Hulusi had been sent to
Erzerum in order to be tried before the court-martial, adding that he thinks that there are people
who are going to help him “flee.”
58. Cf. supra, p. 291, n. 27.
59. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Դ 367, list of the regions where the Armenians and the Greeks was
repatriate.
60. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Դ 543–4, Arméniens présents dans l’Empire ottoman lors du traité de
Sèvres.
61. Vahé Tachjian, La France en Cilicie et en Haute-Mésopotamie (1919–1933), Paris 2004, pp. 36–44.
62. Ibidem, pp. 45–53.
63. Julien Zarifian, Le sancak de Sis/Kozan, Master thesis, University Paris VIII 2003.
64. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Կ 543, Tableau des exactions commises contre la population arménienne
depuis l’armistice.
65. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Ը 375, telegram from Gibbons to the Monitor of Boston, Trebizond, 24 May
1920. On the deportations of Greeks in the vilayet of Sıvas and the exactions to which they were
subjected after the war, cf. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Կ 793.
66. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Դ 368. An Armenian-Greek committee, created by the inter-allied com-
mission, met continuously with representatives of the Patriarchates and the American Near East
Relief from 26 February 1919 to spring 1922 in order to oversee the rehabilitation of the survivors,
recover people who had been Islamicized, and so on: FO 371–3658, first session, 26 February 1919.
68. Ibidem.
69. Spectateur d’Orient, no. 116, 29 April 1919, “Le procès de l’Union et Progrès.”
71. Public Record Office, FO 371/4174, no. 118377, letter from the Admiral Calthorpe to Lord Curzon,
1 August 1919.
72. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Բ 900–2, report on the activities of the Informations Bureau for the years
1919–1920, by Garabed Nurian, member of the Politic Council, June 1920.
73. Zaven Der Yeghiyan, Memories, op. cit., pp. 301–2, 304.
74. Ibidem, p. 277; La Renaissance, no. 71, 22 February 1919.
75. The bureau’s reports were often published in the French-language daily La Renaissance, which
was published from December 1918 to spring 1920 under the direction of Dikran Chayan, a
former member of the Council of State, and Garabed Nurian, with the assistance of Dr. Topjian.
Zaven points out that the Patriarchate financed publication of this journal: Zaven Der Yeghiyan,
Memories, op. cit., pp. 302–3.
76. Ibidem, p. 304.
77. Ibidem, p. 305.
78. Ibidem, p. 307.
79. Ibidem, p. 308.
80. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Թ 578, report by the Armenian Patriarchat of Constantinople, 27
December 1918, report on Turks responsibles for the Armenian atrocities.
81. Ibidem.
82. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Ի 114–25, Primary list of the chief instigators and perpetrators of the
Armenian massacres and deportations of the Years of the Great War (1914–1918).
83. Ibidem, Ի 117–19.
84. Ibidem, Ի 124.
85. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Յ 25–34, Second report on Turks responsibles for the Armenian atrocities
of the Bureau of Information: the question of Turkish witnesses (Part 1).
86. Cf. supra, pp. 737–8.
87. Cf. supra, p. 359, n. 24 (report of 20 December 1915 on Dyarbekir), p. 417, n. 353 (report of 9
December on Harput) and p. 417, n. 353.

88. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Յ 25–34, Second report on Turks responsibles.

89. Ibidem.
90. Ibidem. According to the same report, Asim’s secretary, someone named Şevfik Bey provided
valuable information not only on his own activities, but also on those of the valis Cevdet Bey
in Adana and Abdülhalik in Aleppo, as well as on these mutesarifs and military commanders in
these vilayets.
91. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Կ 104–5, Memorandum from Dr. A. Nakashian to the colonel Ballard,
member of the British Intelligence Service, Galata, July 1920.
92. Ibidem.
93. Zaven Der Yeghiayan, Memories, op. cit., pp. 299–300.
94. Ibidem, pp. 313–14.
95. Cf. supra, p. 204. The patriarch was aided here by the Armenian-Greek committee created by
the inter-allied commission, in which these questions were settled on an ad hoc basis in the
course of the 85 coordinating meetings (held from 19 February 1919 to 29 March 1922) attended
by representatives of the Greek and Armenian Patriarchates and American Near East Relief:
FO 371/ 3658, 371/4195, 371/4196, 371/4197, 371/5087, 371/ 5213, 371/5214, 371/6548, 371/6549,
371–7879.
97. Ibidem; La Renaissance, no. 140–141–142, 15, 16 and 18 May 1919.
98. Kévorkian et Paboudjian, Les Arméniens dans l’Empire ottoman, op. cit., p. 60.
99. Zaven Der Yeghiayan, Memories, op. cit., p. 312. Those present: Stepan Karayan, le Dr. Krikor
Tavitian, Tavit Der Movsesian, Hayg Khojasarian, Nerses Ohanian, Khachig Sevajian, etc.
100. Ibidem, pp. 321–22.
102. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Ը 181–6, no. 193, letter from the Patriarchate to the Ministry of Justice,
3 January 1920, about the law of “abandoned property.”
103. Takvim-ı Vakayi, no. 3747, 12/25 January 1920, p. 6, col. 1 and 2.
104. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Ը 192, “Movable property.”
105. La Renaissance, no. 382, 26 February 1920, and no. 388, 4 March 1920. La Renaissance, no. 355, 25
January 1920, announces the promulgation of the new law about the assets of massacre victims.
According to the paper, the law made the despoliation legal: “no one can accept,” we read there,
“the idea that the Turkish state should inherit all the assets of those massacred.”
106. Such was, in any case, the patriarch’s interpretation: Zaven Der Yeghiayan, Memories, op. cit.,
p. 321; Traité de paix entre les Puissances alliées et associées et la Turquie du 10 août 1920 (Sèvres),
texte français, article 288, pp. 107–8.
231, doc. no. 302, Constantinople, 13 February 1919; the Armenian-Greek committee and rep-
resentatives of the Greek and Armenian Patriarchs and American Near East Relief coordinated
operations; the British High Commissariat enforced their decisions: FO 371/ 3658, 371/4195,
371/4196, 371/4197, 371/ 5087, 371/ 5213, 371/5214, 371/6548, 371/6549, 371–7879.
108. The materials cited in the following thirteen notes were kindly put at our disposal by Vahe
Tachjian. Bibl. Nubar, Archives of AGBU, correspondance du siège, vol. 26, letter from the
Central Committee to the director of the Intelligence Department, 25 April 1918, ff. 61–3.
109. Bibl. Nubar, Archives of the DNA 1–16, correspondance April-May 1919, memoir from the UNA
of Marseille to Boghos Nubar, 28 April 1919.
110. Bibl. Nubar, Archives of AGBU, correspondence, vol. 26, letter from the Central Committee to
the director of the Intelligence Department, 25 April 1918, ff. 163–4.
111. Levon Yotneghperian, Diary (unpublished), pp. 26–30; Sahagian, The Urfa, op. cit., pp. 1166–77.
112. Yotneghperian, op. cit., pp. 40–1.
113. Ibidem, pp. 43–8.
114. Archives Bibl. Nubar, Armenian Orphans, “Herian file: extract of newspapers.”
115. Dzovinar Kévonian, Réfugiés et diplomatie humanitaire: les acteurs européens et la scène proche-
orientale pendant l’entre-deux-guerres, Doctoral thesis, University of Paris I, 1998, p. 106.
116. Archives Bibl. Nubar, Armenian Orphans, “Herian file: extract of newspapers.” R. Herian is
dead in 1921, in Alexandria.

Notes 991
117. Kévonian, op. cit., pp. 105–6.

118. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Դ 543–4, “Arméniens présents dans l’Empire ottoman lors du traité de
Sèvres.”
119. Raymond Kévorkian & Vahé Tachjian, Un siècle d’histoire de l’Union générale arménienne de
bienfaisance, I, Paris 2006, pp. 64–89.
120. James L. Barton, Story of Near East Relief (1915–1930), New York 1930.
121. Kévorkian & Tachjian, Un siècle d’histoire, op. cit., pp. 60–8.
122. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Ը 181–6, no. 193, letter from the Patriarchat to the Ministry of Justice, 3
January 1920.
123. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Դ 543–4, “Arméniens présents dans l’Empire ottoman lors du traité de
Sèvres.”
124. Zaven Der Yeghiayan, Memories, op. cit., pp. 279–80; Azkayin Khnamadarutiun, Ազգային
Խնամատարութիւն, Ընդհանուր Տեղեկագիր [General Report, 1 May 31-October 1919],
Constantinople 1920, p. 3.
125. Zaven Der Yeghiayan, Memories, op. cit., p. 283; Barton, Story of Near East Relief (1915–1930), op.
cit., pp. 207–14. The Armenian-Greek committee created by the inter-allied commission dealt
with these questions together with representatives of the High Commissioners in the course of
the 85 coordinating meetings (which took place from 19 February 1919 to 29 March 1922) that
the representatives of the Greek and Armenian Patriarchates and American Near East Relief
held with the Allies, who intervened wherever they were in a position to do so: FO 371/ 3658,
371/4195, 371/ 4196, 371/4197, 371/5087, 371/ 5213, 371/5214, 371/ 6548, 371/6549, 371–7879.
231, doc. no. 256, Constantinople, letter, 6 February 1919, and “Liste des orphelins qui se trou-
vent chez les Turcs.”
129. Ibidem, p. 289. Chakrian’s team also concerned itself with obtaining the prisoners’ release, recov-
ering churches’ “confiscated” property, and finding the Young Turk cadres’ caches. La Renaissance,
no. 42, 19 January 1919, p. 2, notes that, in Kayseri, five hundred young female converts “had not
yet been given back.”
131. Ibidem, pp. 292–8. The “maison neutre” was closed in August 1922 by the British high
commissioner.
132. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Յ 260, transl. of an article from Ileri, 3 June 1919, “Les enfants battus au
Patriarcat.”
133. Ibidem.
134. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Յ 266, transl. of an article from Ileri, 3 June 1919, “Pauvre Djemile
Hanoum.”
135. Cf. supra, pp. 716, 718.
136. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Յ 259–260–261, transl. of an article from Hadisat, no. 158, 5 June 1919.
137. Ibidem.
138. Ibidem.
139. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Յ 261, “Réponse des journaux arméniens aux allégations des journaux
turcs [The Armenian Newspapers’ Response to the Allegations of the Turkish Newspapers].”
6 The Great Powers and the Question of

“Crimes Against Humanity”
1. AMAE, Guerre 1914–1918, Turquie, 887. I. Arménie (26 May 1915); FO 371/ 2488/51010 (28
May 1915); A.A. Türkey 183/37, A17667; Foreign Relations of the United States , 1915 Supp.,
p. 981 (1928); U.S. National Archives, RG 59, p. 867. 4016/67 (28 May): Dadrian, Histoire du génocide
arménien, op. cit., p. 356, n. 26. Eric Avebury and Ara Sarafian (ed.), British Parliamentary Debates on
the Armenian Genocide, 1915–1918, Princeton & London 2003, Annexe I, pp. 59–60, notes that the
Russian version of the declaration speaks of “crimes against Christianity and civilization.”

2. A. Nasibian, Britain and the Armenian Question from 1915 to 1923, London 1984, pp. 124–9.
3. PRO, FO 371/4141, file 71, no. 6781, letter from to Calthorpe to Foreign Office, 13 January 1919,
recommending extradition procedures for Enver, Talât “and others.”
4. PRO, FO 371/4174, file 1270, ff. 251–62, describes the organization of the activities of the Armenian-
Greek committee that worked alongside the British High Commission.
5. AMAE, Série Archives du Bureau français de la SDN (1920–1940), vol. 10, Commission de la
Société Des Nations; vol. 11, Conférence des préliminaires de Paix. This copious documentation
has been studied by Céline Mouradian, Le traitement juridique et politique des crimes commis contre
les minorités ottomanes de l’Armistice de Moudros jusqu’à la préparation du traité de Sèvres, Master
thesis, University Paris VII 2003.
6. AMAE, Série Conférence de la Paix, Sous-Série Recueil des actes (1918–1932), vol. 40, Commission
des Responsabilités des auteurs de la guerre et Sanctions, Paris, Imprimerie Nationale, 1922.
8. Ibidem. Albert de Lapradelle, professor of international public law, and Lieutenant Colonel O. M.
Biggar were put at the disposition of this committee.
9. Ibidem, p. 324.
10. Ibidem, Procès-Verbal no. 2, session of 7 February 1919, p. 29. N. Politis spells out that these are
“acts contrary to what might be called human law or moral law.”
11. Ibidem, Rapport présenté par la Troisième sous-commission de la Commission des Responsabilités, 5
March 1919, pp. 75–6.
12. Ibidem, p. 78.
13. Ibidem, p. 80.
14. Ibidem, pp. 431–55.
15. Ibidem, pp. 511–14.
16. Ibidem, pp. 162–79.
17. Ibidem, p. 173.
18. Ibidem, pp. 176–7.
19. Ibidem, pp. 178–9.
20. Ibidem, pp. 178–9.
21. Paul Mantoux, Les délibérations du Conseil des Quatre (24 March- 28 June 1919), I, Paris 1955.
22. Ibidem, p. 124.
23. Ibidem, pp. 184–5.
24. Ibidem, II, p. 445–6.
25. Ibidem, II, p. 519.
26. Ibidem, II, p. 517.
27. FO 371/5104, E 1477, propositions unanimously adopted by the Committee for the Protection
of Minorities in Turkey, pp. 6–16. The members of the committee designated by the League
of Nations were: Great Britain, R. Vansittart; United States, Forbes Adam; France, M.
Kammerer, Italie, Colonel Castoldi; Japon, I. Yoshida (ibidem, p. 6) [French version: FO 371/5105,
pp. 135–41].
28. Ibidem, p. 7.
29. Ibidem, pp. 10–11.
30. Ibidem, pp. 11–15.
31. Ibidem, p. 16. FO 371/5107, E 2409, 26 March 1920: the draft treaty on the protection of minorities
in Armenia, in English and French versions (13 pp. and 12 articles) was probably meant to show
that these principles would apply everywhere.
32. FO 371/5105, E 2109, telegram no. 241, from the Admiral de Robeck to the Foreign Office, 17
March 1920, relatif to the law of “abandoned property,” with the note to the Sublime Porte, 2
December 1919.
33. FO 371/ 5105, f° 21.
34. FO 371/5105, E 2109, Cambon to Lloyd George, 11 March 1920.
35. FO 371/5109, pp. 116 and sqq., “Observations présentées par la Délégation ottomane à la Conférence
de la Paix,” 25 June 1920.
36. FO 371/ 5110, E 8687, response from the president of the Peace Conference, Lloyd George, to the
“Observations présentées par la délégation ottomane,” Spa, 16 July 1920, pp. 128–30.

Notes 993
37. The Allies consequently introduced most of the recommendations of the Committee on
Reparations and of the London Conference in the Peace Treaty of 10 August 1920 between the
Allied and Associated Powers and Turkey (the Treaty of Sèvres), French version, articles 226–30,
pp. 83–4.
38. La Renaissance, no. 197, 20 July 1919, text of the memorandum ready by Grand Vizier Damad Ferid
Pasha before the Peace Conference.
39. FO 371/4174, no. 118377, letter from Arthur Calthorpe to Lord Curzon, 1 August 1919, in which
the high commissioner reviews the history of his interventions with the Turkish authorities and
mentions his 22 January 1919 telegram no. 158 to the Foreign Office in which he describes his
intervention with the Sublime Porte.
40. FO 371/4173/53351, ff. 192–3, telegram from the assistant high commissioner, Richard Webb, to
the Conférence de la Paix, 3 April 1919: Dadrian, Histoire du génocide arménien, op. cit., p. 486,
n. 23.
41. FO 371/4174, no. 118377, letter from Arthur Calthorpe to Lord Curzon, 1 August 1919, which
recapitulates these recommendations.
42. Ibidem, p. 1.
43. Ibidem, p. 2.
44. FO 218/1552, letter from the Admiral Webb to Balfour, 25 February 1919.
45. FO 371/4173, no. 47293, telegram from the Admiral Calthorpe to Balfour, 26 March 1919.
46. FO 371/4174, report by the Admiral Calthorpe, “Deportations,” August 1919, p. 5.
47. FO 371/4174, no. 98243, report by the Admiral Calthorpe, on the trials, 10 July 1919, p. 6.
48. Ibidem.
49. Ibidem.
50. FO 371/4174, no. 88761, telegram from the Admiral Calthorpe to Lord Curzon, 30 May 1919.
Initial plans were to put the accused under a guard of French and British soldiers, but this pro-
posed solution was dropped because of the reluctance of the French.
51. Ibidem.
52. La Renaissance, no. 153, 30 May 1919.
53. FO 371/4174, no. 136069, telegram from the Admiral Calthorpe to Lord Curzon, 21 September
1919.
54. FO 371/6500, Turkish War Criminals: Vartkès Yeghiayan (ed.), British Foreign Office dossiers on
Turkish War Criminals, op. cit.
55. FO 371/5089, no. 1054, Turks deported in Malta, Parliamentary Question, 4 March 1920.
56. FO 371/5089, no. 2293, John de Robeck, the high commissioner in Constantinople, to Lord
Curzon, 11 March 1920, f° 108. Among the prisoners classified “A/T” (prisoners detained “for
direct or indirect participation in outrages on subject christians”), Robeck mentions Ali Ihsan
Pasha, Hüseyin Cahid, Tevfik Hadi, Yusuf Rıza, Sabit Bey, Veli Neced, Fethi Bey, Tahir Cevdet,
Rahmi Bey, İsmail Canbolat, Nevzâde Bey, Mumtaz Bey, Fazıl Berki, and İbrahim Bedreddin.
58. Ibidem, p. 145.
59. FO 371/5089, no. 2301, f° 91, telegram from John de Robeck, the high commissioner in
Constantinople, to Lord Curzon, 20 March 1920.
60. FO 371/5089, no. 2322, telegram from John de Robeck to Lord Curzon, 27 March 1920. Salih
Pasha’s government succeeded Ali Rıza’s on 20 March 1920 for ten days; it fell in its turn after
the declaration by the Entente that made Constantinople a conquered city. Damad Ferid took
the reins of government again in April 1920: FO 371/5046, no. 328, f° 140, chiffred telegram from
John de Robeck to Foreign Office, 5 April 1920, announcing the appointment, on the same day,
of Damad Ferid, the leader of the Liberal Entente, to the post of grand vizier; FO 371/5166, E 4278,
14 April 1920, reports from the British Intelligence services to Lord Curzon, p. 221, on the com-
position of Damad Ferid’s cabinet, with, notably, as interior minister, Reşid Bey, a liberal who had
spent the war years in Switzerland.
61. Bibl. Nubar, Archives of the DNA, The House of Lords and the House of Commons, ff. 116–17.
62. Ibidem, f° 28.
63. Vahakn Dadrian, “Raphael Lemkin, International Law and the Armenian Genocide,” in The Key
Elements in the Turkish Denial of the Armenian Genocide: a Case Study of Distortion and Falsification,

Watertown, Zorian Institute, 2001, p. 37; Yves Ternon, “Comparer les génocides,” in Ailleurs, hier,
autrement: connaissance et reconnaissance du génocide des Arméniens, Revue d’histoire de la Shoah
177–8 (2003), p. 41.
64. Annette Becker, “L’extermination des Arméniens, entre dénonciation, indifférence et oubli,
de 1915 aux années vingt,” Revue d’Histoire de la Shoah 177–8 (2003), p. 309; Raphaël Lemkin,
Axis Rule in occupied Europe, Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Government, Proposals for Redress,
Washington, 1944, p. 80.
65. Raphaël Lemkin, “Le crime de génocide,” Revue de Droit international, des Sciences diplomatiques
et Politiques, no. 24 (1946), pp. 213–14.
66. Ibidem.
67. The text of this talk may be found in the Lemkin archives, which were given to the Jewish-
American Archives in 1965 and are available on the internet at www.preventgenocide.org.
68. AMAE, Série Conférence de la Paix, Sous-Série Recueil des actes (1918–1932), vol. 40, Commission
des responsabilités des auteurs de la guerre et sanctions, Paris, Imprimerie Nationale, 1922,
pp. 176–7.
69. Anne-Marie La Rosa & Santiago Villalpando, “Le crime de génocide revisité,” in Katia Boustany
and Daniel Dormoy (eds.), Génocide (s), Bruxelles 1999 (Collection de droit international; 42),
pp. 56–7.
7 The First Trial of the Young Turk Criminals

Before the Istanbul Court-Martial
1. La Renaissance, no. 151, 28 May 1919, a French translation of an article from Alemdar.
2. La Renaissance, no. 128, 1 May 1919, from Sabah.
3. Cf. supra, p. 252. Münîf Bey later adopted the family name Yeğena. He also seems to have played
a major role in organizing the famine in Lebanon in his capacity as governor of the province.
4. FO 371/5091, no. 11834/1670.
5. Cf. supra, pp. 508–13.
6. Krieger, Yozgat, op. cit., pp. 309–10. The 5 February trial session, the first, was opened at 10:30 a.m.
by the judge presiding over the extraordinary court-martial, Mahmud Hayret Pasha. The military
judges on the court were General Ali Nâzım Pasha and General Kürd Mustafa Pasha; the civilian
judges were, to the presiding judge’s left, Harutiun Mostichian, a judge on the Constantinople
Appeals Court, and, to his right, Şevket Bey, a judge on the Constantinople Appeals Court.
7. Ibidem, pp. 311–12, n. 5: the court-martial held lists of massacred people, but not the places and
dates of extermination. The plaintiff is presented again by Hayg [Hmayag] Khosrovian, Hagop
Bahri and Avedis Surenian, chosen by the Armenian Bar Association.
8. Ibidem, pp. 312–15.
231, doc. no. 259, Constantinople, 7 February 1919, “Rapport sur les atrocités de Yozgat, dressé par
un fonctionnaire turc [Report on the Atrocities in Yozgat, Drawn up by a Turkish Official].”
11. Fourth trial session, 11 February 1919: Krieger, op. cit., pp. 315–16. At the 15 February fifth trial
session, a medical report showed that Eugenie Varvarian had sustained a head injury several years
earlier; a certificate attested that she was 18 years old.
12. Fifth trial session, 15 February 1919: ibidem.
13. Cf. supra, pp. 516–8.
14. Cf. supra, p. 739.
15. Krieger, op. cit., p. 312. Remzi, speaking on his own behalf, demanded that the court award him
one and a half million Turkish pounds in compensation for damages in his capacity as the only
survivor and representative of a family from the region 117 of whose members had been murdered.
The court observed, however, that of the 8,000 Armenians living in Yozgat before the massacres,
80 were still alive (ibidem, p. 311, n. 5)..
16. Hüsameddin Ertürk, İki Devrin Perde Arkası [Behind the Curtain during Two Times], ed. by Samih
Hafız Tansu, Istanbul 1964, p. 299.

Notes 995
17. Ibidem; Zhamanag, 25 March 1919, p. 3, col. 5 and p. 4, col. 1–3. The court was made up of the fol-
lowing members: General Mustafa Nâzım pasha, president; General Zeki pasha, General Mustafa
Pasha (known as Nemrud or Kurd Mustafa), General Ali Nâzım Pasha, and colonel Receb Ferdi
Bey; Sâmi Bey, prosecutor, with three assistant prosecutors.
18. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Մ 350, telegram from the civil inspector Nedim Bey, charged with con-
ducting an investigation in the sancak of Yozgat, to Emin Bey, 28 December 1918.
19. Verdict of the trial of Yozgat, 8 April 1919: Takvim-ı Vakayi, no. 3617, 7 August 1919, p. 2. The
verdict was submitted to the Sultan, who promptly ratified it: Zhamanag, 9 April 1919, p. 1.
20. Ibidem.
21. Public Record Office, FO 371/4173, no. 61185, 17 April 1919, telegram from the high commis-
sioner, Calthorpe, to the Foreign Office, describing the execution of Kemal Bey; FO 371/4173, no.
72536, 21 April 1919, letter from Calthorpe to the Foreign Office, about Kemal Bey’s burial, and a
24 April 1919 report by Captain H. A. D. Hoyland, to General Staff Intelligence, 24 April 1919.
According to a report of French Intelligence Services, the “peine de mort n’aurait été prononcée
qu’à une voix de majorité.”
22. Hüsameddin Ertürk, op. cit., p. 297.
23. Ibidem, pp. 297–8.
24. Ibidem, p. 300.
25. Krieger, op. cit., p. 300. A French source indicates that he added: “Long live Muslims and Turkey!
Death to the Armenians, the eternal enemies of the Empire”: SHAT, Service Historique de la
Marine, Service de renseignements de la Marine, Turquie, 1BB7 231, doc. no. 563, Constantinople,
report of 12 April 1919, “L’exécution de Kemal bey.”
26. Hüsameddin Ertürk, op. cit., pp. 220–1. SHAT, Service Historique de la Marine, Service de rensei-
gnements de la Marine, Turquie, 1BB7 231, doc. no. 563, Constantinople, report of 12 April 1919,
“L’exécution de Kemal bey.”
27. Ibidem.
28. La Renaissance, no. 232, 31 August 1919, p. 1.
29. Ibidem.
8 The Truncated Trial of the Main Young Turk Leaders

1. First session of the trial of the Unionists, 27 April 1919: Takvim-ı Vakayi, no. 3540, 5 May 1919,
p. 1, List of the accused, present or fugitives from justice. The court-martial comprised: General
Mustafa Nâzım Pasha, president; General Zeki Pasha, General Nemrud Mustafa Pasha, General
Ali Nâzım Pasha, Colonel Receb Ferdi Bey, judges; Reşat Bey, prosecutor.
2. First session of the trial of the War Cabinets, 3 June 1919: Takvim-ı Vakayi, no. 3571, 11 June 1919,
p. 127. Our count indicates that only three of the 23 members of the Ittihad’s Central Committee
were not indicted: Haci Adıl, Mehmed Cavid, and Hüseyin Cahid.
3. This probably explains why a few people among the leadership of the Special Organization, such as
Aziz Bey or Ahmed Cevad, were indicted along with the members of the Central Committee.
4. Indictment of 12 April 1919, read out at the 27 April first session of the trial of the Unionists:
Takvim-ı Vakayi, no. 3540, 5 May 1919.
5. Ibidem.
6. Ibidem, p. 17.
7. Ibidem.
8. SHAT, Service Historique de la Marine, S. R. Marine, Turquie, 1BB7 231, doc. no. 614,
Constantinople, 29 April 1919, “Le procès des Unionistes [The Trial of the Unionists].”
9. Dadrian, Histoire du génocide, op. cit., pp. 519–22, explains the procedure followed by the
defense.
10. SHAT (cf. n. 8), 1BB7 232, doc. no. 658, translation of the decree of competency, attached to an
8 May 1919 report entitled “The Trial of the Unionists.”
11. Ibidem, pp. 1–2 (annexe).
12. Ibidem, pp. 1–3 (report).
13. Second session of the trial of the Unionists, 4 May 1919: Takvim-ı Vakayi, no. 3543, 12 May 1919,
pp. 15–31.

14. Ibidem, p. 21, col. 2.

15. Ibidem, p. 23, col. 2.
16. Ibidem, pp. 24–6.
17. Ibidem, pp. 29–31.
18. Third session of the trial of the Unionists, 6 May 1335/1919: Takvim-ı Vakayi, no. 3547, 15 May
1919: pp. 33–6, examination of Midhat Şükrü; pp. 37–41, examination of Ziya Gökalp; pp. 42–6,
examination of Küçük Talât; pp. 47–8, examination of Atıf Bey; p. 49, examination of Yusuf
Rıza.
19. SHAT, Service Historique de la Marine, S. R. Marine, Turquie,1BB7 232, doc. no. 663,
Constantinople, May 1919, “The Trial of the Unionists.”
20. Fourth session of the trial of the Unionists, 8 May 1919: Takvim-ı Vakayi, no. 3547, 15 May 1919,
pp. 52–66.
21. Ibidem, pp. 54–5; SHAT (cf. n. 8), 1BB7 232, doc. no. 663, p. 3.
22. Ibidem; Fourth session of the trial of the Unionists, 8 May 1919: Takvim-ı Vakayi, no. 3547, 15 May
1919, pp. 55–7.
23. Fifth session of the trial of the Unionists, 12 May 1919: Takvim-ı Vakayi, no. 3554, 21 May 1919, pp.
66–90.
24. Ibidem, pp. 67–9.
25. Ibidem, p. 85.
26. Ibidem, pp. 85–6.
27. Ibidem, p. 89.
28. Sixth session of the trial of the Unionists, 17 May 1919: Takvim-ı Vakayi, no. 3557, 25 May 1919,
p. 107.
29. Seventh session of the trial of the Unionists, 19 May 1919: Takvim-ı Vakayi, no. 3561, 29 May 1919,
p. 119. Five members of the Central Committee’s Bureau directed the Special Organization.
30. SHAT (cf. n. 8), 1BB7 232, doc. no. 680, report by L. Feuillet, Constantinople, 13 May 1919.
31. FO 371/4174, no. 88761, telegram from Calthorpe to Lord Curzon, 30 May 1919; La Renaissance,
no. 153, 30 May 1919, from Alemdar.
32. First session of the trial of the ministers, 3 June 1919: Takvim-ı Vakayi, no. 3571, 11 June 1919,
pp. 128–31.
33. The court decided to try Şakir separately, together with those who had organized the massacres of
Mamuret ul-Aziz.
34. Dadrian, Histoire du génocide arménien, op. cit., p. 488.
35. First session of the trial of the ministers, 3 June 1919: Takvim-ı Vakayi, no. 3571, 11 June 1919,
p. 141.
36. Ibidem.
37. Ibidem, pp. 132–40.
38. Second session of the trial of the ministers, 5 June 1919: Takvim-ı Vakayi, no. 3573, 12 June 1919,
pp. 144, col. 2 and 145, on Esad effendi, former şeyh ul-Islam.
39. Ibidem, pp. 147–8.
40. Third session of the trial of the ministers, 9 June 1919: Takvim-ı Vakayi, no. 3575, 15 June 1919,
pp. 149–55.
41. Fourth session of the trial of the ministers, 12 June 1919: Takvim-ı Vakayi, no. 3577, 17 June 1919,
pp. 157–9.
42. Fifth session of the trial of the ministers, 24 June 1919: Takvim-ı Vakayi, no. 3593, 9 July 1919 (10
Temmuz 1335), pp. 177–83.
43. Sixth session of the trial of the ministers, 25 June 1919: Takvim-ı Vakayi, no. 3594, 10 July 1919,
pp. 188–93.
44. L’Entente, 26 June 1919.
45. Seventh session of the trial of the ministers, le 26 June 1919: Takvim-ı Vakayi, no. 3595, 12 July
1919, p. 198.
46. In addition to Musa Kâzım, Esad effendi, Rifât bey, Hüseyin Haşim, all of whom were present,
those affected were Talât, Enver, Cemal, Dr. Nâzım, Cavid Bey, Süleyman el-Bustani, Mustafa
Şeref, and – another oddity of this trial – Oskan effendi (Mardikian), a former minister of the post
and telegraph office who had resigned his post at the outbreak of the war, p. 1, verdict rendered on

Notes 997
5 July 1919: Takvim-ı Vakayi, no. 3604, 5 August 1919, pp. 217–24; English and French translations
of the court-martial’s verdict, dated 6 Shewal 1335 [5 July 1919], sent to Lord Curzon by the British
high commissioner on 7 July 1919: FO 371/4174, no. 1310.
47. Takvim-ı Vakayi, no. 3604, 5 August 1919, pp. 217–20.
48. Ibidem.
9 The Trial of the Responsible Secretaries and the

Vicissitudes of the Subsidiary Trials in the Provinces
1. The first session of the trial of the CUP’s responsible secretaries and delegated inspectors, 21 June
1919: Takvim-ı Vakayi, no. 3586, 28 June 1919, pp. 161–4, 168. Sitting on the court were many of
the same judges who had tried the ministers.
2. The second session of the trial of the CUP’s responsible secretaries and delegated inspectors, 23
June 1919: Takvim-ı Vakayi, no. 3589, 5 July 1919, pp. 165–75; Third session of the trial, 28 June
1919: Takvim-ı Vakayi, no. 3596, 13 July 1919, pp. 205–15 (pagination error for pp. 209–10, which
are mentioned twice)
3. Vahakn Dadrian, “The Turkish Military Tribunal’s Prosecution of the authors of the Armenian
Genocide: Four Major Court-Martial Series,” Holocaust & Genocide Studies, vol. 11/1 (1997), p. 42.
Convicted in absentia: Hilmi Bey (deputy of Angora), Ağaoğlu Ahmed (deputy of Karahisar),
Colonel Mümtaz Bey (CUP’s delegate in Suvar), Hasan Fehmi Bey (delegate in Kastamonu) [cf.
supra, p. 527, n. 1947]; Sabri Bey (deputy of Sarukhan), Hüseyin Tosun (CUP’s delegate and deputy
of Erzerum [cf. supra, p. 316]), Samih Rifât Bey (former vali of Konya), Haci Ahmed, the father of
Enver, etc.
4. Cf. supra, pp. 530, 560; on Ahmed Midhat, former chief of the police in Istanbul: APC/APJ, PCI
Bureau, Գ 19 and Թ 396, “List of responsibles in the vilayet of Angora”; Թ 457–9, 432, file 70 (in
French).
5. Cf. supra, pp. 560–2.
6. Cf. supra, p. 570.
7. Cf. supra, p. 672.
8. The first session of the trial of the CUP’s responsible secretaries and delegated inspectors, 21 June
1919: Takvim-ı Vakayi, no. 3586, 28 June 1919, pp. 161–4, 168.
9. La Renaissance, no. 295, 13 November 1919, reports that the trial of the responsible secretaries was
continued on Wednesday, 12 November. The presiding judge was Esad Pasha.
10. Verdict in the trial of the responsible secretaries, 8 January 1920: Takvim-ı Vakayi, no. 3772,
February 1920, p. 2, col. 2, p. 3, col. 1.
11. Ibidem. Sitting on the court at the time were Esad Pasha (presiding judge), and Ihsan Pasha,
Mustafa Kerimi Pasha, İsmail Hakkı Pasha, Süleyman Şakir Bey.
12. Takvim-ı Vakayi, no. 3771, 9 February 1920, pp. 48–9.
13. La Renaissance, no. 330, 24 December 1919, reports that his trial had begun.
15. La Renaissance, no. 363, 4 February 1920, no. 365, 6 February 1920.
18. Cf. supra, p. 471.
19. Verdict of the trial of Trebizond, 8 July 1919: Takvim-ı Vakayi, no. 3616, du 6 August 1919,
pp. 50–2. It is noteworthy that the verdict was published two months after the end of the trial and
one month after the verdict was announced.
20. La Renaissance, no. 324, 17 December 1919; no. 329, 23 December 1919.
21. La Renaissance, no. 605, 6 September 1920.
22. Cf. supra, with regard to his activities.
23. Cf. supra, p. 297.
24. Under the number 2696: FO 371/6504, f° 348. Another document indicates that the American
missionaries Dr. H. Atkinson and Henry Diggs were state’s witnesses who gave evidence incrimi-
nating Sabit: FO 371/6503, no. 264.

25. Le Spectateur d’Orient, 13 June 1919.

27. La Renaissance, no. 284, 31 October 1919, no. 302, 21 November, no. 344, 11 January 1920.
28. Chiffred Telegram no. 5, from the head of the Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa, Bahaeddin Şakir, Erzerum, 21
Haziran 1331 (4 July 1915), to the vali of Mamuret ul-Aziz, Sabit Bey, attention: Resneli Nâzım
Bey: Takvim-ı Vakayi, no. 3540 (read at the trial session of 12 April 1919), 5 May 1919, p. 6, col.
1–2, and no. 3771, 9 February 1920, p. 48, col. 1.
29. Ibidem, pp. 48–9.
30. FO 371/5089, no. 949, from Robeck to Lord Curzon, 18 February 1920.
32. Cf. supra, pp. 301–2, with regard to their activities at the practical level.
33. Judgement of the court-martial, 20 July 1920: Tercüman-ı Hakikat, no. 14136, 5 August 1920, p. 5.
34. Ibidem. Necati was not executed.
35. Cf. supra, p. 301; Kazarian, op. cit., pp. 292–300.
36. Cf. supra, pp. 308–9, with regard to the activities of Memduh. Many of the exhibits presented
during the hearings have been preserved in the archives of PCI Bureau: APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Մ
372–4, 376–401 and 555–70.
37. Takvim-ı Vakayi, no. 3917, 31 July 1920, pp. 5–6.
38. Le Bosphore, 23 July 1920.
40. La Renaissance, no. 156, 3 June 1919.
41. FO 371/5043, E 1363, ff. 123–5, dispatch of 18 February 1920, with attached a 4 February 1920
report bearing on General Halil Pasha. La Renaissance, no. 332, 27 December 1919, specifies that
the trial of Ferid Bey began in the court-martial the 27 December 1919. But we have not informa-
tion to a sentence.
42. La Renaissance, no. 290, 7 November 1919, no. 375, 18 February 1920.
44. La Renaissance, no. 382, 26 February 1920, no. 386, 2 March 1920.
45. La Renaissance, no. 347, 16 January 1920, no. 369, 11 February 1920, no. 387, 3 March 1920.
49. Cf. supra, pp. 543. Verdict of the trial of deportations in Büyükdere/San Stefano, 24 May 1919:
Takvim-ı Vakayi, no. 3618, 8 August 1919, pp. 6–7.
50. Cf. supra, pp. 69, 103.
51. Cf. supra, p. 249; Astourian, “The Armenian Genocide: An Interpretation,” The History Teacher,
art. cit., p. 141, n. 23–4.
52. First session of the trial of Sabancali Hakkı, 9 August 1919: Takvim-ı Vakayi, no. 3623, 14 August
1919, pp. 1–3.
53. Second session of the trial, 12 August 1919: Takvim-ı Vakayi, no. 3632, 25 August 1919, pp. 5–17,
12–17; third session of the trial, 27 August 1919: Takvim-ı Vakayi, no. 3636, 27 August 1919, pp.
18–23; Fourth session of the trial, 31 August 1919: Takvim-ı Vakayi, no. 3637, pp. 24–31; Fifth ses-
sion of the trial, 10 September 1919: Takvim-ı Vakayi, no. 3656, pp. 32–9.
55. Aravod, no. 46, 7 February 1921.
56. Cf. supra, pp. 467–82.
58. La Renaissance, no. 383, 27 February 1920; Le Spectateur d’Orient, 12 July 1919: 12 people
sent to Yozgat to be tried locally, one sent to Amasia, and two sent to Akşehir. Le Spectateur
d’Orient, 14 July 1919, reports that warrants had been issued for the arrest of Bedros Halajian,
Mansurizâde Said (Sarouhan) and Nori (Kerbela). Le Spectateur d’Orient, 18 July 1919, also
reports a planned trial of “people implicated in the massacres and deportations in Angora,
as well as those implicated in atrocities committed in Kerasund, Sıvas, Adabazar, Bilejik,
Bitlis, Ismit, Mamuret ul-Aziz, Amasia, Der Zor, Kirşehir, Dyiarbekir, Kayseri, Konya, Kangri,
Andrinople, Karahisar, Adana, Çataldja, Dardanelle, Bafra, Marash, Akhisar and, finally,

Notes 999
Constantinople. Among the people involved in the Constantinople atrocities were Bedri Bey,
the former police chief and, at the time, a fugitive from justice, Reşad Bey, the former head of
the political section of the police department, and Şehab Bey, the former military commander
of Constantinople ... One is never forbidden to wait,” the newspaper concluded, “and one can
always hope.”
59. La Renaissance, no. 307, 27 November 1919, no. 313, 4 December 1919, no. 318, 10 December 1919.
His file was transmitted to Court-martial No. 3 as early as June 1919 (Le Spectateur d’Orient, 25
June 1919), which seems to indicate that even Damad Ferid’s government did not appreciate the
written statement that he submitted to the Mazhar Commission in December 1918.
60. Cf. supra, pp. 627, and 646.
61. Aravod, no. 31, 25 October 1920.
62. “A la cour martiale, un réquisitoire éloquent,” in La Renaissance, no. 352, 22 January 1920; Le
Bosphore, 22 January 1920.
63. Ibidem.
64. “Choses de Turquie, Autour d’un procès,” in La Renaissance, no. 354, 24 January 1920, from Peyam
Eyam.
65. “Le cas de Mustafa pacha,” in Le Bosphore, 25 October 1920.
66. Takvim-ı Vakayi, no. 3995, 31 October 1920; Aravod, no. 32, 1 November 1920, also reports these
appointments.
67. Alemdar, 31 October 1920.
68. “Le procès de Mustafa pacha,” in Le Bosphore, 8 November 1920.
69. “Réparations, réintégrations, etc. Mustafa pacha,” in Le Bosphore, 21 November 1920.
70. “L’affaire du général Mustafa pacha,” in Le Bosphore, 24 November 1920.
71. “Le procès de Mustafa pacha,” in Le Bosphore, 21 December 1920.
10 Mustafa Kemal: From the Young Turk Connection

to the Construction of the Nation-State
1. Zürcher, The Unionist, op. cit., p. 107. After entrusting the command of his army to Nihat Pasha
[Anılmış], Kemal left Adana for the capital. According to Zürcher, he presented the British, in
vain, with a plan for a British mandate over Anatolia; he would have been the governor of the
area under mandate. This episode is omitted in his memoirs.
2. Ibidem, p. 114.
3. Ibidem, pp. 114–1–15.
4. Ibidem, pp. 111–12. But Kemal seems to have considered Esad to be a man who was “obstinate,
with limited capability.” (ibidem, p. 79).
5. Ibidem.
6. Ibidem, p. 92.
7. Ibidem, p. 118.
8. Ibidem, p. 119.
9. Ibidem, p. 121. Karakol’s representative with the Bolsheviks, Baha Said, signed a mutual assistance
pact with the representative of the Bolshevik government on 11 January 1920.
10. Ibidem, pp. 85, 122.
11. Ibidem, p. 123. Zürcher mentions a public demonstration for Enver that took place in Trebizond in
May 1920.
12. Ibidem, p. 130.
13. FO 371/5043, E 1363, ff. 123–5, letter of 18 February 1920, with a 4 February 1920 report on the
newly elected deputies to the Ottoman parliament.
14. Ibidem, f° 125.
15. Ibidem, f° 126.
16. Cf. supra, p. 340. The evidence he gave the court directly incriminated Halil [Kut].
17. FO 371/5043, E 1363, f° 126.

18. The Greek-Armenian Committee dealt systematically with questions of security in the 85 coor-
dinating meetings that it held between 19 February and 29 March 1922: FO 371/ 3658, 371/4195,
371/ 4196, 371/4197, 371/5087, 371/ 5213, 371/5214, 371/ 6548, 371/6549, 371/7879.
19. 34th session, 10 March 1920: FO 371/ 5087, ff. 141–5.
20. FO 371/ 5041, E 432, report of Intelligence Services; FO 371/5042, E 875, 16 March 1920, about the
withdrawal of French troops from Marash and the massacre of the Armenian population by the
Kemalists.
21. FO 371/5046, E 3318, f. 89, report of 15 April 1920.
22. FO 371/5045, E. 2804, ff. 191 and 196, report of 25 March 1920, “Extortion of contributions by
Nationalists.”
23. FO 371/5043, E 1297, ff. 35 and sq., report of 10 March 1920.
24. FO 371/5043, E 1462, ff. 146–55, letter from Lord Curzon to Robeck, 12 March 1920, on the Allied
decision to occupy Istanbul.
25. FO 371/5043, E 1550, about the naval tactics and the deployment of battleships.
26. FO 371/5043, E 1531, report of 15 March 1920, about the reinforcement of the British troops in
Turkey; FO 371/5043, E 1642, second report of 15 March 1920.
27. FO 371/5043, E 1693, report of 17 March 1920.
28. FO 371/5046, E 3649, report of 2 April 1920, about Turkish reactions to the pursuit of the military
occupation of the capital.
29. FO 371/5173, no. 6709, letter from the British ambassador in Berlin to Lord Curzon, 14 juin 1920,
report on the Representatives of the Young Turks, f. 100 (report in French).
30. FO 371/5173, E 4154, from the French embassy in London to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs,
1 May 1920.
31. FO 371/5173, E 3404, telegram from Robeck to G. Buchanan, British ambassador in Rome, 16
April 1920. It is probable that the Italian authorities closed their eyes to these movements and
were already considering cooperating with the Ittihadist-Kemalist forces.
32. FO 371/5171, E 12472, report of British Intelligence Services (the Istanbul branch of the S.I.S.), on
the week beginning 9 September 1920, passed by Robeck to Lord Curzon, pp. 14–16.
33. FO 371/5178, E 14638, Constantinople, 7 September 1920, report of British Intelligence Services
(the Istanbul branch of the S.I.S.), f° 195.
34. Ibidem, f° 196.
35. FO 371/5089, appendix, copy of a Circular of the Ottoman League, Geneve, 6 January 1920.
36. FO 371/5050, f° 198, copy of the Journal d’Orient, 3 June 1920.
the week beginning 21 September 1920, passed by Robeck to Lord Curzon, f° 153.
38. Telegram from the foreign minister of the Ankara government, Ahmed Muhtar, to Kâzım
Karabekir, 8 November 1920, published in the collection: Kâzım Karabekir, İstiklâl Harbimiz (Our
War of Independence), Istanbul 1969, pp. 844–5, coted in Dadrian, Histoire du génocide arménien,
op. cit., pp. 564–5, n. 4.
the week beginning 28 October 1920, passed by Robeck to Lord Curzon, f° 226.
40. Ibidem, ff. 227–8.
41. Kâzım Karabekir, İstiklâl Harbimiz (Our War of Independence), op. cit., p. 845, coted in Dadrian,
Histoire du génocide arménien, op. cit., p. 565.
42. FO 371/6503, no. 6902, letter from the War Office to the State secretary of Foreign Office, London,
15 June 1921.
43. FO 371/6506, f° 335chiffred telegram from Sir H. Rumbold, 27 September 1921.
44. FO 371/6505, f° 93, telegram from the governor of Malta to the War Office, 29 October 1921. An
attached 9 November 1921 report recalls that these men had been arrested under Damad Ferid
in 1919 and sent to Malta in May–June 1919, and a second group in March 1920; that Chapter
VII, Articles 225 to 230 of the Treaty of Sèvres stipulate that Turks guilty of committing acts of
violence should be tried, and so on.
45. Zürcher, The Unionist, op. cit., pp. 132–3.
46. Ibidem, p. 134. The first article in the program announces that “Union and Progress is a radical
political party that defends all freedoms.”

Notes 1001
47. Ibidem.
48. Ibidem, p. 143. The killers, including the man who laid the assassination plan, Ziya Hurşit, were
discovered in the hotels of the port.
49. Ibidem, p. 143. On 8 February 1925, Kel Ali, a loyal follower of Kemal’s, personally killed the deputy
from Ardahan, Deli Halit, a member of the opposition, in the midst of a session of the National
Assembly (ibidem, pp. 146–14–7). Those tried before Ali Fuad [Cebesoy], Kâzım Karabekir, Refet
[Bele], Cafer Tayyar [Eğilmez], Colonel Arif (1882–1926), Rüştü (1873–1926), Bekir Sâmi (1867–
1932), Sabit [Sağiroğlu] (1881–1960), Ahmed Şükrü, Halis Turgut (1886–1926), Necati [Kurtuluş]
(1882–1956), Haret [Sağıroğlu] (1880–1947), Münir Hüsrev [Göle] (1890–1955), Halil [Işık] (1879–
1935), Zeki [Kadirbeyoğlu] (1884–1952), İsmail Canbolat, Kâmil [Mitas] (1875–1957), Hulusi
[Zarğı] (1883–1968), Abidin (1890–1926), Besim [Özbek] (1882–1965), Faik [Günday] (1884–1964),
brother of Ziya Hurşid, Ahmed Muhtar [Cilli] (1871–1958): ibidem, pp. 147–14–8. The cases of the
other Ittihadists were judged in the second trial, which took place in Ankara.
50. Ibidem, pp. 149–53. On his return from Malta, Şükrü was appointed vali of Trebizond and elected
deputy from Ismit to the Grand National Assembly. The prosecutor alluded, in his closing speech,
to a very dubious connection to the 1925 Kurdish revolt.
51. Ibidem, p. 153. Kara Kemal committed suicide on 27 July before he could be transferred to
Ankara.
52. Ibidem, pp. 154–7. The presiding judge, Ali [Çetinkaya], was on intimate terms with Dr. Nâzım’s
and a close associate of Enver’s.
53. Ibidem, p. 159.
54. Ibidem. The case of Muftizâde Şükrü Kaya, the head of the Department for the Settlement of
Tribes and Emigrants in 1915, is perhaps the most revealing.
Conclusion
1. Currently held in the archives of the Armenian Patriarchate in Jerusalem.
2. APC/APJ, PCI Bureau, Ի 125–128-129–130.

Index
Abandoned property see Commission of Agah Bey (Mutesarif of Yozgat), 482, 513
Abandoned property Agaiev/Ağaoğlu (Ahmed), 11, 131, 142, 194,
Abdel Settar Bey (Kaymakam of Erbaa), 450 213, 303, 407, 716, 720, 814, 833, n. 45
Abdül Gani (CUP’s Representative in Edirne), Agent Mustafa (Captain of the Trebizond
344, 546, 791, 793 harbor), 469, 473, 474, 475, 476, 479, 485
Abdül Gaffar, 219 Aginian (Lieutenant Hovhannes), 432, 436
Abdül Vahid (Colonel), 740 Agn/Eğin, 159, 266, 267, 282, 276, 297, 300,
Abdülhalik (Mustafa), 234, 238, 239, 337, 308, 309, 356, 371, 404, 406–407, 418,
339–340-343, 348, 352–353, 627, 635, 445, 458–459, 486, 552, 555, 560, 561, 567,
640–644, 646, 665, 675, 696, 744, 798, 805 630, 795
Abdülhamid II (Sultan), 1, 9–13, 28–30, 35, Aguni (Sebuh), 247, 251, 252, 292, 541, 542,
43, 48, 52, 54, 56–57, 59–64, 66, 73, 75, 76, 561, 565, 582, 597, 598, 601, 687, 688, 689
78, 93, 98, 101, 107, 109, 113, 120, 146, 174, Aharonian (Avedis), 19, 41
190, 191, 200, 226, 235, 265, 270, 281, 433, Ahmed Muhtar Bey (Major in Bursa), 560
535, 561, 719, 763, 807 Ahmedoğlu Mehmed (çetes leader), 304
Abdülkadir Bey (Mutesarif of Gümüşhane), 486 Ahmedoğlu Ömer (Kürd Topal), 574
Abdülkadirzâde Kemal Bey (çetes leader), 359 Ahmedoğlu Rifât (Çerkez), 573
Abdülkerim (General), 797 Ahrar (Party), 69, 71, 73, 102
Abdülmecid Bey (Kaymakam of Divrig), 445 Ainslie (Kate), 588, 615, 639
Abdurahman Bey (CUP’s Representative), 559 Akanszâde Abdüllah Effendi, 572
Abuharar, 528, 655, 656, 657, 658 Akçabat (kaza of), 480
Adabazar, 73, 241, 263, 272, 530, 531, 546, Akçadağ (slaughterhouse of), 276, 415, 418,
551, 552, 553, 555, 572, 581, 582, 597, 599, 420, 443, 444
645, 664, 668, 670, 687, 701, 794 Akçadağlı Sinanoğlu (çetes leader), 426
Adana, 71, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, Akçam (Taner), 170, 244, 808
84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, Akçura (Yusuf), 19, 20, 23, 24, 131, 194, 201
96, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 106, 107, Akdağmaden, 274, 501, 508, 513
108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 114, 115, 116, 119, Akhisar, 555, 570
121, 127, 129, 133, 134, 141, 150, 153, 180, Akhlat, 334, 340, 346, 351
249, 263, 267, 268, 275, 279, 293, 359, 361, Aknuni (ps. of Khachadur Malumian), 20, 28,
457, 491, 518, 530, 542, 577, 581, 582, 589, 40, 43, 44, 52, 55, 56, 65, 73, 131, 146, 159,
590, 593, 594, 595, 596, 597, 598, 599, 600, 160, 161, 175, 213, 252, 253, 254, 524, 596,
601, 602, 603, 604, 608, 625, 626, 627, 630, 823, n. 192
631, 635, 639, 651, 659, 674, 675, 676, 677, Akpunar, 306
681, 687, 688, 689, 695, 739, 743, 746, 748, Akrag, 305, 350, 351
749, 754 Akrak Maden, 506
Adilcevaz see Ardzge Aksaray, 572, 574, 575
Adiyaman/Hüsni Mansur, 276, 297, 356, Akşehir, 571, 573, 574
415–416, 438, 443, 445, 650 Alacahan, 431, 438, 439, 444, 491
Adıl [Arda] (Haci), 83, 89, 98, 99, 102, 112, Alaşkert, 242, 290
124, 148, 476, 546, 549, 801, 833, n. 45 Albania/Albanians, 29, 41, 49, 51, 65–66, 78,
Adnan [Adıvar] (Dr Abdülhak), 716 84, 92, 126, 146, 152–153, 156–157, 171,
Adontz (Nicolas), 153, 157 173, 175, 235, 241, 244, 266
Afionkarahisar, 273, 565–566, 569, 581, 645, Albistan, 275, 447, 517, 594
667–668, 749 Alboyajian (Arshag), 4, 542, 751

Aleppo, 3, 64, 94, 96, 147, 249, 250, 267, 268, 515, 517, 518, 519, 520, 537, 538, 541, 542,
279, 296, 306, 308, 317, 353, 364, 367, 369, 551, 554, 568, 571, 573, 581, 582, 586, 588,
375, 394, 423, 438, 451, 452, 462, 480, 481, 591, 592, 593, 594, 595, 596, 598, 599, 600,
487, 490, 491, 498, 517, 518, 521, 522, 524, 601, 605, 606, 607, 608, 611, 615, 617, 618,
525, 536, 537, 542, 559, 572, 574, 580, 582, 619, 620, 621, 629, 632, 639, 642, 643, 644,
585, 586, 587, 588, 589, 591, 592, 595, 596, 645, 646, 650, 653, 656, 658, 673, 674, 691,
600, 601, 603, 605, 606, 607, 610, 611, 613, 692, 694, 700, 747, 759, 764, 765
616, 617, 620, 625, 626, 627, 630, 631, 632, Amman, 673, 674, 678, 743
633, 635, 636, 637, 639, 640, 641, 642, 643, Amruş (Commandant Ali), 418, 420
644, 645, 646, 648, 650, 651, 652, 655, 656, Ana, 668, 669
658, 660, 662, 663, 664, 665, 668, 669, 670, Anatolia College, 436, 452, 453, 454
671, 672, 673, 674, 675, 676, 678, 679, 681, Andonian (Aram), 46, 47, 210, 252, 257, 361,
682, 688, 693, 695, 696, 720, 723, 743, 744, 529, 558, 597, 634, 635, 636, 642, 655, 656,
745, 746, 749, 754, 758, 759, 791, 796, 805 663, 665, 666, 667, 668, 671, 672, 744
Alexandretta, 263, 275, 589, 594, 607, 610, Angora/Ankara, 64, 184, 186, 246–247, 253,
611, 612, 640 257, 267–269, 274, 279, 287, 293, 404,
Alexandria, 675, 744 495–525, 527, 529, 531, 554, 578, 581, 629,
Alexandropol, 290, 350, 703, 704, 705, 706 630, 659, 699, 717, 719, 729, 732, 736, 738,
Algeria, 357, 758 739, 741, 745, 748–750, 753, 754, 777, 783,
Ali Beg (in Kiskim), 308, 322 786, 796, 801
Ali Effendi (Colonel), 539, 575 Ankut (Krikor), 657, 658, 659, 744
Ali Haydar (Mutesarif), 725, 733, 762, Anmeghian (Pierre), 15, 42
767, 837 Antakya see Antioch
Allenby (General Edmund), 715, 743 Antioch, 275, 605, 607, 609, 610, 611, 612,
Altunian (Dr. Asadur), 643, 644 659, 676
Amanus, 577, 578, 579, 580, 589, 602, 605, Antitaurus, 591, 599, 600
610, 632, 633, 670, 683, 687, 688, 689 Antranig (General), 40, 52, 222, 227, 295, 302,
Amar Bey (Commandant), 323, 324 305, 553, 558, 614, 643, 707
Amasia, 127, 128, 129, 263, 275, 282, 404, Arabpunar, 451, 614, 647, 649, 651, 653
418, 429, 430, 434, 436, 439, 440, 450, 451, Arabs/Arabia, 10, 11, 19, 25, 29, 31, 32, 34,
452, 454, 455, 488, 489, 491, 508, 659, 660, 39, 45, 64, 123, 170, 185, 191, 232, 257, 280,
701, 749, 801 301, 342, 367, 375, 426, 598, 620, 621, 635,
Amca (Hasan), 678, 679, 682 636, 651, 656, 659, 661, 665, 666, 667, 669,
Amele taburi, 237, 240–242, 249, 293, 310, 670, 671, 673, 675, 676, 677, 678, 679, 681,
312, 313, 323, 347, 370, 371, 387, 396–397, 682, 683, 684, 704, 721, 726, 728, 743,
408, 410, 414, 422, 445–446, 448, 460–464, 744, 758
478, 503, 517, 522, 537, 572, 608–609, Aram [Manukian], 40, 41, 56, 59, 60–62, 75,
616–617, 653, 689 227, 229, 232–234, 319, 331, 348, 712, 823,
American Board of Commissioners for n. 196 (biogr.)
Foreign Missions, 361, 452 Aram-Ashod see Sarkis Minasian (Sarkis)
American Missions/missionaries, 228, 233, Aramiants (Hmayag), 109, 110, 173
286, 326–328, 340–342, 361, 381–384, 387, Arapkir, 159, 266, 267, 276, 294, 302, 308,
389, 391–392, 398, 402, 431, 437, 460, 470, 356, 371, 402, 403, 404, 405, 406, 418, 423,
481, 512, 515, 517–519, 551, 554, 571, 573, 430, 445, 446, 551, 560, 701
592, 596, 598, 600, 601, 605, 607, 611, 619, Arapzâde Sabaheddin Bey (unionist chief in
621, 639, 642, 694 Balıkeser), 564
American Red Cross, 384, 430–431, 514, Ardahan, 215, 219, 220, 221, 266, 268, 269,
537, 571 290, 704, 711, 718
Americans, 228, 233, 286, 296, 320, 326, 327, Ardzge/Adilcevaz, 229, 233, 240, 278, 320,
328, 330, 334, 340, 341, 342, 361, 381, 382, 324, 327
383, 384, 386, 387, 389, 390, 391, 392, 395, ARF (Armenian Revolutionary Federation),
396, 398, 399, 400, 401, 402, 425, 427, 431, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 22, 28, 29, 31, 35,
436, 437, 452, 453, 454, 460, 470, 473, 475, 37, 38, 39, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 51, 52,
479, 480, 481, 487, 488, 489, 490, 491, 512, 53, 56, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 65, 66, 73, 74, 103,

Index 1005
104, 114, 116, 117, 125, 126, 130, 131, 132, Austria-Hungary/Austrian, 47, 141, 176, 179,
133, 134, 135, 136, 137, 151, 153, 154, 158, 205, 242, 307, 357, 360, 379, 495, 498, 537,
159, 160, 161, 175, 176, 177, 190, 214, 218, 546, 547, 614, 627, 629, 650, 653, 606, 706
227, 228, 234, 235, 236, 237, 239, 252, 257, Avedisian (Hagop), 210
319, 320, 337, 344, 355, 467, 516, 539, 568, Avedisian (Toros), 687
614, 615 Avni (Colonel Hüseyin), 477, 507, 589, 590,
ARF’s Eastern Bureau, 39, 61 595, 600, 601, 602, 627, 688, 689
ARF’s Western Bureau, 17, 28, 39, 40, 43, 44, Avni (Hafız Abdüllah), 793
52, 53, 126, 132, 134, 137, 161, 175 Avni Bey (Dr.), 469, 471, 472, 474, 475, 479
Arğana Maden, 276, 307, 356, 368, 369, 370, Avundükzâde Mehmed Bey (Unionist in
393, 423, 481, 630, 793 Gürün), 446
Arjag/Erçek, 321, 325–326, 329 Aya Bey (Unionist in Yozgat), 506
Arjesh, 229, 230, 233, 278, 320, 323, 324, 706 Ayaş, 253, 254, 259, 499, 517, 524, 525, 528,
Armalto (Father), 366 529, 562, 596
Armash, 531, 551, 759 Aydın, 267, 268, 273, 567, 568, 569, 570, 630,
Armedanli İsmail (çetes leader), 311 716, 739, 748
Armenia, 13, 23, 29, 33, 51, 65, 66, 76, 78, 80, Ayntab, 64, 96, 99, 275, 447, 586, 588, 605,
108, 110, 115, 116, 133, 147, 148, 154, 155, 606, 607, 608, 609, 610, 611, 621, 630, 642,
156, 157, 158, 161, 165, 169, 171, 172, 174, 658, 659, 668, 669, 670, 674, 676, 738, 739,
175, 176, 177, 210, 221, 243, 253, 255, 256, 743, 748, 749
258, 259, 266, 271, 335, 344, 516, 542, 554, Ayntura, 675, 762
632, 635, 663, 683, 684, 703, 705, 706, 711, Azarian (Manug), 158, 210, 211, 752
712, 730, 764, 767, 769, 800, 803, 804 Azarig, 73, 528
Armenian Chamber in Constantinople, Azaz, 633, 634, 650, 655
64–65, 67, 71, 96, 108–109, 153–155, 171, Azerbaijan, 181, 218, 219, 220, 225, 226, 227,
172, 215, 250, 537, 538, 540, 541, 594, 691, 232, 239, 334, 335, 337, 699, 703, 704, 705,
692, 782, 788 706, 707, 708, 709, 710, 711, 712, 715, 718,
Army of Islam, 702, 704, 712 744, 745, 783, 800, 802
Arsharuni (Mgr Hovhannes), 146 Aziz Bey, 181, 184, 252, 287, 718, 736, 784,
Arslan Bey, 308, 339, 652 786, 802
Arslanbeg, 553, 554, 660, 668 Aziziye, 274, 430, 444, 447, 517, 566
Arslanian (Kevork, primate of Adana), 589 Azmi Bey (Cemal), 219, 401, 468, 469, 470,
Artvin, 215, 219, 220, 221, 222 475, 476, 477, 479, 482, 485, 571, 572, 718,
Asadur (Hrant), 66, 537 724, 783, 792, 802, 804
Asaf (Dr.), 345
Asaf Bey (Adıl, Mutesarif of Cebelbereket), Bab, 64, 423, 438, 443, 451, 627, 632, 635,
77, 100, 106 636, 655, 674, 693
Ashnan (Diran), 65, 569 Babikian (Hagop), 52, 63, 94, 99, 100, 101,
Asım Bey (Judicial inspector), 603–604, 754, 102, 103, 104, 105, 108, 109, 112, 113, 828,
958, n. 88 (biogr.) n. 97 (biogr.)
Asım Bey (Kaymakam), 393, 407, 418, 426 Bacanakoğlu Edhem, 431, 438, 466
Askeri (Süleyman), 69, 182, 185, 217, 218 Bafra, 274, 468, 476, 486, 489, 491, 493, 659,
Aslanian (Stepan), 65 747
At Osman Zâde (CUP’s chief in Afion), 566 Bağçe, 81, 101, 438
Ata Bey (Mutesarif of Içil), 599 Bağçecik see Bardizag
Atıf Bey [Kamçıl], 69, 181, 184, 186, 199, 246, Baghdad, 4, 5, 64, 80, 156, 246, 247, 363, 368,
495, 496, 497, 498, 502, 504, 507, 527, 528, 429, 448, 553, 582, 588, 603, 626, 632, 644,
529, 531, 578, 592, 699, 777, 783, 784, 785, 649, 650, 653, 654, 658, 661, 662, 669, 692,
786, 801, 932, n. 3 (biogr.) 693, 706, 728, 744, 745
Atkinson (Dr. Henry), 382, 392, 393, 395, 400 Bagdadbahn, 80, 156, 577, 578, 579, 580, 581,
Attar Feyzi (çetes leader), 302 582, 583, 593, 602, 603, 607, 621, 630, 633,
Attar Hakkı (CUP’s responsible secretary in 640, 642, 647, 650, 655, 670, 674, 677, 682,
Dyarbekir), 355, 357, 359 687, 688, 689, 693
Austin (General), 745 Bahabanian (Gregoire), 497

Bakal Union, 717 Becker (Annette), 773

Bakırcizâde Mahmud, 506, 509 Beder Tribe, 352
Baku, 43, 56, 194, 477, 704, 705, 708, 711, 712, Bedirhan (Abdurrahman), 20
715, 803 Bedirhan (Bedır Bey), 53
Bakuba, 711, 744, 745, 758 Bedouins, 665, 669, 672, 758
Balaban tribe, 304 Bedreddin Bey, 359, 362, 372
Balahisar, 501 Bedri Ağa (Haci), 297, 399, 405, 417, 421, 424,
Balakian (Krikoris), 5, 154, 252, 633, 650 426, 438, 442, 443, 480
Bâlbek, 673 Bedri Bey (Prefect of police), 30, 174, 252,
Balıkeser (Kaza of), 133, 184, 273, 558, 563, 718, 783, 802, 803
564, 581, 786 Beha Bey (Director of Worship), 248, 552,
Balıklı, 55, 540, 564 692
Balkan Wars, 47, 135, 137, 141–152, 467, 495, Behcet Bey (S.O.’s chief in Bitlis), 339, 343,
545, 548, 552, 567, 588, 788 345, 347, 461, 464
Balkans, 37, 38, 40, 46, 47, 61, 81, 124, 135, Behesni/Besni, 415–418, 424, 426
136, 141, 142, 153, 154, 162, 167, 176, Behrigian (Mgr Khosrov), 516, 518
194, 557 Beirut, 31, 53, 112, 487, 572, 626, 675, 677,
Balladur (Pierre), 316, 317 678, 679, 743, 749, 759, 776
Baloş Mustafa Effendi (Representative of Bekir Bey (Kaymakam of Vezirköprü), 455
Harput), 383 Bekir Sâmi, 116, 129, 432, 607, 626, 627, 840,
Bandırma (Kaza of), 184, 557, 558, 563, 564, n. 37 (biogr.)
565, 581, 582, 597, 634, 717 Bekir Sâmi Bey (çetes major), 129
Banque Impériale Ottomane, 14, 96, 201, 205, Bekirağa (Jail of), 740, 757, 787
290, 296, 315, 316, 391, 437, 489, 497, 498, Bekran Tribe, 367
558, 594, 606, 608, 693, 696 Belek Tribe, 367
Bardizag/Bağçecik, 551, 553, 554, 556, Belemedik (German hospital of), 687, 689
701, 794 Benne (Dr., ps. of Bedros Manukian), 174,
Bardizbanian (Dr. Vahan), 130, 254 852, n. 65 (biogr.)
Barré de Lancy, 100 Bérard (Victor), 176
Barsamian (Dikran), 514, 582, 723 Berki (Fazıl, CUP’s delegate, representative of
Bartevian (Suren), 108 Çangırı), 434, 464, 527
Barth de Sandfort, 225 Berlin, 10, 19, 20, 136, 155, 156, 157, 163, 174,
Bartin, 530, 531 198, 199, 248, 265, 266, 267, 268, 269, 538,
Bash Abaran, 705 543, 696, 706, 711, 800, 802, 803, 804
Başkale, 220, 225, 228, 229, 230, 241, 242, Bern, 726, 803
319, 331, 333, 334, 337 Besim (Moktar, CUP’s delegate in
Başköy, 304 Afionkarahisar), 609
Basmajian (Garabed), 19 Besim Bey (Major in Sivrihisar), 500, 518
Basra, 653, 693, 728, 745 Beşiri, 148, 152, 276, 339, 345, 351, 355, 356,
Basri Bey (Lieutenant Colonel), 654 362, 363, 367, 368
Batum, 219, 223, 266, 702, 703, 704, 705, Bethmann Hollweg (Chancellor), 376, 634
711, 718 Beylan, 275, 610, 611, 612
Bauernfeind (Hans), 408, 409, 410, 411, 412, Beylerbey (Orphanage of), 759
413, 414, 420, 425, 441, 460, 484, 517, 574 Beyli, 561, 588, 632
Baumann (General), 169 Biğa, 498, 545, 547, 549, 550, 564
Bayazid, 143, 215, 218, 219, 221, 227, 242, Bigutlan (Gorges of), 364
254, 266, 268, 277, 290, 299, 317, 542, 710, Bilecik, 273, 371, 558, 559, 562, 563, 659, 687,
780, 793, 794 748, 749
Bayburt, 152, 218, 263, 277, 280, 290, 296, Binga, 445, 446
297, 298, 299, 300, 301, 302, 308, 314, 455, Birecik, 275, 308, 443, 594, 609, 621, 629, 631,
486, 537, 793, 798 659, 662, 689
Bazarcık, 586, 591 Bitias, 610, 611
Bazarköy (Kaza of), 272, 448, 558, 560, Bitlis, 60, 116, 125, 126, 146, 148, 149, 152, 164,
561, 562 170, 171, 187, 209, 215, 229, 233, 234, 236,

Index 1007
238, 239, 240, 248, 250, 251, 263, 266, 268, British-Armenian Committee, 156, 157
270, 277, 279, 282, 292, 293, 312, 313, 324, Brode (Dr.), 682
334, 337, 339, 340, 341, 342, 343, 344, 345, Bryce (Lord), 156
347, 349, 351, 352, 353, 356, 358, 364, 383, Bucharest, 38, 209, 684
384, 396, 400, 537, 614, 616, 627, 630, 632, Büge (Eugen), 594
642, 650, 652, 653, 654, 729, 731, 739, 745, Bulanik, 152, 277, 338, 345, 349, 350, 351
746, 748, 749, 754, 759, 776, 779, 801, 805 Bulgaria/Bulgarians, 23, 32, 38, 68, 120,
Bitlisli Ali Effendi (Police chief in Siirt), 339 123, 124, 135, 137, 145, 161, 178, 192, 198,
Blank (H.), 587 199, 248, 249, 267, 270, 536, 537, 538, 539,
Bloxham (Donald), 221 545–549, 625, 695, 715, 746, 749, 769, 802
Boğazkemin (Slaughterhouse of), 511 Bünyan, 432, 444, 490
Boğazlian (Kaza of), 257, 496, 501, 502, 504, Burdur, 273, 572, 574, 659
505, 506, 507, 508, 509, 510, 511, 513, 629, Bureau of Deportees, 287
754, 775, 778, 780, 789, 793, 801 Burhaneddin Rumli (Commandant in
Boghosian (Dr.), 252, 254, 525, 529, 597, 641, Kirşehir), 523
642, 744 Bursa, 144, 183, 184, 205, 263, 272, 279, 551,
Boghosian (Levon), 406, 413, 414 555, 557, 558, 559, 560, 561, 562, 563, 565,
Bohtan/Eruh, 277, 339 581, 583, 597, 630, 659, 669, 670, 701, 727,
Bolsheviks, 702, 704, 705, 711, 800, 803, 804 739, 745, 746, 748, 749, 757, 759, 791, 794,
Bolu, 528, 530, 560, 719, 739, 740, 741, 748, 795, 801
749, 757, 759, 791 Bursalı Mehmed Tahir, 37, 822, n. 163 (biogr.)
Bompard (Ambassador), 104, 119, 202 Buxton Brothers, 209
Boshgezenian (Artin/Harutiun), 251, 582, Büyükdere, 543, 781, 795
595, 723
Boşnak Resneli Nâzım (Inspector of CUP in Cafer Tayyar Bey, 170
Harput), 409, 425, 792 Cahid (Hüseyin), 67, 73, 143, 144, 159, 201,
Bosnia, 65, 96, 225, 314 248, 256, 541, 699, 804, 805
Boston, 750 Cairo, 15, 17, 24, 29, 30, 36, 37, 38, 106, 174,
Böttrich (Lieutenant Colonel), 579 490, 743
Boyağli Sefer (çetes leader), 311 Calal Tribe, 352
Boyajian (Dr. Beniamin), 687, 689 Çalıkoğlu Rifât Bey (Mayor of Kayseri), 518
Boyajian (Hampartsum) see Murad Calthorpe (Amiral Arthur), 243, 718, 751, 763,
Boycott (Politic of), 25, 40, 128, 152, 159, 170, 770, 771, 772
200, 201, 202, 208, 429, 468, 514, 662 Çanakkale, 465, 739
Bozajian (Antranig), 614, 615 Canbolat (İsmail), 37, 46, 252, 254, 529, 542,
Bozajian (Puzant), 253, 254 626, 716, 720, 733, 783, 787, 799, 804, 805,
Bozanti, 462, 463, 498, 500, 501, 513, 542, 821, n. 162 and 871, n. 59 (biogr.)
549, 553, 559, 571, 575, 577, 580, 581, 582, Çangırı, 434, 451, 464, 525, 527–531, 537, 542,
583, 594, 630, 631, 632, 687, 688, 689, 565, 791, 801
744, 746 Canik, 127, 187, 274, 467, 486, 491, 492,
Bozarslan (Hamit), 5 748, 749
Brémond (Colonel), 749 Carasso (Emmanuel), 102, 720
Brest-Litovsk, 702, 704, 705 Carmen (ps. of Dajad Melkonian), 59, 60, 827,
Brissel (Consul), 650 n. 73 (biogr.)
British, 4, 12, 20, 23, 24, 27, 46, 71, 79, 85, Çarşamba, 274, 441, 487, 491
86, 91, 93, 108, 156, 157, 199, 243, 252, 357, Çarsancak, 148, 276, 422
358, 378, 395, 425, 463, 464, 505, 569, 589, Çatalca, 72, 89, 137, 142, 723, 739, 748
593, 599, 605, 653, 658, 662, 669, 677, 678, Caucasus, 32, 43, 44, 56, 81, 123, 153, 155,
681, 688, 689, 694, 695, 701, 706, 708, 711, 175, 176, 177, 179, 182, 194, 196, 197, 209,
712, 715, 716, 717, 719, 725, 738, 743, 744, 214, 215, 218, 220, 226, 227, 234, 235, 242,
745, 746, 749, 750, 751, 754, 755, 758, 759, 243, 246, 249, 250, 299, 317, 333, 335, 344,
760, 763, 766, 768, 770, 771, 772, 773, 775, 350, 353, 357, 364, 365, 431, 434, 702, 703,
780, 787, 792, 793, 801, 802, 803, 804, 811 704, 705, 706, 707, 708, 710, 711, 712, 713,
(see also Great Britain) 715, 716, 718, 745, 749, 763, 801, 808, 810

Cavid (Mehmed), 64, 116, 121, 122, 124, 134, Cercle d’Orient, 172, 533
144, 159, 161, 164, 165, 178, 179, 207, 210, Çerkez, 19, 34, 57, 85, 121, 129, 134, 136, 182,
214, 316, 552, 699, 715, 717, 719, 726, 788, 199, 227, 232, 238, 240, 256, 269, 307, 327,
789, 804, 805 329, 335, 350, 352, 357, 358, 359, 360, 361,
Çayaş Bahcesi (Slaughterhouse of), 499 362, 363, 364, 365, 366, 367, 370, 372, 375,
Cebelbereket, 77, 78, 99, 100, 106, 275, 589, 388, 397, 401, 431, 433, 436, 438, 439, 442,
590, 594, 600, 602 444, 449, 451, 456, 464, 466, 498, 502, 506,
Celal [Bayar] (Mahmud), 170, 801, 878, n. 105 510, 518, 534, 552, 553, 560, 573, 575, 590,
(biogr.) 598, 616, 617, 625, 655, 658, 659, 662, 667,
Celal Bey (Mutesarif of Amasia), 451, 454, 459 668, 670, 719, 753, 810
Celal Bey (Vali of Aleppo and Konya), 182, Çerkez Ahmed (Major), 121, 232, 238, 327,
564, 574, 580, 585, 592, 606, 626, 627, 329, 518, 534, 573, 616, 617
696, 754 Çerkez Ahmed Emin Bey (representative of
Celaleddin (Mahmud), 184 Genc), 352, 599, 719
Celaleddin Bey (Mutesarif of Burdur), 697, Çerkez Ethem, 982, n. 15 (biogr.)
714 Çermik, 276, 363, 368, 369
Celaleddin Pasha (Ahmed), 557, 560, 574, 720 Cesaerea/Kayseri, 13, 55, 58, 112, 175, 211,
Çelebiler (Slaughterhouse of), 459, 466 251, 258, 259, 263, 267, 268, 274, 280, 282,
Cemal Bey (Unionist in Erzerum), 247, 291, 283, 430, 460, 461, 462, 465, 489, 495, 496,
304, 366, 426, 500, 502, 505, 510, 549, 562, 497, 498, 500, 502, 505, 507, 508, 513, 514,
595, 606, 610, 738, 759 515, 516, 517, 518, 519, 520, 521, 522, 524,
Cemal Pasha (Ahmed), 104, 107, 116, 143, 529, 536, 659, 674, 676, 701, 717, 739, 743,
163, 462, 594, 596, 606, 617, 626, 631, 632, 749, 756, 759, 760, 776, 777, 794, 801
637, 639, 641, 643, 646, 673, 678, 682, 684, Çetebaşi Ali Bey (S.O.’s officer), 606
691, 772, 802, 803, 822, n. 176 (biogr.) Cevad Bey (Vali), 75, 77, 78, 81, 82, 83, 89, 93,
Cemil (Arif), 69, 148, 180, 181, 182, 197, 217, 95, 98, 100, 102, 103, 106, 112
218, 219, 221, 222, 223, 244, 345, 592, 645, Cevad (Colonel Ahmed), 181, 182, 184, 185,
702, 805 186, 227, 720, 737, 738, 772, 783, 784,
Cemil Bey (Kaymakam of Şarkışla), 443, 516 785, 786
Cemil Bey (Yakub, CUP’s delegate), 69, 518 Cevad Abbas [Gürer], 69
Cemilpaşazâde Mustafa, 359 Cevded Bey (Mutesarif of Tokat), 448, 449
Çemişkezek, 276, 422 Cevdet (Abdüllah), 10, 26, 28, 29, 60, 149, 171
Cenani (Ali, Representative of Ayntab), 605, Cevdet (Hüseyin, inspector of CUP in
606, 607, 609 Mürgün), 791
Çengiler see Chenguiler Cevdet Bey (vali of Van), 199, 225, 226, 228,
Central Committee (CUP’s), 2, 3, 15, 20, 22, 231, 232, 233, 319, 320, 321, 326, 327, 328,
23, 30, 31, 32, 36, 37, 38, 44, 46, 51, 53, 329, 330, 331, 332, 335, 337, 338, 339, 340,
56, 57, 58, 60, 61, 68, 69, 72, 98, 103, 104, 341, 342, 343, 344, 345, 348, 349, 351, 361,
115–124, 126–130, 133, 134, 137, 141, 142, 592, 598, 651, 653, 654, 672, 688, 689,
143, 144, 152, 161, 167, 168, 169, 170, 172, 693, 695
174, 175, 178, 179, 181, 182, 183, 184, 185, Cezire, 276, 299, 356, 360, 364, 378, 652,
186, 187, 191, 192, 194, 195, 196, 197, 198, 653, 656
199, 200, 202, 203, 207, 208, 212, 214, 217, Chaldeans, 364, 653, 744
218, 219, 223, 225, 238, 243, 244, 246, 247, Chalian (Garabed), 77, 593, 595
249, 255, 256, 285, 286, 292, 294, 301, 312, Chaliand (Gerard), 5
314, 327, 348, 349, 357, 358, 359, 377, 379, Chambers (W.), 83, 85, 594, 595
380, 382, 386, 425, 429, 456, 464, 467, 469, Chardigny (Colonel), 745
470, 474, 476, 477, 495, 502, 529, 542, 567, Chechens, 375, 649, 651, 652, 665, 666, 669,
605, 625, 626, 627, 633, 670, 677, 681, 682, 810
699, 700, 702, 712, 715, 717, 720, 721, 726, Chelebian (Mgr Andreas), 361
727, 729, 736, 752, 756, 759, 762, 767, 775, Chemchgadzak/Çemişkezek, 276, 422
783, 785, 786, 787, 791, 792, 793, 795, 800, Chengiler, 553, 561, 581
801, 802, 803, 804, 805, 807, 808, 809 see Chilingirian (Mgr Yeghishe), 663, 664, 798,
also CUP 799

Index 1009
Chlghadian (Mgrdich), 356, 361 Court-martial, 4, 5, 72, 80, 81, 103, 143, 181,
Chnkush, 368–370 185, 187, 198, 221, 245, 255–258, 286–287,
Choloyan (Hovsep), 232, 319, 321, 331, 332 301, 314, 341, 346, 358, 365–370, 375, 379,
Chomakhlu/Çomaklu, 515, 520 381, 387, 391, 395, 398, 409, 412, 417–420,
Chrajian (Stepan), 358, 361, 362 424–425, 435, 461, 466, 469, 471, 475–484,
Chrysantos (Mgr), 470 502, 506–9, 511, 512, 515–520, 529–531,
Çiftlik, 394, 411, 491, 545, 565, 777 534, 546, 553, 555–560, 568, 590, 591, 594,
Cilicia, 33, 63, 71, 74, 75, 76, 77, 79, 80, 81, 595, 600, 602, 606, 614, 615, 617, 627, 646,
82, 83, 87, 88, 89, 90, 93, 94, 96, 97, 98, 99, 649, 666, 688, 701, 725, 735–742, 748, 750,
100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 107, 108, 109, 753–754, 770–772, 775–798
111, 112, 116, 119, 125, 132, 134, 146, 155, Crawford (Dr.), 470
180, 249, 251, 269, 279, 282, 498, 501, 515, Crete, 34, 85, 357
520, 539, 559, 581, 585, 586, 588, 591, 593, Çukur, 421, 555, 588
594, 598, 599, 600, 603, 604, 615, 626, 676, Çürüksulu Mahmud Pasha, 178, 223
683, 691, 692, 745, 746, 749, 801, 808 Curzon (Lord), 772
Çinazzâde Mustafa (CUP’s chief in Keghi),
304 Daghavarian (Dr. Nazareth), 67, 130, 158, 252,
Circassians, 366, 655 253, 499, 524, 596, 829, n. 99 (biogr.)
Circisağazâde Kör Yusuf (Representative of Dağistanlı İsmail (chief of the bureau of
CUP in Dyarbekir), 355, 357, 358 Deportations in Yozgat), 509
Clark (Dr.), 431, 437 Damad Ferid Pasha, 131, 719, 739, 770
Clause Martens, 764 Damad Mahmud Pasha, 17, 18, 19
Clemenceau (Georges), 766, 767 Damadian (Mihran), 57
Club constitutionnel ottoman, 76, 84, 89 Damascus, 75, 123, 375, 519, 521, 574, 590,
Cold (Edith), 600, 601 596, 603, 607, 608, 640, 645, 668, 673, 674,
Çomaklu see Chomakhlu 675, 677, 678, 682, 693, 715, 728, 743, 749,
Commission of Abandoned Property/Emvalı 754, 758
Metruke, 153, 154, 155, 158, 160, 164, 171, Dara, 364, 375, 378, 393
178, 185, 186, 200, 203, 271, 285, 287, 308, Dardanelles, 53, 209, 215, 241, 244, 252, 272,
316, 317, 343, 417, 460, 461, 462, 477, 478, 549, 550, 630, 695, 717, 746, 749, 808
479, 485, 486, 498, 595, 678, 717, 722, 725, Darende, 274, 430, 434, 446
726, 733, 735, 736, 737, 738, 739, 740, 741, Daron, 60, 66, 236, 349
750, 751, 753, 755, 756, 760, 770, 774, 776, Darwinism (Social), 24, 121, 190
784, 801 Dashnaktsutiun see ARF
Commission on the Responsibility (Peace Davis (Leslie), 381, 383, 387, 389, 391, 392,
Conference), 763–765, 769–770, 773 394, 395, 399, 400, 401, 427, 490
Committee for Orphan Relief, 759 Demirjibashian (Levon), 154, 160, 845, n. 10
Committee of Progress and Union (CPU), (biogr.)
36–42, 43–48 Denek Maden, 522
Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), Denizly, 273, 568, 570
27, 29, 30, 31, 38, 41, 51–60, 62–74, 83, 97, Department of State Security, 4, 287, 542, 557,
99, 102, 104–104, 108, 110–124, 126–137, 735, 738, 783
141–152, 163, 169, 180, 187, 191, 198, 464, Der Garabedian (Kegham), 63, 305, 370, 537,
542, 609, 627, 696, 699, 721, 740 723, 828, n. 95 (biogr.)
Committee on Reparations and Der Khorenian (Bsag), 383, 534, 616
Compensation, 763–764 Der Movsesian (David), 154, 210
Constanza (Congres of), 173, 174, 175, 255, Der Zor, 250, 300, 307, 364, 375, 393, 438,
256 442, 447, 490, 498, 501, 508, 521, 522, 528,
Çorlu, 545, 549 537, 553, 559, 574, 588, 601, 607, 608, 611,
Çorum (Kaza of), 274, 452, 496, 499, 501, 511, 627, 632, 636, 637, 640, 641, 642, 645, 646,
512, 513, 517, 528, 529, 795 649, 651, 652, 653, 654, 655, 656, 658, 659,
Council of Four, 766, 767 661, 662, 666, 667, 668, 672, 677, 693, 718,
Council of State (Ottoman), 81, 143, 155, 162, 746, 754
537, 731, 735, 783 Dera’a, 519, 589, 673, 678–679

Derik, 276, 356, 363, 366, 367, 375 Eçzaci Mehmed (çetes leader in Erzincan),
Dersim, 59, 266, 267, 276, 296, 297, 298, 300, 308
302, 305, 307, 311, 312, 317, 356, 371, 382, Edhem (Captain), 231, 324, 325, 417, 426, 501,
383, 386, 396, 397, 399, 405, 421, 422, 424, 552
441, 446, 630, 748, 749, 792 Edhem Bey, 343, 458, 475, 565, 574
Derviş Bey, 121, 137, 345, 506, 549, 588 Edip (Halil), 365, 372, 376, 621, 675, 676, 716
Desert of Syria, 297, 521, 548, 573, 596, 644, Edirne, 123, 137, 142, 145, 159, 161, 180, 182,
660, 662, 663, 746, 758 199, 272, 280, 540, 545, 546, 547, 548, 549,
Deutsche Bank, 560, 577, 579, 607 579, 597, 645, 659, 674, 687, 699, 716, 723,
Deutsche Orient Mission, 694 739, 748, 749, 791, 793
Deutsche Orientbank, 596 Edrenos, 272, 558, 562
Deutsche Tageszeitung, 694 Efkalidis (Representative), 724
Deutscher Hilfsbund für christliches Eğin see Agn
Liebeswerk im Orient, 408, 641, 694 Egypt, 10, 12, 32, 81, 141, 156, 176, 357, 403,
Develu (Kaza of), 514, 520 612, 745
Deyirmen Dere, 471, 477, 480 Ehmann (Johannes), 382, 385, 387, 389, 392,
Dido Reşid, 235, 345 396, 402
Dilber (Senator Zareh), 251, 533, 542 Elbedir (Nahie of), 484
Dilman, 227, 320, 330, 331 Elbistan, 588, 591, 606
Dipsi, 655, 656, 657 Elek Deresi (Slaughterhouse of), 452
Divrig/Divriği, 436, 443, 445 Emin (Ahmed), 352, 599, 719
Diyadin, 215, 277, 290 Emin [Yurdakul] (Mehmed), 131, 194, 724,
Dodd (William S.), 571, 572, 573, 575, 581, 582 725, 858, n. 21
Dolci (Mgr Angelo Maria), 390, 497, 498, 537, Emin Basri (Captain), 339
541 Emin Effendi (CUP’s delegate in Inegöl), 563
Döngel, 551, 554, 591 Emir (Major Mustafa), 562
Dörtyol, 81, 249, 585, 587, 589, 590, 593, 594, Emirpaşaoğlu Hamid (çetes leader), 431, 439,
595, 600, 602, 604, 630, 632, 639, 659, 701, 443
743 Emrullah Effendi, 144
Doughty-Wylie (Major), 79, 85 Emvalı Metruke see Commission of
Draçzâde Nusrallah Bey (CUP’s responsible Abandoned Property
secretary in Kayseri), 518 Enderes, 455, 457, 459, 462
Draftees (Armenian), 240, 311 Enver (İsmail), 38, 46, 51, 68, 69, 119, 141,
Dunsterville (General), 706, 711 142, 143, 145, 163, 167, 168, 169, 171, 176,
Dunsterville Mission, 706 177, 178, 179, 180, 181, 182, 191, 193, 203,
Dyadin, 242, 290, 323 207, 208, 209, 213, 214, 217, 220, 221, 225,
Dyarbekir, 4, 28, 39, 59, 74, 85, 113, 119, 144, 227, 228, 241, 242, 251, 257, 289, 290, 319,
148, 152, 159, 165, 179, 187, 195, 196, 209, 326, 383, 426, 432, 463, 470, 477, 504, 541,
235, 246, 247, 266, 267, 268, 269, 270, 271, 542, 549, 573, 578, 581, 616, 651, 676, 681,
276, 279, 293, 295, 305, 306, 307, 314, 338, 688, 689, 694, 695, 699, 702, 703, 704, 705,
340, 351, 352, 355, 356, 357, 358, 359, 360, 711, 715, 716, 717, 718, 726, 727, 729, 736,
361, 362, 363, 364, 365, 366, 367, 368, 369, 783, 784, 787, 789, 799, 800, 801, 802,
370, 371, 372, 373, 374, 375, 376, 377, 378, 803, 804
379, 380, 383, 393, 395, 396, 397, 398, 399, Ephrem Khan, 132
401, 409, 423, 425, 432, 466, 517, 521, 524, Equitable (Company), 491
534, 537, 582, 615, 616, 617, 621, 626, 630, Erba, 133
631, 632, 645, 649, 652, 661, 701, 719, 729, Erçek see Ardjag
732, 736, 738, 739, 740, 744, 748, 749, 753, Erciş see Arjesh
793 Eregli, 263, 571, 572, 573, 574, 581, 582, 588,
Dyarbekirli Cemal Bey, 564 594, 687
Dzarugian (Antranig), 643 Erganian (Diran), 153, 845, n. 9 (biogr.)
Ertogrül Bey (Dr.), 546, 795
Echmiadzin, 335, 344 Ertuğrul (Sancak of), 273, 562, 563, 726
Eckart (Franz), 617, 619 Erzberger (Matthias), 208, 209, 695

Index 1011
Erzerum, 15, 28, 44, 60, 63, 64, 115, 116, 123, Euphrates College, 381, 382, 383, 384, 385,
130, 149, 152, 158, 164, 165, 171, 175, 176, 386, 394, 397, 425, 534
177, 179, 181, 182, 184, 187, 199, 207, 209, Everek, 258, 496, 514, 515, 516, 517, 520, 521,
214, 217, 218, 219, 220, 221, 222, 228, 231, 522, 659, 664
236, 240, 241, 244, 245, 246, 248, 249, 250, Eydincik, 564
251, 263, 266, 267, 268, 269, 270, 277, 279, Eyüb Sabri [Akgöl], 38, 69, 124, 144, 609, 627,
280, 282, 283, 289, 290, 291, 292, 293, 294, 634, 640, 699, 783
295, 296, 297, 298, 299, 300, 301, 302, 303, Eznik vartabed, 233, 330
304, 305, 307, 308, 309, 310, 311, 312, 313,
314, 315, 316, 317, 324, 326, 331, 335, 353, Fadıl Bey (Kaymakam of Kilis), 606
359, 371, 376, 377, 378, 381, 384, 385, 397, Fahri (Mehmed), 530, 561
398, 399, 400, 401, 402, 405, 412, 416, 417, Fahri Pasha, 606, 610, 619, 747
423, 425, 426, 432, 434, 441, 442, 443, 446, Faik Ali Bey (Mutesarif of Kütahya), 564, 754
460, 469, 470, 474, 480, 486, 495, 534, 537, Faik Bey (Ali, Kaymakam of Ordu), 484
551, 560, 629, 632, 648, 649, 650, 652, 653, Faik Bey (Kaymakam of Eregli), 574
654, 659, 660, 661, 674, 685, 693, 695, 699, Faik Pasha (General Süleyman), 296, 314, 397,
701, 702, 703, 717, 718, 728, 731, 732, 733, 398, 401, 424, 425, 426
739, 742, 745, 746, 748, 749, 754, 759, 772, Faik [Kaltakkıran] (Representative of Edirne),
776, 779, 783, 785, 786, 800, 801 715–716
Erzin, 105, 590 Faiz el-Güseyin (Representative), 367
Erzincan, 30, 59, 148, 149, 186, 198, 215, 265, Fakhirian (Mampre), 451
266, 277, 282, 290, 291, 294, 296, 298, 299, Fakreddin Effendi (Müdir of Armash), 551
300, 301, 302, 303, 304, 308, 309, 310, 311, Farah Bey (Kaymakam of Kuşadasi), 570
312, 314, 398, 399, 401, 403, 412, 422, 423, Fatih Bey (Kaymakam of Alexandretta), 612
431, 446, 455, 456, 458, 460, 481, 482, 483, Fatihpaşaoğlu Haci Bekir (çetes leader), 359
537, 545, 629, 701, 702, 703, 748, 786, 793, Fatsa, 274, 468, 487, 493
801 Faysal (Emir), 758
Erzinganli Kasab Memduh (çetes leader), 311 Fayk Bey (Kaymakam of Merzifun), 452, 453
Erzrumli Ömer (çetes leader), 304 Fayk Bey, 81, 94, 100, 102
Erzrumlı Gani (CUP’s representative in Fazıl (Captain), 409, 418, 419, 426, 461
Sıvas), 434 Fazıl Bey (çetes leader), 304
Esad (Ahmed), 243 Fazlı (Ahmed), 30, 44
Esad [Isık] (Dr.), 716, 799 Fazlı (İsmail), 106
Esad Bey (Kaymakam of Bulanik), 237, 345 Fazlı (Mehmed), 36
Eşaf Bey (Representative of Malatia), 409, 414 Fearson (Miss), 606, 608
Esayan (Arthur) see Arshavir Sahagian Fedakaran-ı Millet (Those Devoted to the
Esefian (Mesrob, auxiliary primate of Nation), 69
Dörtyol), 589, 590 Fehmi (Ali), 19
Eskijian (Hovhannes), 641 Fehmi (Hasan), 69, 121, 135, 527, 719
Eskişehir, 252, 263, 273, 498, 501, 512, 553, Fehmi (Hoca, Representative of Tokat), 449
558, 559, 561, 562, 563, 565, 566, 580, 581, Fehmi Bey, 184, 482, 496, 549, 570, 659
660, 687, 739, 748, 759, 791, 795, 801 Fehmi effendi (Müdir of Cihan Bey), 574
Eşref Hoca (Representative of Malatia), 420 Feke, 275, 599, 601, 604
Ethem (Captain Mustafa), 529 Fenerjian (Kris), 56
Euphrates, 263, 266, 290, 297, 298, 299, 300, Ferid (Ahmed), 20, 22
302, 303, 304, 306, 307, 308, 310, 316, 338, Ferid Bey (CUP’s delegate in Konya), 572,
347, 350, 352, 356, 368, 369, 370, 371, 381, 573, 792
382, 383, 384, 385, 386, 394, 395, 397, 398, Ferid Pasha, 126, 178, 770, 797
402, 403, 404, 406, 407, 411, 422, 423, 425, Feridzâde Emin Bey (çetes leader), 359
438, 442, 445, 446, 482, 486, 488, 534, 596, Fethi [Okyar] (Ali), 142, 144, 213, 715, 719,
611, 621, 626, 631, 632, 637, 640, 644, 655, 722, 799, 805, 839, n. 40 (biogr.)
656, 657, 658, 659, 660, 661, 662, 663, 664, Fetih Bey (Kaymakam of Osmaniye, 602, 603
665, 667, 668, 669, 670, 674, 678, 682, 688, Fevzi (Mustafa, Representative of Saruhan),
693, 695, 724 582

Feyaz Ali Bey (CUP’s chief in Yozgat), 634, Ğarzan, 148, 152, 229
636, 640, 952 Gemerek, 443, 444, 460, 461, 462, 463, 517,
Fifth Commission (Ottoman Parliament’s), 519
178, 498, 717, 725, 726, 733, 753, 774, Genc, 277, 280, 338, 347, 348, 352, 353
784 Geneva, 12, 14, 17, 39, 43, 48, 53, 176, 803
Fikri (İhsan), 77, 81, 82, 83, 87, 89, 92, 100, Georgia/Georgians, 217, 218, 219, 484, 687,
103, 106, 112, 569, 570 703, 705, 797, 802, 803
Filibeli Ahmed Hilmi, 69, 175, 180, 218, 219, Gerjanis, 277, 290, 311
222, 289, 291, 301, 800, 804, 805 German Military Mission (in Turkey), 142,
Fischer (Harriet), 675 164, 167–168, 169, 177, 208, 212, 289
Fırıncilar, 297, 399, 404, 405, 406, 407, 412, German Orphanage (Aleppo), 744
413, 415, 416, 417, 418, 424, 438, 441, 442, German Orphanage (Harput), 396, 399, 402
444, 447, 451, 458, 459, 480, 491, 518, 531, Germany/Germans, 142, 155, 157, 158, 164,
629, 647, 648 167, 168, 169, 171, 176, 177, 178, 179, 193,
Foreign Office, 707, 709, 778, 842, 944, 945, 200, 207, 208, 212, 214, 220, 221, 227, 235,
949, 950, 992 238, 250, 286, 289, 291, 293, 294, 296, 308,
Fourth Army (Ottoman), 240, 462, 463, 567, 314, 315, 316, 328, 330, 340, 348, 357, 362,
569, 587, 594, 595, 603, 606, 610, 618, 632, 365, 376, 377, 382, 384, 385, 392, 396, 399,
642, 643, 673, 674, 678, 681, 682, 683, 690, 402, 408, 409, 410, 412, 413, 420, 425, 427,
743, 777, 808 433, 441, 460, 463, 470, 487, 497, 512, 517,
France/French, 12, 13, 14, 19, 23, 53, 55, 56, 534, 537, 538, 541, 542, 543, 548, 567, 573,
62, 63, 64, 69, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 80, 577, 579, 580, 581, 587, 589, 590, 591, 593,
84–91, 93, 95, 100, 102, 104, 106, 108, 119, 594, 596, 606, 618, 619, 626, 627, 631, 632,
124, 130, 141, 143, 144, 155, 156, 158, 160, 633, 634, 635, 636, 639, 640, 641, 642, 643,
161, 162, 163, 170, 176, 180, 194, 199, 201, 644, 646, 650, 652, 653, 656, 661, 662, 664,
202, 204, 207, 212, 225, 228, 238, 247, 252, 666, 667, 669, 677, 681, 682, 687, 688, 689,
307, 317, 342, 346, 355, 357, 360, 366, 373, 694, 695, 703, 704, 705, 706, 710, 712, 717,
383, 431, 436, 460, 466, 469, 474, 487, 495, 718, 744, 746, 802, 809
531, 540, 560, 589, 593, 598, 605, 610, 612, Geukderelian (Garabed), 76, 81, 90
614, 632, 669, 675, 681, 683, 684, 685, 687, Gevaş, 229, 233
695, 706, 708, 710, 712, 716, 717, 719, 725, Gevranlızâde Memduh Bey (Police chief in
743, 745, 747–750, 758, 759, 763, 765, 768, Dyarbekir), 356, 359, 362, 372
770, 771, 773, 776, 780, 784, 785, 797, 802, Geyve, 272, 546, 553, 555
811 Gök (Medrese), 412, 434, 435, 436, 442, 459,
Franssen (Father), 708, 709 462
Fua (Albert), 20, 69 Gökgöz, 555
Fuad (General Ali), 717 Gokhbants, 322, 325, 326, 329
Fuad Bey (Arab Representative), 185 Göksun, 275, 588, 591
Fuadağazâde Haci Şemseddin, 344 Göljük (Lake), 368, 369, 393, 396, 399, 400,
Furnuz, 588, 606 481
Göltz (Marshal Colmar Von Der), 142, 191,
Galata, 64, 153, 172, 210, 250, 251, 540 654
Galatalı Şevket (Colonel), 772 Gomidas vartabed, 252, 528, 537
Galicia, 242, 702, 716 Goms see Papazian (Vahan)
Galli (Senator), 157 Gop, 303, 304, 350
Gallipoli, 252, 545, 546, 549, 550 Gopal, 303, 304
Gani Bey, 434, 437, 460, 463, 465 Gorele (kaza of), 485, 486
Gargar, 209, 215, 229, 278 Goriun, 236, 237
Garib Bey (Ali, Representative of Kayseri), Govdun, 433
517 Göz Tepe, 413
Garib Bey (Kaymakam of Göksun), 588 Graffam (Mary), 437
Garo (Armen) [Karekin Pastermajian], 159, Graif (Engineer M.), 650
160, 161, 163, 164, 172, 176, 669, 828, n. 94 Great Britain/English (see also British), 23,
(biogr.) 46, 201, 208, 212, 317, 534, 706, 763

Index 1013
Greece/Greeks, 4, 19, 25, 31, 38, 47, 63, 73, 86, Hakkı Bey, 103, 116, 119, 120
94, 96, 97–100, 120, 124, 126, 127, 128, 131, Halajian (Bedros), 63, 73, 144, 159, 160, 161,
137, 145, 169, 170, 178, 180, 192, 193, 195, 165, 172, 210, 211, 215, 247, 251, 533, 536,
200, 201, 202, 203, 214, 218, 241, 243, 248, 537, 795, 828, n. 91 (biogr.)
267, 268, 269, 270, 279, 290, 299, 356, 358, Halet Bey (Representative of Kemah), 304,
370, 379, 394, 414, 423, 429, 431, 448, 450, 308, 309, 311, 332, 349
467, 470, 484, 485, 491, 508, 520, 531, 545, Halid (Mehmed, chief of the police in Mosul),
548, 551, 555, 557, 558, 561, 562, 564, 565, 653
567, 568, 570, 593, 597, 598, 625, 627, 668, Halide Edip, 675, 716
677, 687, 716, 717, 721, 722, 723, 724, 735, Halil (İbrahim, Kaymakam of Viranşehir),
741, 744, 747, 748, 749, 750, 751, 752, 755, 447
761, 763, 764, 765, 766, 770, 772, 773, 777, Halil Bey [Menteşe], 73, 123, 124, 143, 159,
789, 801, 808 161, 162, 167, 170, 178, 214, 248, 249, 536,
Greenfield (James), 157 693, 699, 719, 721, 726, 784, 838, n. 21
Grey (Edward), 156 (biogr.)
Gübgübzâde Rifât (Unionist chief in Kayseri), Halil Pasha [Kut], 38, 69, 142, 180, 181, 184,
518 227, 333, 337, 345, 346, 352, 377, 378, 616,
Gübgübzâde Sureya (Captain of gendarmerie 702–704, 712, 716, 740, 794, 800, 803, 822,
in Kayseri), 516, 517, 518 n. 177 (biogr.)
Guerguerian (Krikor) see Krieger Halim (Mehmed Ali), 30, 36
Güğen Boğazi (Slaughterhouse of), 388, 397, Halim (Mehmed Nazmi), 549
398 Halim (Mehmed Said), 36, 143, 167, 177, 178,
Guichen, 612 185, 210, 214, 249, 252, 535, 536, 542, 699,
Gülek, 597, 599 719, 726–728, 783, 784, 787
Gümülcineli İsmail Bey, 69 Halim Pasha (Abbas), 783, 787
Gümüşhane, 274, 282, 467–469, 472, 478, Halimoğlu Yusuf Ziya, 181
480–483, 486, 749 Halis Turgut, 805
Günther (Franz), 577, 578, 688 Hama, 307, 375, 438, 443, 447, 500, 519, 590,
Gurci Ahmed, 449, 747 612, 668, 673, 674, 676, 677, 678, 682, 693,
Gürci Torunoğlu Süleyman (çetes leader), 492 743
Gürün, 172, 274, 418, 430, 444, 446–447, 606, Hamadân, 132, 706, 708, 711, 744, 745
744 Hamam, 459, 655, 656, 658, 665, 668, 740
Gwinner (Arthur Von), 579 Hamazasp vartabed (Primate of Canik), 491
Hamdi (Commandant Haci), 304, 349, 590
Habib Bey (Representative of Bolu), 530, 719 Hamdi (Mustafa), 19, 20
Haci Ali Bey (President of the CUP in Hamdi Bey (Hoca, çete major), 303
Edirne), 546 Hamid Bey (CUP’s responsible secretary in
Hacın/Hadjen), 76, 80, 82, 90, 94, 96, 113, Adabazar), 553, 555, 609, 794
116, 146, 250, 275, 282, 522, 528, 564, 578, Hamid Bey (Vali of Dyarbekir), 320, 357, 439,
594, 595, 599–602, 604, 639, 659, 701, 743 440
Hafız (Haci), 64 Hamid Bey [Kapancı], 246
Hafız Mehmed, 543, 795, 805 Hamid Nuri Bey Kaymakam of Aziziye),
Hague Peace Conference, 15, 17, 215, 735, 764 444
Haifa, 678, 693 Hamid Rıza Bey (Representative), 559
Hakim Bey (Mutesarif of Afionkarahisar), Hamidiye (regiment), 75, 155, 162, 164, 227,
520, 566 229, 234, 237, 238, 459, 517, 601
Hakkari, 238, 266, 267, 278 Hamilton (Dr. C. F.), 592, 606
Hakkı (Hafız İsmail), 19, 29, 37, 103, 116, 119, Hamitli Ali Rıza, 801
120, 143, 144, 159, 202, 661, 664, 667, 668, Hampartsumian (Kosti), 744
717, 718, 719, 738, 742, 748, 783, 795, 822, Hamşın, 450, 483, 486, 487, 492, 555
n. 165 (biogr.) Hanioğlu (M. Şükrü), 3, 15, 27, 29, 30, 36, 43,
Hakkı (İsmail, Vali of Adana), 361 44, 45, 58, 190, 191, 193, 196, 198
Hakkı Bey (Sevkiyat’s inspector general), 656, Hanlı, 423, 461, 463
661 Hanlı Han, 423

Harput/Kharpert, 39, 165, 171, 179, 187, 235, Hnchak/Henchakians see Social Democratic
266–269, 276, 281, 282, 292, 294–296, 299, Hnchak Party
302, 305, 306, 307, 311, 312, 314, 348, 351, Hocazâde Hüseyin Bey (Director of
356, 359, 365, 368, 369, 376, 381–427, 434, Deportations in Meskene), 565, 621, 655
437, 441, 443, 460, 481, 482, 486, 525, 534, Hoff (Nicolai), 171, 227, 358
537, 560, 630, 632, 645, 650, 661, 670, 739, Hoffmann (Temporary consul in Aleppo), 633,
745, 746, 748, 749, 753, 759, 772, 792 640, 667
Harputlian (Hovhannes), 426 Holsmann (Philippe), 687
Harzan (Kaza of), 277, 338, 340, 351, 353 Holstein (Walter), 340, 365, 631, 650, 652, 653
Hasan Bey (Major), 574, 588, 592, 602, 632 Homs, 307, 375, 438, 447, 612, 673, 674, 676,
Hasan Fahri Bey (Kastamonu), 528 677, 678, 682, 693, 743
Hasan Fehmi, 69, 121, 135, 527, 560, 566, Hoover (Dr.), 582
719 Horton (George), 567
Hasanbadrig, 438, 441, 444 Hospital of Red Crescent in Trebizond, 470,
Hasanbeyli, 81, 96, 528, 578, 590, 595, 602, 471, 472, 474, 476, 477, 480, 537, 716
633, 639 Hotel Baron (Aleppo), 665
Hasançelebi, 418, 438, 440, 441, 442, 444, Hotel Splendide, 73
451, 466, 491 Hovnanian (Dr. Ph.), 688
Hasankale, 218, 237, 242, 291, 299, 355 Huluki Hafiz Bey (çetes leader), 302
Haşim (Hüseyin), 784, 787, 789 Hulusi Bey (Police chief in Erzerum), 291,
Haşim Bey (Representative of Malatia), 398, 465, 508
409, 411, 420, 424, 425 Hulusi Bey, 560, 748
Haşim Beyzâde Mehmed, 398, 411, 424 Humann (Hans), 208, 427
Hauran, 447, 626, 640, 673, 674, 678, 679, Humaşlı Farso (çetes leader), 419
682, 749 Hurşid (Çerkez), 320
Havasoğlu Haci Hüseyin (CUP’s chief in Hurşid (General Ziya), 256, 407, 587, 602,
Aziziye), 444 797, 798, 805
Haydar (Ali), 68, 184, 496, 586, 592, 614, 618 Hüsameddin [Ertürk], 716, 778, 780
Haydarbeyzâde Şükrü Bey, 572, 574 Hüseyin Ağa (çetes leader, 311, 333
Haydarpaşa (station of), 142, 533, 693, 761 Hüseyin Beg (from Kulp), 352
Hayots Tsor, 40, 232, 233, 324, 325, 333 Hüseyin Bey zâde Hasan (çetes leader), 311
Hayret (Mahmud), 653, 739, 754, 778 Hüseyin Çavuş (Major of gendarmerie), 447,
Hayret Bey (Vali of Mosul), 653 552, 564
Hayri Bey, 485, 715, 719 Hüseyin Husni (Çerkez), 199, 443
Hayri effendi, 212, 361, 598, 676, 699, 783, Hüseyinzâde Ali [Turan], 124, 194, 804, 805,
787 839, n. 41 (biogr.)
Hazarabedian (Mgr Anania), 302, 689 Huseynig, 387
Hazo, 179, 235, 237 Hüsni (Hüseyin, Kaymakam of Koçgiri), 443
Heizer (Oscar), 475, 480 Hüsni Bey, 294, 485
Hekimhan, 418, 438, 441, 442, 444, 466 Hüsni Effendi (Ahmed), 501
Hellenic League, 44 Hüsni Mansur see Adiyaman
Herian (Rupen), 758 Hutsi Bey (chief of deportations in Tarse), 597
Hikmet Bey (Commandant), 426, 449, 461
Hikmet Bey (Kaymakam of Pergamus), 570 İbrahim (Bandermali Haci), 232
Hikmet Süleyman, 23 İbrahim Edhem (Kaymakam of Tarsus), 599
Hilmi (Colonel Abdülkadri), 653, 654, 704 İbrahim Halil (Kaymakam of Viranşehir), 366
Hilmi Bey (Mutesarif of Mardin), 222, 339, İbrahim Niyazi Bey (Kaymakam of
340, 362, 372, 405, 523, 549, 587, 606, 609, Gümüşhaciköy), 455
653, 654, 719, 728, 801 İbrahim Pirizâde (minister of justice), 184,
Hilmi Pasha (Hüseyin), 68, 95, 99, 105, 111, 535
119, 141 İbrahim Safa Bey, 519
Hinis see Khnus İbrahimoğlu Mehmed Bey (S.O.’s chief in
Hizan/Khizan, 148, 149, 234, 238, 266, 267, Gürün), 447
277, 337, 344, 353 İbrahimzâde Ahmed Tevfik, 549

Index 1015
İbrahimzâde Haci Abdül Gani, 344, 485 Izmirlian (Garabed), 615, 616
Ibranossian Brothers, 509 Izmirlian (Mattheos), 64, 108, 154
Içil, 275 Iznik (lake of), 560, 563
İgdir, 331, 335 İzzeddin Bey (unionist in Edirne), 546
Ihsan (Onnig, representative of Smyrna), 537 İzzet Bey, 330, 485, 523, 530, 531, 574, 719,
İhsan & Servet Bey (unionist chiefs in Siirt), 720, 739
339 İzzet Pasha (Ahmed), 167, 168, 228, 715, 719,
İhsan Bey (Kaymakam of Severek), 367 736, 844, n. 32 (biogr.)
İhsan Çavuş (çetes leader), 505
İhsan Pasha (General Ali), 378, 702, 706, 707, Jabaghchur, 392, 746
744 Jackson (Jesse B.), 487, 586, 607, 617, 621,
İkdam, 694 629, 632, 639, 641, 642, 643, 645, 650, 653,
İmam Salaheddin, 794 656, 673, 674, 700
İmamzâde Mustafa, 470, 472, 474 Jacobites, 653, 663
Immaculate Conception (Sisters of), 308, 394, Jaeckh (Ernst), 208
759 Jafer Mustafa (çetes leader in Erzerum), 291,
İnce Arab Mehmed (Bayburt), 301 298, 310
İncesu, 500, 515, 518, 520 Jaffa, 678, 693
İncirli, 502, 510, 511, 528, 554, 593 Jamalian (Arshak), 155
Indere (slaughterhouse of), 411, 412, 419 Jangulian (Harutiun), 174, 253, 524, 852, n. 64
Inegöl (Kaza of), 273, 558, 563 (biogr.)
Information Bureau (Armenian Janina, 137, 300, 481, 793
Patriarchate’s), 4, 5, 199, 247, 252, 272, 408, Jansen (Genny), 402
668, 751, 753, 754, 756, 811 Jaurès (Jean), 14
Injeyan (Mattheos, Primate of Smyrna), 568, Jebel Druze, 673, 674, 678
569 Jeppe (Karen), 614, 616, 618
International High Court, 721, 735, 764, 765, Jerablus, 263, 631, 662
768, 770, 771, 772, 774, 784, 785, 811 Jernazian (Yephraim), 614, 615, 617, 620
Intilli, 578, 596, 602, 604, 642, 677, 687, 688 Jerusalem, 5, 271, 272, 639, 641, 669, 673,
İsak (Colonel), 334 674, 675, 682, 683, 691, 692, 715, 743, 749,
İsak Çavuş (Camp director in Hamam), 658 759, 773, 809
Ishkhan, 39, 40, 60, 61, 227, 232, 233, 319, Jıhankir (çetes leader), 325
320, 324, 326 Johannsen (Alma), 348, 351
Islahat-ı Osmaniye (Radical Party), 69 Julfa, 226, 704, 705, 707
Islahiye, 528, 602, 604, 633, 635, 650, 655,
672, 687, 689 Kabayan (Vartivar), 688
İslâm Ordusi, 702 Kabur (valley of), 626, 652, 665, 667
İsmail Muştak, 718, 719, 754 Kadir Bey (S.O.’s officer), 485, 523
İsmail Safâ [Özler], 593 Kadri (Hoca), 19, 69
İsmail Sidki Bey, 549 Kadri (Hüseyin), 144, 733
Ismit, 184, 241, 267, 268, 272, 279, 548, 549, Kadri Bey (Kaymakam of Palu), 371, 417
551–556, 562, 577, 578, 580, 583, 597, 598, Kahmi (Captain Çerkez), 498
630, 659, 670, 676, 687, 701, 720, 747, 748, Kahta, 276, 297, 300, 356, 399, 415, 416, 417,
749, 756, 759, 794, 801, 804 621
Ismitli Mümtaz, 69, 203, 559 Kalecik, 274, 495, 496, 501
Ispir, 277, 297, 298, 299, 310 Kalemkiarian (Knel, Primate of Sıvas), 431,
Isvolsky (Alexandre), 684 432, 434, 435, 437, 462, 463
Italia/Italians, 86, 108, 131, 157, 233, 328, 330, Kalenderian (Ardavast, Primate of Urfa), 614,
331, 487, 537, 569, 716, 765, 788 615, 616, 687
Ittidal (Party), 81, 82, 83, 87, 88, 89, 90, 100, Kalfayan (Harutiun), 59, 529
106 Kaloyan (Kalust), 370, 403, 404, 405
Ittihad see CUP Kalpakjian (Mgr Yeznig), 371, 393
Ittihad-ı Muhammedi, 69, 71, 72 Kâmil (General Mahmud), 68, 71, 141, 158, 291,
Ittilâf (Party), 69, 70, 131, 134, 135, 136, 736 294, 308, 311–314, 341, 344, 346, 460, 461

Kâmil Bey (Kaymakam of Sivrihisar), 502 Katma, 498, 574, 596, 607, 610, 633, 634, 635,
Kâmil Bey (Kaymakam of Adalia), 575 636, 637, 650, 655
Kâmil Bey (Kaymakam of Mahmudiye), 321 Kayadipi (slaughterhouse of), 463, 517
Kangal, 274, 430, 438, 439, 443, 444, 451, 464, Kayayan (Hovagim), 85
465, 466, 484, 491, 531, 658 Kayseri see Cesaerea
Kanlı Dere (Slaughterhouse of), 438, 442, 443, Kâzım (Çerkez, Major of çetes), 388, 397
447, 451, 480, 518 Kâzım (Captain Küçük), 227, 516, 517, 518
Kapigian (Garabed), 437, 438, 439, 440, 441, Kâzım [Özalp], 69, 805
442, 463, 647, 648, 649, 659, 660, 661, Kâzım Nâmi, 37
662 Keban Maden, 276, 402, 406
Kara Kemal, 69, 202, 217, 218, 222, 248, 249, Kechejian (Mgr Levon), 437
541, 716, 717, 783, 784, 786, 787, 799, 804 Kechian (Puzant), 73, 90, 110, 210, 252
Kara Vasıf (Chief of the Karakol), 69, 222, Kechyan (Dr. Mgrdich), 506, 528
772, 800, 805 Kel Ali [Çetinkaya], 805
Karabekir (Kâzım), 36, 38, 499, 702, 717, 801, Kel Osman (Police chief in Pera), 451, 533
803, 822, n. 182 (biogr.) Kelejian (Dr.), 542, 558
Karagözian (Setrag), 517 Kelekian (Diran), 15, 30, 31, 32, 38, 135, 158,
Karahacılı (Slaughterhouse of), 510 159, 210, 252, 253, 529, 816, n. 35 (biogr.)
Karahisar, 259, 739, 748, 759 Kelkit, 449, 486
Karakayık (Gorges of), 416, 442 Keller (Slaughterhouse of), 504, 509, 510, 511,
Karakilisa, 242, 290, 705 687, 754, 777
Karakol (Party), 716, 717, 718, 720, 737, 740, Kemah, 277, 280, 282, 290, 296, 297, 298,
749, 761, 771, 772, 799, 800 299, 300, 302, 303, 304, 308, 309, 311, 313,
Karaköprü, 303, 374, 616, 617, 662 316, 383, 481, 483, 545, 551, 629, 748
Karaman, 304, 306, 371, 571, 572, 573, 594 Kemal (Ali), 24, 73, 818, n. 81 (biogr.)
Karaman Effendi (çetes leader), 304 Kemal (Mustafa), 4, 119, 717, 747, 750, 765,
Karamursal, 555, 556, 794 796, 799–805, 822, n. 175
Karanlık Dere (Gorges of), 558 Kemal Bey (İsmail), 19
Karasi (Sancak of), 273, 558, 563, 564, 739, Kemal Bey (Kaymakam of Boğazlian), 378,
749, 801 485, 486, 497, 502, 504, 506, 508, 509, 511,
Karayan (Stepan), 65, 153, 154, 155, 163, 165, 512, 562, 600, 601, 609, 740, 776, 778, 779,
171 789, 793
Karcikan/Garjgan, 278, 320, 325 Kemal Vanlı Bey (çetes leader), 308
Karekin Khajag, 524 Keondiurian (Madatia, Prelate of Bardizag),
Karian (Bedros, (Auxiliary Primate of Agn), 554
406 Kerek, 519, 626, 673, 674, 678, 743
Karlık (Slaughterhouse of), 417, 459, 596, 645, Kerim Refik Bey (Kaymakam of Ras ul-Ayn),
655, 673 651
Kars, 41, 220, 242, 266, 268, 269, 283, 290, Kesab, 275, 607, 610, 612, 659, 743
304, 601, 702, 703, 704, 711, 718 Keskin, 277, 290, 522, 523
Karsbazar (Kaza of), 275, 601, 604, 659, 743 Kevork V (Catholicos), 153, 154, 515, 516
Kartal, 541, 546 Kevorkian (Karnig), 370
Kasab Durak (çetes leader), 302 Kghi/Kıği, 277, 294, 295, 304–307, 311, 312,
Kasab Ego (çetes leader), 302 371, 399, 795
Kasab Niko (çetes leader), 359 Khachadurian (Karekin, Primate of Konya),
Kasab Şeko (çetes leader), 359 571, 573, 582, 674
Kasıldıh (Jail of), 645 Kharakhanian (Mgr Nerses), 235, 236
Kâsim Bey (Lieutenant Colonel), 345 Kharpert see Harput
Kasparian (Aristakes), 210 Khatisian (Alexandre), 155, 705
Kastamonu, 28, 253, 273, 527, 528, 529, 531, Kheroyan (J.), 651, 652
630, 659, 699, 717, 739, 748, 750, 754, 759, Khizan see Hizan
783, 786, 796, 801 Khnus/Hinis, 277, 290, 303, 304, 350, 650
Kâtibzâde Nuh, 517 Khodorchur, 298, 307, 308
Kâtibzâde Şevket, 359 Khojasarian (Hayg), 210, 252, 537

Index 1017
Khosrovian (Hmayag), 111, 776 Künzler (Jacob), 619, 650

Khoy, 218, 225, 320, 329, 706, 707, 708, 710, Kuran (Ahmed Bedevi), 720
711 Kürd Arslan Bey (çetes leader), 308
Kiavaş/Kiavash, 40, 278, 324, 325 (see also Kiurdian (Nerses), 663
Vostan) Kurdistan, 20, 266, 269, 683, 748
Kieser (Hans-Lukas), 5, 365, 379 Kürdoğlu Serhoş Hasan (Representative of
Kilis, 275, 577, 592, 594, 605, 606, 607, 610, Amasia), 451
627, 630, 636, 689 Kurds, 11, 33, 34, 39, 40, 41, 62, 66, 76, 85,
Kirason, 32, 263, 290, 398, 441, 476, 484, 485, 116, 125, 126, 136, 148, 151, 152, 170, 195,
486, 742, 747, 801 209, 226, 229, 230, 233, 235, 237, 240, 266,
Kirkuk, 626, 653 267, 269, 279, 280, 294, 295, 298, 304, 309,
Kirmasti, 272, 558, 562 321, 322, 325, 327, 328, 335, 339, 340, 341,
Kirşehir, 274, 496, 497, 498, 500, 503, 522, 344, 347, 350, 351, 352, 355, 356, 359, 364,
523, 554, 749, 801 367, 374, 376, 378, 382, 383, 386, 388, 389,
Kiskim (Kaza of), 296, 307, 308, 486 393, 394, 396, 400, 401, 403, 404, 405, 407,
Kizilhisar (Kaza of), 459 413, 415, 416, 439, 443, 481, 654, 707, 810
Kizirian (Garabed, Auxiliary Primate of Kuruçay (Kaza of), 277, 290, 311, 485
Ayntab), 500, 600, 609 Kuşçubaşızâde Eşref [Sencer], 69, 180, 182
Kıği see Kghi Kut el-Amara, 688
Kırk Göz (Bridge of), 404, 405, 407, 413, 418, Kütahya, 273, 280, 403, 481, 557–561, 564,
441, 442, 444, 488, 491 565, 664, 668, 739, 749, 754
Kızılbaş, 267, 300, 421, 422, 433, 506 Kütükcuoğlu Ziya Bey (O.S.’s officer in
Knapp (Grace H.), 233, 340, 341, 342 Angora), 499
Kocabaşizâde Ömer Effendi (Unionist chief in Kütükoğlu Hüseyin (çetes major in Sıvas), 431,
Marash), 592 435, 438, 442, 444
Koçhisar, 274, 430, 435, 437, 442, 443, 527, Kuyumjian (Garabed), 516, 518, 601, 777
552, 658, 795
Konya, 70, 103, 215, 221, 250, 267, 268, 273, Lale, 636
287, 290, 309, 462, 486, 498, 542, 549, 552, Lansing (Robert), 764
553, 554, 559, 569, 570, 571, 572, 573, 574, Larcher (M.), 720
575, 580, 581, 582, 587, 588, 589, 626, 630, Lavisse (Ernest), 14
632, 639, 646, 656, 659, 687, 696, 723, 736, Laze Midhat Mehmed Bey (çetes leader), 305
738, 739, 746, 748, 749, 750, 753, 754, 757, Lazkin Şakiroğlu (Kurd tribe chief), 324, 332
759, 761, 776 Lazs/Lazistan, 34, 64, 302, 304, 305
Köprüköy, 220, 241, 320, 501 League for Personal Initiative and
Kör Adıl (çetes leader in Divrig), 446 Decentralization, 26–29, 44
Kör Hüseyin Pasha, 62 Lebedinsky (General), 702, 703
Korganoff (General), 711 Lemkin (Raphael), 773
Köse Ahmedzâde Mustafa Bey, 572 Lenin, 802
Kötü Han, 440, 444 Lepsius (Johannes), 157, 208, 220, 534, 694
Köyulhisar (Kaza of), 274, 459 Leroy-Beaulieu (Anatole), 13
Köz Tepe, 492 Leslie (Elvesta), 606, 620, 662
Kozan (Sancak of), 63, 80, 275, 491, 594, 596, Leslie (Francis), 615, 617, 619
599, 601, 604, 722, 724 Lice, 247, 276, 351, 352, 355, 356, 363, 368
Kozukcioğlu Munir (çetes leader), 296 Lim (island, Lake Van), 322, 325, 329
Kress von Kressenstein (General Friedrich Lismayer (Engineer), 650
Freiherr), 703 Lloyd George (David), 766, 767, 768, 769, 772,
Krieger (ps. of Krikor Guerguerian), 3, 184 773
Krikor Effendi (Judge), 739 London, 12, 21, 23, 155, 156, 160, 161, 165,
Krisian (Shavarsh), 524 210, 491, 561, 684, 768, 770, 771, 804
Kruzian (Reverend), 642, 644 Lord Mayor’s Relief Fun, 745, 759
Küçükalizâde Bahri, 447 Loris-Melikov (Dr. Jean), 823, n. 187
Kumkapı, 540, 759 Lossow (General Von), 703
Kündebeg (Slaughterhouse of), 412, 417 Loytved (Consul), 682

Lütfi (Dr.), 19 Marât, 655, 665, 666, 668, 669

Lütneger (Swiss Engineer), 687 Marcher (Hansina), 385
Marden (Dr.), 453
Maan, 519, 674, 693, 758 Mardikian (Oskan Bey), 154, 178, 369, 461,
Macedonia/Macedonians, 19, 20, 23, 32, 34, 536, 845, n. 11 (biogr.)
38, 40, 45, 46, 47, 60, 89, 102, 124, 134, 135, Mardikian (Vrtanes), 524, 525, 533
141, 146, 182, 189, 192, 327, 553, 588, 596, Mardin, 263, 276, 340, 356, 359, 362, 363,
769 364, 365, 366, 371, 372, 373, 374, 375, 376,
Macedonian Committee, 20, 146, 192 377, 379, 393, 617, 620, 630, 650, 652, 689,
Maden, 276, 307, 356, 368, 369, 370, 371, 388, 743
393, 397, 398, 402, 406, 423, 443, 481, 506, Mardinkapulı Tahir Bey (çetes leader), 359
508, 522, 563, 564, 630, 793 Mârra, 632, 646, 655
Maderınkil (Slaughterhouse of), 481 Marzbed (alias Haci Hüseyin), 60, 126, 524,
Maher (Léon), 608 539, 642
Mahir (İsmail), 23, 128 Marzevan see Merzifun
Mahir Bey (Commandant), 452, 453 Mazhar (Hasan), 4, 186, 246, 287, 308, 309,
Mahmudiye, 220, 228, 229, 278, 319, 320, 321 359, 495, 506, 552, 735, 738, 753, 754, 786
Mahrim dosieler, 287 Mazhar Commission (of Inquiry), 4, 287, 316,
Maimon (Affair), 121, 124 460, 462, 736, 739, 740, 776
Makhokhian (Family), 471, 472, 479, 480 Mazlumian (Onnig and Armenag), 641, 642,
Maku, 710, 711 744
Mala, 599 McLaren (Miss), 330
Malatia, 276, 282, 297, 299, 300, 306, 308, Mécheroutiette, 69
356, 381, 384, 393, 394, 395, 398, 399, 402, Mechveret, 12, 23, 31, 36
403, 404, 405, 406, 407, 408, 409, 410, 411, Medzgerd/Mazgirt, 276, 422
412, 413, 414, 415, 416, 418, 419, 420, 424, Mehmed Ali (Harput), 363, 378, 388, 416, 425,
425, 426, 430, 439, 440, 441, 445, 446, 455, 426, 469, 470, 471, 473, 477, 478, 480
488, 491, 518, 535, 594, 629, 630, 650, 701, Mehmed Ali Bey (Bolu), 530
746, 749, 792 Mehmed Ali Bey (Haci, çetes leader), 416
Malazgirt see Manazguerd Mehmed Alioğlu Haci Mustafa Effendi (çetes
Malgara, 545, 659 leader), 416
Malkhas (Ardashes Hovsepian), 176, 238 Mehmed Bey (Representative of Inegöl), 406,
Maloyan (Mgr Ignace), 372, 373, 374 409, 426, 446, 449, 549, 562, 563, 564, 574,
Malta, 478, 523, 556, 570, 770, 771, 772, 775, 598
787, 792, 794, 801, 804 Mehmed Cemal Bey (Commandant), 555, 791
Malumian (Khachadur) see Aknuni Mehmed Effendi (Police chief in Mosul), 405,
Mamahatun, 277, 290, 293, 300, 304, 312, 313 406, 409, 416, 419, 421, 444, 449, 501, 502,
Mamulian (Joseph), 307 539, 549, 566, 572, 574, 602, 603, 609
Mamura, 633, 636, 655, 687 Mehmed Ekşioğlu (Major of Kastamonu),
Mamuret ul-Aziz (Vilayet of), 74, 144, 266, 528
270, 279, 291, 296, 314, 352, 359, 369, 381, Mehmed Reşad (Sultan), 93
382, 383, 384, 385, 387, 388, 389, 391, 392, Mehmed VI Vahideddin (Sultan), 715, 719
393, 395, 396, 397, 398, 399, 401, 403, 405, Mehmedce Bey (CUP’s delegate in Bursa),
407, 408, 409, 411, 413, 415, 417, 419, 421, 557, 558, 560, 794
423, 424, 425, 426, 427, 440, 537, 629, 718, Mehmedoğlu İbrahim Bey, 506
748, 792, 805 Mehmedoğlu Said, 506
Manastır, 38, 46, 47 Mehmedzâde Hilmi (Keghi), 304, 306
Manazgerd/Melazkırt, 277, 324, 335, 349 Mehsudiye, 274, 430, 459
Mandelstam (Andre), 155, 160, 164 Mektubci Ahmed Bey (Mutesarif of
Manisa (Sancak of), 273, 568, 570, 791 Şabinkarahisar), 456, 458
Marash/Maraş, 96, 99, 105, 108, 113, 447, 449, Melik Tangian (Mgr Nerses), 709
585, 586, 587, 588, 591–592, 600, 606, 611, Melik-Aslanov (Dr.), 708
615, 639, 641, 643, 653, 656, 659, 689, 743, Meloyan (Ghevont), 60, 323
746, 749 Memduh (Abdülhalim), 20, 23

Index 1019
Memduh (Police chief in Dyarbekir), 357, 359, Monastırlı Nuri, 69

362, 372, 373 Mordtmann (Dr. Johann H.), 250, 293, 534,
Memduh Bey (Mutesarif of Erzincan), 304, 538, 626
308, 309, 311 Morgenthau (Henry), 390, 453, 487, 489, 537
Memduh Bey (Representative), 559, 653, 793 Moscow, 132, 684, 800
Mercimekzâde (Ahmed, CUP’s delegate in Mosdichian (Artin/Harutiun), 81, 94, 100,
Bilecik), 562 102, 105
Merdesi (Nahie of), 416 Mosul, 156, 226, 235, 246, 299, 300, 310, 317,
Merkez-i Umumî, 119 340, 353, 358, 359, 361, 362, 365, 375, 378,
Merril (John), 588, 592, 606 438, 476, 484, 485, 539, 553, 588, 620, 625,
Mersin, 75, 85, 86, 90, 94, 100, 102, 103, 106, 626, 631, 644, 647, 649, 650, 652, 653, 654,
108, 263, 269, 275, 285, 594, 595, 598–599, 663, 664, 667, 668, 674, 706, 724, 744, 750,
677 754, 758, 794, 796, 801
Merzifun/Marzevan, 126, 275, 429, 430, 431, Mosuli Muhamed (çetes chief), 359
434, 436, 439, 452–455, 481, 488, 489, 491, Mosuli Yehia Muştak Bey (çetes chief), 365
701, 747 Mozian (Levon), 229, 294, 582, 597, 598,
Meskene, 498, 500, 521, 522, 528, 553, 573, 677
590, 601, 627, 636, 637, 645, 655, 656, 657, Muammer (Ahmed, Vali of Sıvas), 184, 401,
658, 661, 662, 663, 664, 665, 668, 672 429, 430, 431, 432, 433, 434, 435, 436, 437,
Mesopotamia, 10, 136, 171, 199, 243, 244, 438, 439, 446, 448, 449, 452, 458, 459, 460,
300, 317, 348, 364, 369, 378, 437, 460, 543, 461, 462, 463, 464, 465, 466, 503, 504, 517,
548, 613, 620, 621, 625, 627, 629, 630, 631, 573, 746
648, 649, 655, 670, 672, 683, 685, 691, 693, Müdad (Haci Ahmedzâde), 304
695, 696, 744, 749, 758, 760, 802, 808 Müdafa-i Milliye Cemiyeti (Committee for
Metternich (Ambassador), 538, 682, 696 Public Welfare), 142, 180
Mevlanzâde Rıfat, 69, 247 Mudros (Armistice of), 4, 252, 461, 463, 603,
Mezreh, 381, 382, 383, 384, 385, 386, 387, 668, 710, 718, 721, 735, 736, 750, 763, 787,
388, 389, 391, 392, 393, 394, 395, 396, 397, 794, 798
398, 399, 400, 401, 402, 404, 409, 412, 413, Muftizâde Kâmil Bey (Major of Konya), 572
423, 425, 426, 427, 437, 481, 482, 490, 525 Muftizâde Şerif Bey (çetes chief), 359, 365
Mgrdichian (Thomas), 299, 323, 358, 449, 521 Muftizâde Şükrü [Kaya], 542, 625–627, 805
Miadin, 668, 669 Muhacir, 66, 123, 137, 162, 165, 173, 204, 205,
Midhat (Ahmed, CUP’s delegate in Bolu), 245, 250, 285, 390, 429, 466, 495, 535, 536,
560, 791 542, 552, 557, 566, 578, 588, 595, 596, 602,
Midhat (Mehmed), see Arshavir Sahagian 609, 625, 659, 746, 747, 748, 755
Midhat Bey (Kaymakam of Rumkale), 574, Muharrim Bey (Director of Deportations in
621, 748 Bab), 635, 636
Midyat, 276, 342, 356, 376, 377 Muhtar Bey (Commandant), 559, 655
Milis Iso Telun (çetes chief), 323 Muhtar pasha Ğazi Ahmed), 308
Military Requisitionings, 418 Mumbuc, 423, 438, 594
Millî İktisat (National Economy), 25, 132, Mumtaz Bey (CUP’s delegate), 559, 560, 602
355, 717 Mumtaz Bey (İmamzâde Ömer,
Minasian (Sarkis) (ps. Aram-Ashod), 40, 210, Representative of Kayseri), 518
252, 524, 597, 824, n. 18 (biogr.) Münîf (Ali), 89, 252, 502, 595, 719, 775, 783,
Mirza Bey, 449, 482, 486 787, 942, n. 7, 955, n. 20, 994, n. 3
Mirza Effendi (çetes chief), 478, 481 Murad (ps. of Hampartsum Boyajian), 32, 33,
Mirza Said, 60 35, 42, 48, 51, 53, 63, 65, 72, 127, 135, 153,
Misakian (Shavarch), 539 154, 172, 174, 252, 253, 259, 350, 368, 482,
Mkhitarist (Fathers), 308, 537, 562, 563 485, 486, 517, 519, 524, 542, 574, 585, 590,
Modgan/Mutki, 277, 338, 341 602, 668, 742
Mohamed Ali Bey (Kaymakam), 445 Murad Bey (çetes chief), 482, 486, 519
Moks, 39, 126, 152, 229, 233, 278, 280, 281, Murad Bey (vice-prefect of police), 542, 574,
320, 331, 332, 333, 344 590
Moldavia, 716 Murad Bey (Mizanci), 15, 42, 72, 252

Murad Sepastatsi/Murad Khrimian, 41, 60, Nasreddin Bey (Representative of Sıvas), 499
130, 324, 432, 433, 434, 435, 444, 490, 516, Natanian (Mikayel), 210, 744
823, n. 203 (biogr.) Nathan (Consul E.), 595, 598
Muradian (Mgrdich), 239, 302, 386 Navarian (Asadur), 4
Mürsel Pasha (General), 711–712 Nazarbekian (Avetis), 12
Murtula Beg (Kurd tribe chief), 333 Nazarbekov (General), 227, 333, 703, 706
Murtula Bey, 62 Nazilly, 570
Musa beg (Haci, çetes chief), 350, 351 Nazıf (Süleyman), 449, 510, 716, 718, 761, 762,
Musa Bey, 184, 786 772
Musa Dagh see Musadağ Nazıf Bey (çetes leader), 308
Musa Kâzım, 350, 536, 699, 719, 783, 787, Nâzım (Dr. Selanikli Mehmed), 19–20, 22–23,
788, 789 29, 32, 37, 40, 42–44, 47–49, 54–57, 59,
Musadağ, 610, 611, 612 72–75, 80, 85, 94, 100, 126, 148, 152–153,
Mush/Muş, 59, 148, 179, 214, 234–242, 251, 156–158, 165, 170, 173, 175, 179, 183, 193,
259, 277, 282, 293, 294, 335, 337, 341–349 227–228, 231, 239–240, 243–244, 249, 252,
Mustafa Ağa Azizoğlu (Major of Malatia), 261, 268–269, 297–298, 311–312, 356–357,
411, 412 413–415, 461, 471, 495, 501–502, 514,
Mustafa Bey (Captain), 309, 342, 407, 484, 519–521, 529, 532, 586, 591–592, 595, 597,
502, 507, 564 654, 678, 814, n. 4
Mustafa Effendi (Police chief of Kastamonu), Nâzım Bey (Captain), 549, 574, 718, 720
528, 563, 564, 566, 590, 592, 602, 609 Nâzım Pasha (General Mustafa), 134, 141, 474,
Mustafa Effendi Ali Guzelzâde (Unionist in 778
Erzerum), 426 Nazmi Bey (Ali, president of the CUP in
Mustafa Ferikhanoğlu (Chief of the Ramma Kirşehir), 549
tribe), 362 Nazmi Bey (Kaymakam of Niğde), 574
Mustafa Turhan Bey, 498 Nazmi Bey (Mutesarif of Argana), 368, 486,
Mutedil Hürriyetperveran Fırkası (Moderate 523
Liberals’ Party), 69 Near East Relief, 759, 772
Mutki see Modgan Nebih Bey (Kaymakam of Munbuc), 636, 637
Necati Bey (CUP’s responsible secretary in
Nabi Bey (Mutesarif of Malatia), 398, 409, Angora), 247, 300, 301, 302, 308, 496, 497,
444 498, 502, 503, 720, 777, 793, 794
Naci (Ömer), 37, 38, 60, 62, 124, 127, 136, 175, Necati Sezayi Bey (Kaymakam of Adabazar),
182, 184, 218, 219, 220, 225, 227, 228, 231, 553, 555, 599
232, 247, 249, 334, 357, 363, 368, 377, 467, Necib (Mustafa), 127, 128, 129, 130
549, 732, 733, 822, n. 164 (biogr.) Necib Bey (Kaymakam of Karamursal), 496,
Nadamlenzki (Arthur), 547 564
Nafi Bey (Kaymakam of Mehsudiye), 459 Necib Bey (Mehmed), 496
Nagibzâde Ahmed, 519 Necmi Bey (Süleyman, Mutesarif of Canik),
Nahabedian (Ghevont, Primate of Marash), 491
592 Nedim (Mahmud, Representative of Urfa),
Nahmer (Ernst Von), 543 614, 616, 621
Nail (Yenibahçeli), 69, 105, 180, 217, 218, 219, Nemrud Kürd Mustafa Pasha (General), 352,
468, 469, 470, 472, 475, 476, 477, 718, 792, 398, 793, 794, 796, 798
804, 805 Neşed Pasha, 438, 458
Nakashian (Dr. Avedis), 370, 524, 525, 627, Nesimî [Sayman] (Giritli Ahmed), 123, 699,
754, 755, 796 783, 804, 805, 838, n. 22 (biogr.)
Nalband İzzedin Kâmil, 451, 747 Nesimî Bey (Hüseyin, Kaymakam of Lice),
Nalbandian (Representative Mattheos), 558, 363, 368
569, 582, 596, 722, 724, 725 Nestorians, 334, 364, 707
Nallihan, 274, 495, 496 Neutral Home, 761
Namik Bey, 629 Nevşehir, 572, 574, 575, 659
Narman, 218, 242, 277, 290, 299 Nevzâde Bey (Captain), 653, 654, 794
Naroyan (Mgr Mesrob), 646 Nevzat (Refik), 69, 501

Index 1021
New York Life Insurance Company, 491 Oğuz (Cemal, CUP’s delegate in Çangırı),
Nicolas II (Czar), 46, 153, 155, 156, 157 527, 528, 529, 530, 716, 791, 792
Nidge (Sancak of), 518 Ohanian (Nerses), 210
Niepage (Martin), 640, 650 Ohnigian (Dr. Levon), 662
Nihad Bey, 486, 731, 754 Olti, 219, 220, 290, 312, 334
Niksar, 133, 275, 430, 436, 448, 449, 450, 659 Ömer Cemil (General), 797
Nişanzâde Mehmed effendi (Unionist in Ömer Feyzi (Representative of
Angora), 501 Şabinkarahisar), 459
Nisibin, 276, 356, 364, 375, 376, 378, 621, 758 Ömer Lutfi Bey (CUP’s delegate in
Niyazi (Ahmed), 47 Bandırma), 564, 801
Niyazi (Şakir), 218, 222 Ömer Seyfeddin, 193
Nizameddin Bey (Kaymakam of Bandırma), Ömerzâde Mehmed, 308
564 Ordu, 273, 398, 401, 441, 468, 483, 484, 485,
Nogales (Rafaël de), 233, 324, 326, 327, 328, 508, 747
329, 330, 331, 334, 337, 338, 339, 343, 349, Ormanian (Malakia), 64, 65, 158, 159, 675,
364, 365, 366 691, 696
Nolder (Governor), 744 Osman (Ali, Vali of Bursa), 559, 560
Noradounghian (Gabriel), 65, 134–136, 158, Osman Bey (Müdir of Çılheder), 304, 306,
406, 445 372
Nordüz, 152, 230, 278, 324, 332, 334 Osman Bey Tekelizâde, 86
Nubar (Boghos), 154, 155, 156, 157, 158, 159, Osman Kanon Zabiti (çetes leader), 359
160, 161, 164, 171, 272, 675, 683, 684, 809, Osman Şakir (General), 780
846, n. 17 (biogr.) Osmaniye, 67, 69, 81, 180, 181, 247, 251, 286,
Nubar Pasha, 12 518, 528, 574, 577, 587, 590, 596, 597, 599,
Nur (Rıza), 131, 466 601, 602, 603, 632, 639, 693, 736, 737, 746
Nuran Pasha (Süleyman), 875, n. 84 (biogr.) Osmanlı Ahrar Fırkası (Ottoman Freedom
Nureddin Bey (Kaymakam of Çorum), 530 Party), 67
Nuri (Abdüllahad), 627, 635, 640, 646, 796 Osmanlı Hürriyet Perver Avam Fırkası
Nuri (Haci Baloşzâde Mehmed), 297, 383, (Liberal party of the Ottoman people), 799
387, 399, 405, 424–426, 441, 792 Osmanlı Hürriyet Perverân Cemiyeti
Nuri (Muhammad, Representative of Zor), (Ottoman Freedom Organization/OFO), 37
668 Ottoman Committee of Union and Progres, 11
Nuri [Conker], 69 Ottoman Constitutional League see Şûra-yı
Nuri [Killigil] (General), 702 Osmanî Cemiyeti
Nuri Bey (General Osman), 549 Ottoman League, 803
Nuri Bey (Haci Fazlızâde), 609 Ottoman Parliament, 72, 178, 202, 208, 214,
Nuri Osmaniye or Nur el-Osmaniye 223, 498, 536, 723, 725, 727, 729, 731, 733
(headquarters of CUP), 67, 180, 181, 247, Ottomanism, 33, 34, 43, 51, 52, 54, 57, 100,
251, 286, 518, 693, 736, 737 189, 191, 192, 198, 757
Nurian (Garabed), 4 Oturakci Şevket (çetes leader), 297, 299
Nurzâdeoğlu Bekir Çavuş (CUP’s chief in Ovacık, 276, 356, 422, 551, 553, 554
Agn), 407
Nusret (Captain Mehmed), 294, 295, 300, 301, Pakarij (Tercan), 304, 313, 545
302, 481, 549, 720, 739, 741, 793, 798 Pallavicini (Johann von), 390, 498, 537, 542,
Nusret Bey (Kaymakam of Islahiye), 602 559
Nusuhi Bey (Colonel), 341, 346 Palu, 266, 276, 294, 295, 305, 306, 307, 312,
351, 353, 356, 370, 371, 397, 560, 746
Odabashian (Father Sahag), 215, 431, 433, 435, Pante Mahu (Gorges of), 323, 324
436, 456, 466, 473 Papazian (Dr. Vahan), 29, 56, 59, 60, 62, 67,
Odian (Yervant), 251, 252, 524, 541, 542, 582, 75, 126, 130, 131, 133, 137, 153, 154, 158,
583, 597, 598, 633, 637, 642, 645, 668, 669, 160, 163, 164, 165, 176, 178, 179, 214, 227,
674, 676, 677, 682, 744, 746 234, 235, 236, 237, 238, 239, 242, 271, 309,
Office for the Settlement of Nomadic Tribes 347, 349, 352, 406, 827, n. 60 (biogr.)
and Refugees, 666 Papazian (Movses), 506, 508

Papazian (Onnig), 530, 548, 595, 596, 597, Platana, 469, 470, 481
639, 687, 689, 690 Pöhrenk, 504, 506
Paramaz (ps. of Mattheos Sarkisian), 235, 256, Political Council (Armenian Patriarchate’s),
257, 852, n. 58 (biogr.) 4, 65, 108, 109, 110, 111, 151, 152, 153, 154,
Paraquin (Ernest), 704, 705, 710, 712 155, 157, 158, 171, 172, 173, 175, 210, 215,
Paris, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 22, 27, 30, 36, 37, 38, 252, 537, 538, 691, 692, 751, 755
41, 43, 44, 46, 47, 48, 52, 54, 69, 103, 113, Politis (Nicolas), 764
120, 121, 130, 143, 154, 155, 156, 158, 160, Pollock (Ernest), 764
161, 165, 173, 174, 176, 194, 198, 199, 257, Pomiankowski (Marshal), 179, 706
267, 272, 308, 683, 684, 745, 803, 809 Port-Saïd, 612
Partridge (Ernest C.), 431, 436 Posseldt (General), 290
Party of the People (Ahali), 69 Post (Dr. W.), 247, 287, 435, 581, 582, 660,
Parvus (ps. of Alexander Helphand), 132, 133, 784, 787
841, n. 64 Pötürge, 276, 402
Paşa Çayiri (Slaughterhouse of), 435 Preliminary Peace Conference, 763, 770
Pashayan (Garabed Khan), 136, 252, 253, 525, Pülumur/Polormor, 277, 311
842, n. 87 (biogr.)
Pasın, 180, 242, 280, 290, 291, 299, 312 Qaradâgh, 710, 711
Passelt (General), 250 Qotur, 225, 707
Pastermajian (Setrak), 290
Patriarchate of Constantinople (Armenian), Radinsky (Vladimir), 567
96, 106, 146, 147, 148, 149, 154, 160, 161, Rahmi [Evranos] (Mustafa), 37, 64, 134, 170,
162, 172, 173, 199, 203, 210, 215, 247, 249, 400, 450, 484, 549, 567, 568, 569, 602, 801,
250, 252, 267, 268, 269, 270, 271, 272, 279, 804, 821, n. 161 (biogr.)
286, 287, 355, 407, 431, 447, 448, 486, 533, Rajo, 607, 633, 634, 636, 637, 655
534, 537, 538, 539, 540, 542, 549, 557, 562, Rakka, 297, 300, 364, 423, 438, 443, 501, 553,
563, 567, 568, 571, 583, 605, 630, 645, 668, 574, 588, 590, 594, 601, 615, 632, 649, 655,
674, 675, 691, 692, 693, 739, 747, 750, 753, 658, 659, 660, 661, 662, 663, 665, 668, 676,
754, 755, 756, 758, 759, 760, 776, 809, 811 693
Payas, 589, 590, 602 Ramgavar, 57, 154, 251, 360
Peace Conference (Paris), 702, 703, 763, 770 Ramız (Ahmed), 247, 737
Peet (Dr.), 693 Ranney (Dr. C. F.), 592
Pera, 131, 211, 247, 533, 540, 759 Ras ul-Ayn, 307, 364, 366, 375, 393, 438, 442,
Perdahjian (Yervant), 210, 537, 691, 692 498, 537, 574, 590, 598, 601, 614, 627, 630,
Perkri, 215, 229, 233, 278, 311, 321, 322, 323, 632, 635, 637, 640, 647, 649, 650, 651, 652,
324, 329, 331, 335, 344 653, 654, 663, 664, 665, 666, 670, 672, 674,
Persia, 60, 132, 199, 219, 221, 223, 225, 230, 688, 690, 693, 695, 720, 758
232, 290, 319, 330, 334, 550, 702, 705, 707, Raşid Bey (Kaymakam of Derik), 367
708, 711, 745, 802, 803 Rasim Bey (Representative of Sıvas), 434,
Pertag, 325, 422 464, 498
Pertev Pasha [Demirhan] (General), 434, 446, Rastgelenian (Harutiun), 614, 617, 618
464, 466, 567, 568, 569 Rauf [Orbay] (Hüseyin), 69, 182, 599, 715,
Peter (William), 328, 452, 453, 454, 487, 488, 718, 719, 742, 747, 772, 799, 805
489, 490, 491 Rauf Bey [Esad], 94, 98
Petersburg, 153, 157, 158, 160, 165, 171, 176, Recayi (General Halil), 507, 564, 776, 777
334, 683, 684 Receb Bey (CUP’s delegate), 559
Petra, 743 Receb Bey (Kaymakam of Darende), 446, 523
Pichon (Stéphan), 80, 90, 104, 106, 158 Receb Ferdi (Colonel), 778
Pilos, 60, 291 Red Konak (Harput), 388, 392, 395, 396, 397,
Pingian, 445, 446 426
Piri Mehmed Necati Bey (Lieutenant), 301, 793 Refahiye, 277, 290, 311, 431
Pirincizâde Feyzi (Representative of Dyarbekir), Reforms projet (Armenian), 12, 16, 18, 20–22,
357, 359, 360, 361, 362, 364, 379, 615 27, 33, 35, 42, 45–47, 66, 67, 73, 76, 98, 115,
Pirincizâde Sedki, 359, 365 116, 119, 158, 171, 135, 136, 137

Index 1023
Relief Committee of Aleppo, 639, 641, 643, Rössler (Dr. Walter), 591, 627, 631, 632, 634,
644, 645, 745, 759, 772 635, 636, 639, 640, 641, 644, 645, 646, 650,
Remzi (Levon), 739 652, 656, 662, 664, 666
Remzi (Mustafa), 83, 100, 106, 777 Rostom [Stepan Zorian], 41, 131, 175, 219, 227,
Remzi Pasha, 100 823, n. 200 (biogr.)
Reşad (Mustafa), 203, 252, 255, 742, 798, 860, Romania, 38, 178, 227, 270, 490
n. 88 (biogr.) Rumbold (H.), 804
Reşad (Nihad), 30, 44, 539, 560, 564, 654, 719, Rumelia, 70, 72, 73, 81, 113, 136, 141, 152,
733 159, 357, 552, 588, 609, 625, 747
Reşid (Captain), 327 Rumkale, 275, 621, 631
Reşid (Dr. Mehmed), 10, 124, 182, 196, 246, Rüşdi Bey (Çerkez, Colonel), 182, 359, 402,
247, 297, 307, 327, 358, 359, 361, 362, 363, 485, 555
364, 365, 366, 367, 368, 369, 370, 371, 372, Russia/Russians, 10, 28, 33, 39, 42, 44, 46, 47,
375, 378, 379, 380, 398, 405, 409, 410, 411, 53, 84, 86, 88, 108, 132, 137, 156, 158, 161,
412, 414, 415, 420, 421, 424, 443, 466, 517, 162, 163, 176, 177, 194, 197, 207, 208, 212,
518, 527, 537, 552, 553, 564, 565, 570, 754, 218, 240, 242, 248, 249, 266, 267, 268, 303,
786, 788, 801, 814, n. 2 335, 357, 467, 534, 630, 683, 694, 702, 705,
Reşid Bey (Mutesarif of Malatia), 615, 621, 711, 712, 741, 773
632, 652, 719, 729, 732, 739, 740 Rüştü [Aras] (Tevfik), 121, 716, 805, 837, n.
Reşid Bey (Vali of Kastamonu), 518, 527, 552, 321 (biogr.)
553, 564, 565, 570 Rüsûhi Bey (Dr.), 144, 181, 182, 225, 783, 784,
Resneli Boşnak Nâzım, 291, 292, 383, 404, 804
409, 420, 425, 426, 718, 792, 793 Ryan (Arthur), 554, 770
Resul Hayri (Police chief in Dyarbekir), 361
Reşvan (Kurd Tribe), 297, 399, 405, 417, 424, S.O. see Special Organization
438, 442, 480 Saadetian (Smpad), 291, 293, 296, 299
Reval (Rencontre of), 46 Sabaheddin (Prince), 19, 20, 22, 23, 26, 27, 28,
Reynolds (James), 59 29, 30, 40, 41, 44, 45, 46, 48, 53, 57, 72, 134,
Rezvani (Gorges of), 362 143, 189, 191, 257
Rhétoré (Father Jacques), 364 Şabinkarahisar, 67, 259, 274, 430, 438, 441,
Richmond (Clara), 490, 515, 518, 519, 528 455, 456, 457, 458, 459, 461, 484, 485, 486,
Rifât (Hoca, CUP’s delegate in Ismit), 552, 667, 731, 761
556, 794 Sabit Cemal Sağiroğlu (Vali), 199, 301, 383,
Rifât Bey (Major), 518, 546, 565, 574, 719, 384, 385, 387, 389, 390, 395, 397, 398, 400,
787, 789 401, 422, 424, 426, 427, 501, 560, 792, 805,
Rigal (Father), 84, 89, 91, 98, 111 1001, n. 49
Riggs (Henry H.), 334, 382, 383, 384, 386, Sadık (Mehmed), 62, 122, 124, 131, 134, 837,
387, 388, 389, 390, 391, 392, 393, 422 n. 17 (biogr.)
Rize, 218, 221, 274, 468, 486 Sadık Pasha (Representative of Tarse), 599
Rizeli Celal Effendi, 543, 795 Sadullah (Former Representative of Bitlis),
Rizeli İsmail (çetes leader), 482, 483 342, 343, 464
Rıza (Ahmed), 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 17, 19, 20, Safâ (İsmail), 87, 88, 89, 106
22, 23, 27, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 36, 37, 41, 42, Şafi Bey (Kaymakam of Bab), 635
43, 44, 45, 47, 48, 53, 54, 57, 63, 73, 98, 99, Safrastian (Arshag), 745
111, 114, 131, 144, 181, 182, 191, 199, 219, Safvat Bey (Mutesarif of Kozan), 601
301, 304, 323, 345, 422, 425, 442, 451, 466, Sağar Zâde (O.S.’s officer), 304
468, 500, 502, 523, 524, 549, 564, 602, 609, Şahabeddin (Colonel, Commander of the XVth
727, 740, 783, 785, 799, 801 Ottoman Division in Kayseri), 258, 502,
Rıza (Ali, Kaymakam of Çarsancak), 267, 476 505, 518
Robeck (John de), 768, 772, 793 Sahag II Khabayan (Catholicos), 111, 641,
Rodosto see Tekirdağ 691
Rohner (Beatrice), 633, 641, 644, 676, 744 Sahagian (Arshavir, alias Arthur Esayan and
Rohrbach (Paul), 433 Mehmed Midhat), 174, 255, 257, 641, 744,
Rolin-Jaequemyns (Edouard), 764 852, n. 55

Sahagian (Shavarch, Primate of Tokat), 55, Sâmi Bey (Süleyman, Mutesarif of Rize), 486
128, 257, 448, 449, 607, 614, 641, 744 Sâmi Paşazâde Sezaî, 30, 36, 44
Şahib Bey (Kaymakam of Gürün), 446 Samih Hafız Tansu, 780
Saib (Ahmed), 29, 37 Sâmin (Ahmed), 69, 121
Saib (Dr. Ali), 469, 471, 472, 473, 474, 475, Samsat/Samosat, 415
477, 523, 668, 792 Samsun, 32, 126, 127, 128, 263, 274, 404, 418,
Said Bey (Kaymakam of Geyve), 555, 563, 575 430, 439, 440, 441, 443, 452, 455, 468, 469,
Said Halim, 36, 143, 167, 177, 178, 185, 210, 472, 479, 484, 486, 487, 488, 489, 490, 491,
214, 252, 535, 536, 542, 699, 719, 726, 727, 508, 659, 676, 677, 701, 723, 724, 733, 739,
728, 783, 784, 787, 821, n. 156 740, 741, 747, 754, 777, 799, 800, 801
Said Pasha, 96, 134, 168 Samuel (Hrant), 582, 593
Saint James (Armenian monastery of, San Stefano, 540, 543, 795
Jerusalem), 272, 450, 675, 743, 809 Sanasarian Secondary School, 430, 436, 438,
Sakaria, 500, 552, 554, 555, 558, 562, 563 464, 466, 661
Şakir (Dr. Bahaeddin), 20, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, Sanders (Otto Liman Von), 164, 167, 168, 169,
32, 33, 36, 37, 38, 42, 43, 44, 45, 48, 51, 53, 177, 202, 208, 212, 220, 289
54, 58, 144, 175, 180, 181, 182, 184, 186, Sansar (Gorges of), 309, 310
187, 191, 195, 196, 197, 198, 199, 209, 210, Sapah-Giulian (Stepanos), 11–14, 18, 22,
213, 217, 218, 219, 220, 221, 222, 223, 244, 32, 33, 34, 35, 43, 48, 51, 53, 57, 70, 115,
245, 247, 248, 253, 289, 291, 292, 294, 297, 126–134, 172, 255, 257, 814, n. 6 (biogr.)
299, 301, 303, 304, 306, 308, 314, 357, 359, Sarafov (Boris), 20, 47
362, 372, 375, 405, 425, 426, 434, 460, 464, Sarajian (Bedros, Primate of Hacın), 600
465, 469, 470, 475, 495, 501, 507, 510, 522, Saray see Mahmudiye
523, 530, 546, 592, 614, 615, 616, 621, 626, Sardarabad, 705
694, 699, 712, 718, 729, 737, 776, 777, 783, Sarı Ahmed (Çerkez), 502
784, 785, 786, 787, 792, 793, 794, 795, 797, Sarı Efe Edip, 69
798, 800, 802, 803, 804 Sarıkamiş, 220, 221, 222, 240, 244, 290, 334,
Şakir (Husni İsmail Çavuszâde), 308 432, 433, 434, 456, 694, 702, 808
Şakir Bey (Representative of Yozgat), 405, Şarkışla, 439, 443, 444, 451, 462, 463, 488,
507, 522 517
Şakir Receb (çetes leader), 522, 523 Sasun, 20, 50, 54, 58–59, 80–81, 83, 94, 159,
Sakıb Bey (Ali, Kaymakam of Çorlu), 549 270, 297–298, 332, 333, 343, 346, 413, 416,
Salah Cimcöz, 719 421, 423–424, 426, 428–430, 433–434, 449,
Salâheddin Bey (Hasan), 791 780
Salih Beyzâde Hüseyin (Major of Merzifun), 420 Şatak see Shadakh
Salih Pasha, 59 Savur, 276, 356, 363, 377, 378
Salih Zeki, 514, 520, 653, 654, 657, 661, 663, Sazonov (Serge), 158, 177, 685
664, 668, 718 Sbordoni (G.), 233, 328, 330
Salim Mehmed (General), 502, 503 Schäfer (Paula), 633, 641, 644, 689
Salmast, 218, 225, 227, 230, 232, 320, 707, Scheubner Richter (Max Von), 291, 293, 314,
708, 710, 711, 744, 745 315, 377, 385, 650
Salonika, 11, 32, 37, 44, 46, 47, 48, 51, 53, Schwarz (Paul), 220, 289
64, 69, 74, 81, 102, 103, 112, 113, 116, 119, Scott (J. B.), 764
121–124, 124–129, 134, 137, 195, 199, 209, Sebka, 655, 656, 658, 659
490, 552, 567, 573, 747, 754 Security Commission (Armenian
Salt, 263, 678, 743 Patriarchate’s), 153, 154, 158, 160, 164, 271
Sâmi (Halil, Kaymakam of Cezire), 345, 346, Şekerci Ağia Bey (Colonel), 688, 689
348 Selanikli Refik Bey (Kaymakam), 543, 549,
Sâmi (Hoca Haci Ilyas), 235, 345, 346, 348, 564, 645, 795
360, 378, 458, 503, 518, 561, 564, 601, 720, Selim Ahmed (Kaymakam), 423
723, 725, 730, 732, 739, 776 Şer (Addaï, Bishop of Siirt), 339
Sâmi [Kızıldoğan] (Hüsrev), 69, 822, n. 167 Seraphimoff (M. G.), 547
Sâmi Bey (Kürd), 518, 561, 564, 601, 720, 739, Şeref (Mustafa), 29, 699, 799
776 Serez, 121, 137, 144, 194, 327

Index 1025
Serfiçeli Hilmi Bey (Mutesarif of Siirt), 339 Sidki (Mustafa, police chief in Der Zor), 668,
Şerif (Adıl Güzelzâde), 294, 305, 308 669
Şerif Bey (Major Ali), 406, 407, 426, 435 Şifahdiye (medrese of Sıvas), 434, 435, 436,
Şerif Bey, 145 442, 451, 459, 462
Şerif Pasha, 69, 120, 143, 170, 255, 257 Siirt, 66, 130, 148, 149, 238, 263, 267, 277,
Seropian (Mgr Mushegh), 57, 76, 77, 78, 350 334, 337, 338, 339, 340, 342, 345, 349, 351,
Serri Bey (Hüseyin), 415, 451 353, 630, 650, 652, 653, 801
Servet (Edib), 37 Silivri, 540, 545
Servet Bey (Mutesarif of Mush), 339, 345, 346, Silvan, 148, 276, 345, 351, 356, 363, 367, 368
348, 359 Sinai, 743, 745
Servet Bey (Major of Bandırma), 235, 564, Sincanköy (Station of), 499, 524
572 Sinjar, 375, 653, 664, 669
Sevag (Rupen Chilingirian), 211, 529, 530 Sinop, 28, 273, 508, 528, 531
Severek, 276, 308, 356, 364, 366, 367, 371, Sirri (Süleyman), 530, 801
423, 443, 524, 621 Şirvan (Kaza of), 148, 266, 267, 277, 334, 338,
Severeklı Ahmed Çavuş (Mutesarif), 308 340
Şevket (General Mahmud), 72, 73, 89, 90, 93, Sis, 63, 77, 82, 113, 263, 275, 459, 594, 595,
98, 141, 142, 143, 148, 149, 154, 157, 160, 596, 599, 600, 601, 602, 604, 722, 724
167 Sivrihisar, 495, 496, 499, 500, 501, 656, 659,
Şevket (Mulazim Ethem, çetes leader), 426 795
Şevket Bey, 333, 367, 499 Sıdkı (CUP’s chief in Canik), 485, 491
Şevketzâde Şadir (Representative of Marash), Sımko (Kurd tribal chief), 707, 710
592 Sıvas, 80, 115, 126, 127, 129, 130, 152, 158,
Şevki (General Yakub), 702, 717, 718 184, 187, 215, 221, 250, 266, 267, 268, 274,
Şevki Abbasoğlu (çetes leader in Kuruçay), 279, 282, 283, 293, 311, 314, 381, 401, 404,
311 412, 413, 418, 429, 430, 431, 432, 433, 434,
Sevkiyat (Deportation), 404, 441, 574, 597, 435, 436, 437, 438, 439, 440, 441, 442, 443,
609, 626, 627, 633, 634, 635, 636, 637, 640, 444, 445, 446, 447, 449, 451, 452, 453, 454,
645, 655, 656, 658, 659, 661, 663, 664, 668, 455, 456, 457, 458, 459, 460, 461, 462, 463,
670, 678 464, 465, 466, 474, 484, 486, 488, 489, 491,
Sevkiyat Memuri, 441 492, 499, 503, 504, 517, 518, 537, 551, 596,
Seyfe (Gorges of), 435, 442, 443 598, 606, 629, 630, 647, 648, 649, 650, 658,
Seyfullah (Representative of Erzerum), 292 659, 660, 661, 662, 701, 723, 729, 736, 739,
Şeyhzâde Necib (çetes leader in Kghi), 304 745, 746, 747, 748, 749, 750, 759, 786, 795
Şeytan Deresi, 364, 616, 620, 621 Shmavonian (Dr. Samuel), 642, 643
Shadakh/Şatak, 40, 232, 233, 319, 320, 321, Smith (Floyd), 361, 362
325, 326, 331, 332, 333 Smyrnia, 12, 32, 38, 52, 59, 63, 73, 100, 106,
Shahbaz (Parsegh), 176, 252, 369 130, 144, 170, 180, 267, 273, 279, 280, 282,
Shahbazian (Karnig), 447, 660 400, 523, 529, 537, 565, 567–569, 570, 582,
Shahrigian (Harutiun), 109, 116, 131, 154, 210, 605, 669, 739, 747, 759, 801, 805
253, 525 Social Democratic Hnchak Party (SDHP), 13,
Shakhatuni (Arshavir), 712 14, 18, 21, 31–34, 44, 47, 51, 52, 53, 57, 69,
Shalvarjian (Aram & Ardashes), 597, 598, 599 70, 73, 78, 126, 128, 129–134, 154, 172, 173,
Shamdanjian (Mikayel), 252, 565 174, 175, 255, 519
Shashian (Levon), 663, 666, 672 Şögüt (Kaza of), 276, 563
Sheddadiye, 263, 652, 665, 666, 668, 669 Special Organization (Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa), 2,
Shemavonian (Arshag), 537 3, 38, 170, 175, 180, 181, 182, 183, 184, 185,
Shepard (Fred), 588, 642 186, 191, 197, 198, 199, 202, 203, 210, 217,
Shirajian (Aharon), 587, 592, 641, 642, 643, 218, 219, 220, 221, 222, 223, 225, 226, 227,
644 228, 231, 238, 244, 245, 285, 286, 287, 289,
Shirinian (Kamer), 432, 438, 534, 537, 692 291, 294, 296, 297, 301, 304, 305, 308, 310,
Shirvanian (Jean), 384 312, 323, 327, 334, 338, 339, 343, 345, 346,
Shushi, 11, 194 358, 359, 364, 365, 367, 372, 380, 381, 383,
Sibil, 644, 645, 673, 674 384, 385, 404, 405, 409, 420, 424, 425, 426,

432, 438, 441, 446, 447, 451, 461, 462, 464, 416, 429, 613, 614, 653, 663, 706, 707, 708,
466, 467, 468, 472, 476, 477, 478, 480, 482, 721, 744
485, 495, 496, 497, 498, 502, 503, 506, 507,
509, 510, 517, 518, 524, 525, 530, 549, 552, Tabib Effendi (Representative of Angora), 498
553, 558, 564, 571, 590, 592, 602, 606, 607, Tabriz, 225, 226, 377, 708, 709, 710
616, 626, 627, 629, 654, 656, 661, 670, 688, Tachjian (Vahé), 5, 749, 758
695, 699, 702, 704, 712, 716, 717, 718, 722, Tafile, 911
726, 729, 731, 732, 733, 736, 737, 738, 740, Tahir (Kaymakam of Hinis/Khnus), 359, 372,
754, 778, 780, 783, 784, 785, 786, 787, 792, 420
793, 800, 801, 805, 807, 810 Tahir Bey (çetes leader), 359, 530
Stanoz, 269, 274, 495, 496, 499, 524 Tahir Bey (Hasankale), 291, 303, 326
Stöckel (Richard), 595, 596 Tahir Pasha, 60, 125, 228, 326
Stuermer (Harry), 717 Tahsin (Hasan), 171, 209, 227, 228, 231, 241,
Suad Bey (Ali, Mutesarif of Der Zor), 651, 245, 246, 289, 291, 292, 293, 294, 301, 311,
654, 663, 801 315, 316, 401, 458, 480, 501, 555, 592, 648,
Sub-Directorate for Deportees, 625, 626, 627, 674, 679, 693, 753, 772, 801
631, 633, 635, 640, 651, 655, 657, 665, 670, Talas, 514, 515, 518, 519, 520, 523, 528, 543,
671, 796 598, 746
Şukri Bey (Kaymakam of Midyat), 376, 592 Talaslı Behcet Bey (Colonel), 444
Şükrü (Ahmed), 207, 599, 699, 719, 729, 783, Talât (Küçük), 144, 720, 783, 784, 785, 803,
784, 787, 801, 804, 805 804, 805
Şukrü [Bleda] (Midhat), 37, 64, 69, 116, 121, Talât (Mehmed), 37, 46, 51, 53, 54, 73, 116,
124, 144, 159, 161, 165, 175, 182, 184, 208, 117, 120, 121, 122, 124, 134, 135, 137, 142,
213, 214, 248, 249, 287, 533, 699, 716, 720, 143, 144, 145, 157, 159, 160, 161, 164, 165,
736, 783–786, 805, 821, n. 160 (biogr.) 167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 173, 174, 177, 178,
Şükrü Bey (Mutesarif of Cebelbereket), 564 181, 182, 196, 199, 202, 203, 207, 209, 213,
Süleyman Bey (Kaymakam), 371, 424 214, 217, 218, 219, 230, 231, 232, 234, 245,
Süleyman el-Bustani, 178 247, 248, 249, 250, 251, 252, 253, 257, 259,
Sultaniye, 460, 523, 552, 571, 582, 588, 589, 287, 293, 316, 339, 358, 359, 379, 383, 390,
746 409, 447, 462, 464, 470, 476, 478, 498, 501,
Süngürlü (Kaza of), 274, 501, 513 508, 523, 530, 533, 535, 536, 537, 542, 546,
Şûra-yı Osmanî Cemiyeti (Ottoman 565, 578, 590, 595, 603, 625, 627, 644, 646,
Constitutional League), 29 664, 673, 682, 683, 684, 685, 688, 689, 694,
Sureya Bey, 255, 516, 517, 518 695, 696, 699, 700, 701, 702, 703, 705, 707,
Surmene (Kaza of), 273, 301, 472, 480 709, 711, 715, 716, 717, 718, 720, 726, 728,
Suruc, 297, 308, 423, 438, 442, 443, 444, 451, 736, 753, 754, 773, 775, 783, 784, 785, 786,
594, 618, 621, 647, 648, 649, 651, 653, 657, 787, 789, 799, 800, 801, 802, 803, 804, 805,
659 821, n. 159 (biogr.)
Suşehir, 215, 274, 430, 431, 433, 455, 456, 457, Tanielian (Barkev, Primate of Bursa), 558, 559
458, 459, 462, 463, 466, 484 Tanielian (Nerses, Primate of Yozgat), 503, 508
Suvar, 653, 665, 666, 667, 669 Tarsus, 81, 105, 112, 498, 500, 521, 571, 594,
Svin (Dr. Sarkis), 154, 542, 845, n. 12 (biogr.) 595, 597, 598, 599, 603, 668, 677
Switzerland, 620, 717, 803 Tatar Mehmed Said (Police chief in Yozgat),
Syria, 10, 64, 136, 170, 171, 199, 243, 247, 269, 509
300, 317, 353, 364, 366, 369, 462, 487, 497, Tatevian (Vahan), 160
498, 500, 537, 542, 543, 548, 549, 550, 571, Tatvan, 334, 340, 342
574, 575, 581, 589, 603, 620, 625, 626, 629, Taurus, 34, 331, 368, 513, 578, 580, 582, 591,
630, 631, 642, 648, 649, 655, 670, 672, 678, 605, 631, 687, 688, 689
679, 681, 683, 685, 691, 692, 693, 695, 696, Tavitian (Dr. Krikor), 252, 469, 516, 537, 691,
712, 728, 745, 746, 749, 758, 759, 760, 796, 692, 751
808, 809 Tayar Bey (çetes leader of Kırk Göz), 418,
Syriacs, 91, 94, 225, 227, 267, 269, 339, 340, 420, 441
355, 364, 365, 366, 368, 371, 373, 374, 376, Teceddüt Fırkası (Party of Renovation), 715,
377, 378, 379, 380, 389, 390, 394, 401, 415, 718, 780

Index 1027
Tehlirian (Soghomon), 773 Toynbee (Arnold), 588

Tekeyan (Vahan), 57 Transcaucasia, 209, 702, 705, 711, 771
Tekin Alp, 192, 194, 201 Transcaucasian Federation, 703, 704, 705
Tekirdağ/Rodosto, 73, 100, 145, 272, 491, 536, Trebizond, 158, 169, 172, 181, 182, 186, 187,
545, 548, 549, 565, 579, 597, 598, 645, 659, 207, 217, 218, 219, 221, 263, 267, 268, 273,
667, 723, 723, 740, 801 279, 290, 301, 314, 316, 381, 398, 399, 401,
Tekkeli Neşad (çete major), 469, 478 404, 432, 446, 450, 460, 467, 468, 469, 470,
Teklif-i harbiyye (Military contributions), 355, 471, 472, 473, 474, 475, 476, 477, 478, 479,
356, 357, 358, 383, 405, 408, 430 480, 481, 482, 483, 484, 485, 487, 489, 491,
Tell Armen, 375, 376 493, 495, 537, 629, 642, 685, 695, 699, 701,
Tellal İsmail Bey (çetes leader), 564 702, 703, 718, 723, 724, 739, 741, 746, 747,
Temo (İbrahim), 10, 38, 57, 69 748, 749, 750, 759, 783, 785, 786, 789, 792,
Temporary Deportation Law, 243, 316, 722 793, 795, 797, 801, 803
Temporary Law on the Property, Liabilities Tripani (Company), 93, 597
and Debts, 204 Tumanyan (Garabed, Representative of
Tenekejian (Nigoghos), 386, 534 Kayseri), 514
Teotig, 252, 689, 690 Tunalı Hilmi, 17
Ter Minasian (Ruben), 52, 59, 61, 62, 73, 131, Tur Abdin (Defense of), 361, 377, 378
235, 352 Turian (Eghishe), 108, 110, 111, 116, 154, 691
Tercan, 180, 277, 290, 300, 304, 310, 311, 313 Turian (Mgr Ghevont), 537
Terme, 274, 468, 487, 492 Turian (Mgr Kevork), 467, 468
Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa see Special Organization Turkestan, 123, 365, 704, 705, 711, 802
Tevfik [Okday] (Ahmed), 719 Turshian (Mgr Harutiun), 308
Teyfeş beg (çetes leader), 371
Teymuz Bey (Kaymakam of Bilecik), 562 Ulash, 438, 442, 444, 447, 460, 466
Third Army (Ottoman), 174, 186, 187, 198, United States, 381, 382, 391, 392, 396, 401,
219, 220, 221, 223, 228, 233, 240, 241, 245, 487, 491, 514, 567, 642 (see also Americans)
246, 255, 289, 291, 292, 298, 299, 308, 311, Uniye (Kaza of), 274, 468, 487, 492, 493, 747
312, 313, 314, 324, 341, 344, 377, 381, 398, Urfa, 123, 275, 297, 308, 317, 346, 358, 364,
408, 425, 433, 460, 461, 462, 463, 499, 618, 366, 367, 371, 388, 389, 393, 394, 395, 396,
702, 791, 797, 808 397, 403, 405, 412, 416, 420, 423, 438, 442,
Thrace, 116, 180, 182, 267, 272, 279, 551, 554, 443, 447, 489, 518, 524, 534, 594, 607, 609,
571, 577, 588, 630, 632, 658, 659, 660, 699, 613, 614, 615, 616, 617, 618, 619, 620, 621,
718, 746, 808 629, 630, 647, 649, 650, 651, 658, 660, 661,
Tigris, 331, 332, 333, 334, 337, 338, 356, 361, 662, 667, 668, 689, 701, 720, 739, 748, 749,
365, 368, 378, 423, 631, 654, 724 758
Timar (Nahie of), 40, 229, 234, 321, 322, 323, Urfalian (David), 84
328, 329, 333 Urmia, 225, 226, 227, 232, 320
Tireboli (Kaza of), 485, 486 Uşak, 273, 558, 564, 565
Tiriakian (Hayg), 253 Ussher (Dr. Clarence), 233, 320, 326
Tiriakian (Hrach), 59 Uzun Ahmed (çetes leader), 502, 508
Tivekelian (Kegham, Primate of Kghi), 305
Tokat, 129, 263, 275, 404, 418, 429, 430, 436, Van, 5, 17, 29, 40, 55, 56, 59, 60, 61, 62, 74, 75,
439, 440, 443, 447, 448, 449, 450, 454, 488, 116, 126, 128, 130, 131, 147, 148, 149, 152,
491, 630, 658, 659, 747, 749 155, 158, 160, 164, 171, 176, 178, 181, 187,
Tokatlian (G.), 212, 489, 518 207, 209, 215, 219, 220, 225, 226, 227, 228,
Tomarza, 521, 522, 528, 659, 720 229, 230, 231, 232, 233, 234, 235, 236, 237,
Topal Osman, 221, 486, 742 239, 240, 242, 246, 248, 249, 250, 251, 252,
Topçibaşev (Mardan Bey), 56 254, 255, 263, 266, 267, 268, 269, 270, 278,
Torigian (Mgr Vaghinag), 445, 455, 456 279, 280, 281, 282, 290, 292, 293, 294, 314,
Torkomian (Dr. Vahram), 66, 211, 252, 528, 537 319, 320, 321, 322, 323, 324, 325, 326, 327,
Tortum, 219, 277, 289, 290, 299, 314, 398 328, 329, 330, 331, 333, 334, 335, 337, 338,
Tosun (Hüseyin), 19, 28, 301, 316, 520, 615, 340, 341, 344, 345, 349, 351, 356, 358, 361,
819, n. 107 364, 383, 389, 555, 598, 616, 625, 630, 632,

651, 652, 688, 694, 695, 699, 700, 701, 703, Yenibahçeli Şükrü [Oğuz], 69, 180, 217, 218,
706, 707, 720, 729, 739, 744, 745, 746, 747, 219, 468, 470, 477, 716, 718, 804, 805, 831,
748, 749, 754, 759, 763, 776, 779, 783, 801 n. 140
Varak (Monastery of), 322, 325, 326, 329, Yenişehir, 273, 558, 563
331 Yenişehirli Hilmi (Police chief in Smyrnia),
Varantian (Mikayel), 176 569
Vartkes [ps. of Hovhannes. Seringiulian], 29, Yeramian (Mikayel), 537, 553
59, 63, 72, 89, 90, 104, 109, 111, 126, 130, Yesayan (Father Harutiun), 516, 529, 744
159, 160, 161, 163, 164, 171, 172, 176, 210, Yezidis, 267, 269, 375, 653, 669
213, 214, 251, 252, 533, 534, 536, 539, 582, Yıldırim (Operation), 662, 665
597, 616, 639, 721, 828, n. 93 (biogr.) Yıldız (Palace of), 17, 36, 54, 57, 63, 68, 78,
Varto, 277, 338, 346 88, 98, 798
Varvarian (Eugenie), 511, 777 Yırıhi Han (Gorges of), 438
Vasıf Bey (Mehmed), 184, 235, 236, 237, 496 Yotneghperian (Levon), 614, 615, 616, 617,
Vehbi Bey (Unionist in Yozgat), 502, 508, 510, 618, 619, 620, 758
512 Yotneghperian (Mgrdich), 614, 615, 616, 617,
Vehbizâde Hasip Effendi (S.O.’s chief in 618, 619, 620
Marash), 592 Yotneghperian (Sarkis), 614, 615, 616, 617,
Vehib (Colonel Mehmed), 426 618, 619, 620
Vehib Pasha (General), 60, 186, 239, 308, 316, Yozgat, 247, 263, 274, 430, 495, 496, 497, 501,
353, 426, 460, 461, 463, 491, 702, 705, 740, 502, 503, 504, 505, 506, 507, 508, 509, 510,
792, 795, 797, 798 511, 512, 528, 529, 531, 545, 603, 629, 630,
Vehib Rumi Bey (Kaymakam of Bahçe), 602 659, 739, 749, 771, 775, 776, 777, 778, 779,
Vienna, 38, 43, 205, 257, 537, 786 789, 792
Viranşehir, 276, 366, 367, 375, 438, 443 Yunüs Nadi, 267, 269, 877
Vishab (Operation), 35 Yunüz Vasfi Bey (Dr.), 470, 471, 474, 477
Vostan, 61, 233, 278, 320, 324, 333, 334, 344, Yusuf İzzeddin (Prince), 30, 198, 536
706 Yusuf Kemal, 72, 100, 102, 103, 104, 113, 627,
Vramian (Arshag), 41, 62, 131, 175, 227, 228, 796, 801
229, 230, 231, 232, 239, 319, 700, 823, n. Yusuf Kenan, 106
207 (biogr.) Yusuf Rıza, 181, 182, 186, 217, 218, 219, 467,
Vratsian (Simon), 176 476, 477, 495, 784, 785, 786
Yusuf Ziya Bey (Kaymakam of Ras ul-Ayn),
Wadi Musa, 743, 758 651, 720
Wangenheim (Hans Von), 157, 158, 177, 178,
208, 289, 291, 340, 365, 534, 536, 538, 594, Zahle, 642, 743, 744
694 Zakarian (Nerses), 153, 173, 174, 253, 845, n.
Westenenk (Louis C.), 171, 209 7 (biogr.)
White (George E.), 452, 453, 454 Zakho (Gorges of), 654, 744
Wilson (Woodrow), 766, 767 Zara, 274, 430, 431, 433, 435, 443, 445, 462,
Winkler (M.), 577, 578, 688 466, 647, 658, 747
Winter (Jay), 244 Zaralı Mahir, 431, 433, 443, 466
Wolff-Metternich (Ambassador), 538, 543, Zartarian (Krikor, Primate of Divrig), 445,
694, 696 446
Wolffskeel Von Reichenberg (Captain Zartarian (Rupen), 40, 41, 55, 210, 252, 253,
Eberhard), 618, 619, 620 524, 596, 597, 824, n. 18
Zavarian (Simon), 56, 60, 62, 66, 115, 126,
Yalova, 546, 553, 555, 581, 801 137, 160, 538, 539, 826, n. 30 (biogr.)
Yasinzâde Şevkı (Colonel), 359, 363, 365 Zaven (patriarche Der Yeghiayan), 4, 5, 165,
Yaver Bey (Kaymakam of Savur), 377 171, 210, 235, 238, 250, 251, 254, 431, 467,
Yaver Şakir (Çerkez, çetes leader), 359, 361 534, 535, 536, 537, 538, 539, 587, 646, 652,
Yeghishe (Prelate of Siirt), 323, 339 653, 654, 656, 658, 668, 674, 677, 678, 683,
Yemen, 10, 61, 189, 269 691, 692, 744, 745, 750, 751, 752, 759, 760,
Yeni Han, 84, 443, 448, 454 793

Index 1029
Zavriev (Dr. Ivan/Hovhannes), 115, 160, 235, Ziya Gökalp (Mehmed), 142, 145, 195, 198,
683, 684, 685, 975, n. 16 247, 248, 249, 357, 379, 699, 716, 718, 720,
Zeitun, 215, 275, 534, 594 761, 784, 785, 810
Zekeria Zihni Bey, 548 Zohrab (Krikor), 53, 55, 56, 63, 65, 66, 67, 68,
Zeki Bey (Mehmed), 530 72, 73, 74, 90, 99, 107, 109, 110, 111, 115, 116,
Zeki Bey, 111, 121, 122 124, 134, 137, 153, 154, 158, 159, 160, 161,
Zekioğlu Ormanci Hasan, 506 162, 163, 164, 171, 172, 175, 176, 179, 207,
Zeravikan (Nahie of), 416 210, 212, 213, 214, 215, 250, 251, 252, 254,
Zeynalzâde Mustafa (çetes leader), 371 533, 534, 536, 582, 597, 616, 639, 721, 728
Zeynel Bey (çetes leader), 297, 299, 399, 405, Zollinger (Emil), 643, 644, 678
424, 438, 442, 443, 480, 621 Zühtü (Besim), 565, 791
Zeytuntsian (Vahan), 174, 852, n. 63 (biogr.) Zürcher (Erik J.), 3, 200, 202, 221, 241, 242,
Zihni Babanzâde (Mustafa), 93, 548 716, 717, 718, 772, 799, 800, 804, 805
Zile, 275, 430, 436, 450, 454, 508, 537 Zurlinden (S.), 654

Raymond Kévorkian - The Armenian Genocide - A Complete History-I.B.Tauris (2011)

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Raymond Kévorkian - The Armenian Genocide - A Complete History-I.B.Tauris (2011)

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Raymond Kévorkian is an historian who teaches at the Institut Français de Géopolitique,

University of Paris-VIII-Saint-Denis. He is Director of the Bibliothèque Nubar – the

“This is a major, magnificent achievement of scholarship. It is hard to imagine this book

“Raymond Kévorkian has made a major contribution to the developing historiogra-

“This mighty volume constitutes the most complete summary to date.”

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Distributed in the United States and Canada

Copyright © ODILE JACOB, 2006, 2011

ISBN: 978 1 84885 561 8

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: available

Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham

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Part I Young Turks and Armenians Intertwined

Part II Young Turks and Armenians Facing

Part III Young Turks and Armenians Face to Face

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7 The First Acts of Violence 225

Part IV In the Vortex of the War: The First

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Part V The Second Phase of the Genocide

Part VI The Last Days of the Ottoman Empire:

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10 Mustafa Kemal: From the Young Turk Connection to

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Young Turks and Armenians

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Abdülhamid and the Ottoman

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Young Turks and Armenian Militants

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To arrive at a comprehensive view of the positions of the other Armenian Committees

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Finally, the author affirms that,

The Young Turk Coalition: An Ideology in Gestation

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Prince Sabaheddin’s League for Personal Initiative and

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The Committee of Union and Progress and

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so powerful an organization that it appeared by early 1907 as a credible committee of activ-

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Turkish nation, which has pursued a “dominant nation/religious community” policy